Paul McCartney was describing his breakfast when things got very specific very quickly. Five raspberries. Placed in the middle. Then a handful of blueberries, tucked in. Then a strawberry, which he cuts up. Add a few pecans and raisins, he said, ‘if you want to party.’ This is the man who wrote Yesterday, and he is meditating over his cereal bowl with the same deliberate attention he brings to a chord change. The reason anyone should care is simple: McCartney sat down with comedian Amy Poehler for a long, roaming conversation that revealed more about how he actually thinks and works than most formal interviews manage in a decade. It began, as all great conversations do, with a question about whether he was taller than John Lennon.
The height debate, the school bus, and a career in coil winding management
Before music, there were coils. McCartney’s first job out of school was winding coil wire onto armatures in a factory, earning seven pounds and fifteen shillings a week. John Lennon and George Harrison showed up one day, and a man on the factory floor quietly told him there were some guys outside he might want to see. They had a gig. McCartney looked at the coils. He looked at the pay packet. ‘I can’t believe I actually questioned it,’ he said, ‘but I did. I said I’ll get back to you.’ He did get back to them. He gave up what he called ‘a career in coil winding management.’
George Harrison had entered his life earlier, on a green double-decker bus. McCartney would board at one stop, Harrison at the next, both in the same school uniform, and they would spend the half-hour ride talking about guitars and rock and roll. That meeting made it onto the new album, Boys of Dungeon Lane, in a song called Down South. When the Beatles later needed another guitar player, McCartney vouched for Harrison. ‘I got this little mate,’ he told Lennon. ‘He’s young, and that could be a problem.’ It was not a problem. Harrison played, Lennon was impressed, and the group had its third member.
On the height question: all four Beatles were the same height, McCartney maintained, though Ringo was ‘a bit smaller.’ He took real issue with the 2009 biopic Nowhere Boy, in which his character ends up physically smaller than the John Lennon character and gets knocked to the floor. Director Sam Taylor-Wood’s explanation was that it was a movie, not a documentary. ‘I thought, well, I don’t like that explanation,’ McCartney said. He had already texted Sam Mendes about the upcoming Beatles film. The Paul McCartney actor, he noted, is markedly shorter than the actor playing Lennon in the Abbey Road crossing shot. Mendes texted back that it was just a stride pattern.
What he does not know how to do, and what he does every year in Liverpool
McCartney teaches songwriting at his old Liverpool school, meeting students one-on-one while they carry a guitar or a small piece of music. His opening line to each of them: ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ He means it. He sits down with a guitar or at a piano, finds something that sounds good, and follows it. ‘Oh, that’s not bad. Where could it go next?’ The trick, he explained, is sometimes to move through the chords and sometimes to tell yourself to stay. A good opening line matters most, because it tells you where you are going.
The song Days We Left Behind, from Boys of Dungeon Lane, came from looking at old photographs. He knew he had something when the phrase arrived: ‘looking back at white and black.’ Not black and white. The inversion, he said, changed the image entirely, and it rhymed.
Poehler told him that if humanity ever needed to send one person into space to represent songs to aliens, ‘we would push you to the front.’ McCartney’s response was immediate: ‘When are we leaving?’
On collaborators he still wants but has not pursued: Bob Dylan. ‘I’m too nervous to ring him up,’ he said. He has asked himself the question and the answer is always the same name, and always the same hesitation. He genuinely cannot picture Dylan on the telephone.
A milkshake, a memory, and a question from Stella
Stella McCartney, speaking from London three days before a Paris show, sent two questions through Poehler. The first: what is Monk Berry Moon Delight, and have you smoked it? The song is from the 1971 album Ram. McCartney’s answer: when his children were small and could not yet pronounce certain words, their word for milk was ‘monk.’ He was thinking of a milkshake. ‘Monk berry moon’ is a milkshake, in his head. Everything else in the lyric, he acknowledged, ‘just flew off on one.’
The second question was about his first memory. Stella’s own first memory, she believes, is being in an incubator. She had been born by emergency caesarean section after a placenta complication, and McCartney had traveled between floors of the hospital to check on her and report back to Linda. He had noticed that the tiny baby in the incubator made a small movement that was exactly Linda’s, though she had never met Linda. He ran back upstairs to tell her.
His own first memory, he said, might be of being born. He was a forceps birth, at a Victorian hospital in Liverpool called Walton Hospital. What he remembers, or thinks he remembers, is white tiles and chrome instruments and the clanging sound. Poehler told him she was also a forceps birth. ‘Give it up for forceps people,’ he said.
The moment he and Lennon almost walked into SNL
McCartney was at Lennon’s place in New York when Lennon showed him Saturday Night Live for the first time. Lorne Michaels had appeared on camera holding a small check, offering the Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite on the show. Lennon suggested they go down right then, live. For a moment, McCartney said, they were going to do it. Then it was eleven-thirty at night, and they were comfortable. ‘No, it’s much too comfortable here. Let’s just watch it.’
A strawberry, cut up
The breakfast comes back at the end. Five raspberries placed in the middle of the bowl. Blueberries tucked in. A strawberry, cut up. No coffee in the morning, just water. One coffee sometime in the middle of the day, occasionally. The ritual before a gig, he said, did not really involve superstition, just not eating too much, and knowing exactly what lunch would be. He did not say what the gig-day lunch was. That part stayed his.
