Paul McCartney has opened up about his longtime song-writing partner John Lennon, admitting he still wonders what Lennon would think of his music.
On Friday, Paul McCartney released his 18th solo album, Egypt Station. While one would assume that anything Macca puts his name to would automatically be an instant classic, it turns out that the living legend still thinks back to his days working with John Lennon while writing a song.
In a recent interview with NME, Paul McCartney discussed his songwriting process, and admits that he still judges his new tunes by what his former bandmates would have thought.
“You know, you do sometimes, particularly if you’re wondering about a line and you think, is this any good or is it crap,” he explained. “I sometimes will just think, oh right, OK, Beatles session, writing session with John, and I say, ‘What do you think of that?’ And he’ll either say, ‘It’s great, keep it,’ or, ‘No, it’s no good, re-write it.’”
“So you often, you know, look to the past for reference,” he continued. “But I don’t do it all the time. That’s just occasionally if I’m wondering if it’s going to work, remembering things like when I’m writing ‘Hey Jude’ and playing it to John for the first time; I said I’d change the line ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder’ and he said, ‘You won’t, you know’.”
“So those are the little moments I refer to and think, ‘Is it one of those lines or is it rubbish’.”
Incidentally, Paul McCartney’s comments come just a couple of days after a far different interview in which the icon discussed his group masturbation sessions with John Lennon.
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“What it was, was over at John’s house, and it was just a group of us,” explained McCartney. “And instead of just getting roaring drunk and partying—I don’t even know if we were staying over or anything—we were all just in these chairs, and the lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did.”
“We were just, ‘Brigitte Bardot!’ ‘Whoo! And then everyone would thrash a bit more. I think it was John sort of said, ‘Winston Churchill!’”
“I think it was a one-off,” McCartney concluded. “Or maybe it was like a two-off. It wasn’t a big thing. But, you know, it was just the kind of thing you didn’t think much of. It was just a group. Yeah, it’s quite raunchy when you think about it. There’s so many things like that from when you’re a kid that you look back on and you’re, ‘Did we do that?'”
“But it was good harmless fun. It didn’t hurt anyone. Not even Brigitte Bardot.”
Check out Paul McCartney’s ‘Fuh You’:
