Paul McCartney: The Waterstones Interview

it is my huge pleasure to be here today to talk to sapporo mccartney about this absolutely wonderful book the lyrics which is just published a quite exquisite book two volumes i think everybody who opens it will find very surprising and thrilling and that i hope we can now explore as to just quite why support thank you for that thank you thanks for doing this yeah absolute honor and and i have to say as a bookseller a a special privilege given what you've produced could you just tell us because it is surprising i think why you chose to create this book in this manner um my brother-in-law and the new york publisher bob weil norton got together over lunch and they started thinking about this and sort of saying well you know it'd be good if we could do something with paul and um include sort of art and some poems and lots of lyrics and discussing other commentaries and i ended up having lunch with them where they put this idea to me and i said yeah sounds great but it grew because i've got a great team at my office in london here um who keep my archive uh which i thought had all gone i thought i just lost it over the years easycom easygo but it turned out it was in little uh storage units and governments and rooms and things and they found it all so when the american publishers was dealing with my archive kids here um they it just became a thrilling project they said oh we've got this my guys were sort of saying would you like this what about these original lyrics what about this and stuff so it just grew and i was really a bit of a bystander until they said to me um we want you to talk about these songs in conversation with paul muldoon well at that point i didn't know personally i knew of him and so we got together and you know he's irish i'm of irish extraction so we already had something going and he's a poet and i'm sort of songwriter so we're in the same area you know and really what happened we just ended up having five years of great conversations which we taped so someone had the horrible job of transcribing them all um and that with the lyrics and the handwritten lyrics and with drawings and photographs suddenly made this very interesting book and it is precisely that it's that you you've given us these this selection of your lyrics so it's not all the lyrics it's a selection of the particularly illuminating ones with these transcribed conversations and then inspirations places loves this cornucopia of influences on your life but then given to us a to z not chronologically what was the thinking behind that um i think it was if you wanted to know about a particular song you didn't want to have to go to the index and find what page it was on kind of made it a lot easier you want to know about eleanor rigby that'll be under e so you know that's it was really just for ease of access and reading it where there is this actually i found because i started at a and ended up at z or said yeah that i was building a picture all the time and actually a new picture we've there are wonderful biographies um and that have told your life but this is doing it in a very personal way and i found that it was building episodically did that surprise you or is it was was was there anything was there any purpose to the way that you were choosing well no the idea of having it alphabetical was at first i thought well is that going to work because maybe you want the early songs first and then you want to build and but it works you just skip around but it's like in a film where you can just have this scene and skip into the future and skip back ah i see that that's what that means and it's like it's quite an interesting way to do it now i i was just interested talking about the songs and then interested in reading that as you say we start with all my loving and then it sort of moves into another period it doesn't just stay in that period but it's all about me it's all about the songs uh it's all about my recollections and as you say the nice thing that happens is um if i'm talking for instance about eleanor rigby the song um i know where i got this idea of some lonely old ladies so i can go into that explanation and it's funny i was just in liverpool just over the weekend and we we drove by the the place where this first lonely old lady lived and i used to just go and see her said you need anything you know just be i was a boy scout so i'm doing my good deed and i got to like her a lot and the conversation was thrilling because you know she'd talk to me about uh crystal radio sets and i said what's that yeah well here it is she got in and just the the depth of her experience was fascinating for me because she'd lived through the war and uh had this whole other range of subjects that i'd not been exposed to so i was now learning from her and even though she was a lonely old lady um i liked those people i i met a few more and so elena river is a kind of composite of those people and liverpool does infuse the book and and obviously your life and this this amazing sort of early influences obviously first and foremost your mother and father extraordinary and then through this incredible quality of education that you had and then the people that you met perhaps first your your parents who are such wonderful companions in this book your mother your father coming through and and informing your songwriting not just in those early songs but but really it seems throughout yeah i think so you know um my dad was the musician who would play at the family parties uh so he was the music in the house we had a piano like a lot of people in that era and so i would listen to all his music and would it would just go in me so i would oh i love that chord i love the way that chord goes into that chord what is it and just through my life i would discover oh that's that's that change you know and he had a friend called freddie rimmer who would come around who he worked with at the cotton exchange they were both cotton salesmen freddie had come round to visit and i really thought freddie was amazing and so did my dad freddie himself said no i'm nothing special um but he seemed to have a richer vein of cords so yeah it was all going on and then my mom was a nurse and later a midwife and she was very aspirational like a lot of moms she wanted her kids to do well hopefully to become doctors being a nurse but they they'd were aspiring because the people they were working with my mom working with doctors she would see that's it's a different level you know these are very educated people my dad had the similar thing with the people who owned his company the cotton brokers where they took the cotton in from everywhere around the world and sold it onto the mills behind liverpool um and he had the people there who were obviously as their owners they're posher than people that we'd normally meet so he was exposed to that so he learned things like i think crosswords i think came from that gardening all sorts of good influences that then they'd bring into our house so you know i was i was getting an education via their bosses kind of thing and then i went to a really good school um liverpool institute high school for boys which was a thousand boys quite an experience you know walking in the first day my little short trousers and my satchel and as an 11 year old and just being in this huge institution it had been a public school as an eleven-year-old i was in the third form so i could never work at why why aren't i in the first form well because there'd been nine-year-olds used to go to this so they just kept the whole system and it was very good for someone who wasn't able to pay like my parents though it was a really good looking back on it it was a really good free education where you know the first year i was learning latin and spanish and all the other subjects second year it was latin spanish and german so you know just in two years i'm i'm engaged and it's broadening perspectives and you're you're finding books you're reading and then i'm finding books because i had a really good teacher alan durbin who'd been taught by f.r levis who again and had a great teacher so it's a lineage that i just happened upon i didn't know how special it was until much later um but he he turned me onto books because you know in the english literature class i was kind of interested but the actual the truth of it is he told me the dirty bits in the canterbury tales so for a by now i was like 15 so for a 15 year old liverpool boy this was interesting because you know i didn't know chaucer was so bawdy and seeing it it was like wow and it is it is funny because i now tell my kids friends and and various other people who i know they're doing literature and they're going to do chores and i know they go oh i said just read miller's tale you know and i start telling them and they get me oh my god this old guy is getting dirty on us i said no it's not me it is jose well i just love the idea that way back in history there was this sort of naughty sense of humor that i could totally i mean my mates could totally identify with so yeah i became hooked on books i would go to the local bookshops and uh i bought a lot of plays that weren't on the syllabus so it was it was just good you know just beginning to memorize and get the sense of poetry and and song construction your construction yeah unwittingly because you know i didn't really know i was going to do much with my songwriting that was just a little hobby um but yes i do think that is true that the meter of some of these things i mean one of the things i learned was that shakespeare often uses rhyming couplets and i always thought that was a kind of interesting idea you're going to end the scene i can't remember one of it but nobody even rubbed her out but dibby deborah did give him a shout goodbye and then they walk off i thought that's good it works um so i i unconsciously i ended up ending one of my songs and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make not realizing that that's where i picked it up the idea from so yeah it was it was really sort of a great period for me in liverpool getting that education which i mean i didn't really go on to use that education other than in what i did and it does seem to have been that freedom that you you weren't required to excel academically and university and the rest you were allowed actually as soon as you began to broaden your interests that was encouraged i i think that's very true because i think it might have dampened it if i'd now had to really know chaucer and you know um really be able to write knowledgeably about what it was i was enjoying um i i didn't have to do that i now got into the freedom of songwriting and once i met john and he was the only other person in the universe i'd ever met when i said oh yeah i write some songs he says so do i so suddenly we had a friendship and upon but um yeah no if we'd had to get academic on it i think it would it could have killed it whereas it was just oh lewis carroll turned out he loved jabberwocky and i love jarawaki so these things you know crept into someone saying i'm the walrus and from the walrus and the carp you know you just was stealing from all these little ideas and making them our own in our own songs so it came in a very free and natural way and throughout this you we the scrapbook element to it we have a a continuing influence of of other creative forces there are painters who appear musicians obviously many playwrights so the the other creative arts how have they inspired you uh a lot um it goes back to i was always interested in art and in modern art and in liverpool they had a prize an essay prize when the coronation was happening in 1953 i now can look at it and it's i realize it's a pr exercise because you know from this perspective then it was just wow you know if you're going for an essay prize and if you win you'll get free books and things you know anyway i i won a minor prize but was allowed to go and get a book so i got a book on modern art and so that kind of started my interest in that and then the great thing about the 60s was this whole scene was together in london basically so you would go to a club like the establishment and you would meet peter cook you would meet john mortimer you would meet painters and sculptors and so you could have these great conversations which widen your horizons all the time you go around to see peter blake or go around to see richard hamilton and just hanging with them it gave you a new perspective which then we were able to put into our work so you know when we needed an album cover in the old days you just went and you got your photo taken but then we started to think wait a minute yeah my it was our record label they did start to get a bit worried because we were now spending 75 pounds on a record cover they were scandalized doesn't seem so much now but you know they paid a fiver for a quick photograph well it was all such a rich scene in london in the 60s that it all entered your life your work your conversations and one can can clearly see it through this book as one marches through all of these sort of creative influences upon you and then of course you started with this great cooperation collaboration with with john lennon and many of us i'm sure know the full stories and the ins and outs but it but it feels in this book that it has a particularly human element as it runs throughout do you feel that this now with the grapes or passage of time being able to represent it in this very sympathetic way is actually appropriate i think it is a good thing i mean there were periods you know like at the breakup of the beatles where we weren't so friendly so you couldn't do anything like this then because the sort of hurt feelings and stuff like that would have crept in now that so much time's elapsed now that john isn't here and george isn't here you get a whole new perspective so if i'm ever talking to anyone it's with great affection uh because they're my fallen heroes you know so i'm more like a fan these days when i'm talking about the beatles stuff um then i was making it alongside the guys so you were just so busy working and doing your thing now i can look back on it all and just think wow that was amazing if i'd write a song called it's getting better all the time then john was likely to chirp in with it couldn't get much worse and you know you just now i realize wow that's um very valuable in the creative process to have someone who just doesn't go that's nice and just adds and adds so we we had that ping-ponging kind of technique i'd write online he'd write a second line or he'd write a line um so it was it was really good we were very helpful for one in one another and i think now i can look back on it in a loving way and think that was very special that that's certainly what what comes through is repeatedly and and and then also the other sort of huge sort of relationship with linda your as you describe it your muse who again comes through both linda and and to a sense uh kintar as a place as well which infuses the book and that was that was our escape um at the time that i'd met linda and we were sort of falling for one another the beatles breakup and the business things were happening and it was really very unpleasant uh to be in london where we were living so linda said to me one day you've got a farm up in scotland haven't you i said yeah i don't go there much she said can we go so we went and threw her eyes which is an american visiting scotland very romantic view of it all i caught the bug and i saw it like that which was great because before that i i wasn't as enamored of it as she was so we we not only had a great time up there very free we were now free of everything you know i if my business and needed me they would ring me i said well i can't come in i'm sorry it was just perfect so all these heavy business meetings i i was able to avoid a lot of them um and so we built our life together and a family and a family so we we were raising our family and the thing looking back on it that was great for me is um i'd always wanted to be a man you know not just sort of kid who played a guitar and when you're married now you have responsibility you've got a wife you've got kids so i wanted to be that guy so i had to be i'm in scotland so if we want a table uh i've got to make it so that was great i mean it just brought things out of me that i never thought you don't want the drip to come through you're up on the roof ruth needs painting i'm your man so it was great it was lots of things like that we had the freedom to just be yourself we managed to avoid most of the business trouble so it was it was a it was a good period and talking of mending the roof and fixing a hole you've got this very um striking line in the book which is before i write a song there's a black hole and then i get my guitar or piano and fill it in the creative process is starts with a hole yeah it's uh yeah or you can also like uh pulling a rabbit out of a hat still a hole the top yeah if you think or i'll write a song which you know i've got some time and i'm just sitting around and i'm fed up with watching delhi i think i could do so i get my guitar and i'm very conscious of the fact there's there's nothing there i've got i've got any idea what i'm going to do it's a black hole but then i start picking away and get a little bit of an idea go oh that's nice and you follow that trail and at the end of maybe two or three hours um you've suddenly got this thing they've got this song so now instead of a black hole you can now go and play this thing to people you know present this little discovery look what i just done and it's a great thing to be able to do it's it's kind of magical it is completely magical and and these conversations with paul muldoon it comes across time and again that you are both prepared to confront the very ordinary linda's cooking how you how the kitchen is before you but also very philosophical things you will take inspiration from tagore the great bengali poet you so you're you're tackling all eclectically it's it's just um you're drawing on what you are and who you are so all these influences from school and then beyond uh poets i'd read um poets i'd meet uh it it's in you so you can't help it if you remember a particularly beautiful line from a poem then you might take the feeling of that line and just massage it a bit now it's your line um but you've you've taken it from someone who's great someone who you admire a lot and you know i would meet people like uh i ran into alan ginsberg for instance he was coming through london and so we we piled up and um yeah it was great to to be with him and to hang with him because you know i've got such respect for him um and yet he was just another 60s character like i was there's plenty of those in this book and there's a lot of them yeah yeah well i said look it was a very rich period so you you could i mean one thing i would do would be to just ring people up hello i'm paul mccartney uh you're i've a cottler and i really like what you do would you like should we go out for dinner anyone who fascinated me i just said you want to meet up now alan would he took some of my poems and he started to annotate them started to correct them like he was a poetry professor and so i thought okay that's good you know let's see what he comes up with but what he did was he and i said this to him in the end i said alan you're just making me into a beat poet you're making me american and that's not going to work he was just taking out all the the ah so it was just general wait liverpool ivan you know it just he snapped it all down which i thought that's okay but it's not my voice but just being exposed to him was you know valuable and so i can look back on that now and think wow that was that was really something special you know i ended up backing him on guitar at the albert hall he did a thing called ballad of the skeletons and i ended up with what happened is he said to me do you know anyone who could accompany me and i said well maybe dave stewart maybe david gilmour maybe no no and i realized in the end what he meant was would you believe you've got a guitar or two heaven and and then your your projects have obviously expanded greatly and um i was sort of intrigued particularly by the liverpool oratorio where you you were taking on really a completely different sort of thing and it and it features sort of episodically in in the book um tell me a little bit about that well i knew carl davis the composer and conductor and his wife jean and lyndon eugene so he turned up one day and he said the liverpool philharmonic is having a big anniversary i think it was 150 years and he said and they'd like to commission you to write something so i said well great you know no idea what i was doing but that's me i'm like a great enthusiast so i will accept things before i even know what i've accepted so i used to just go to carl's place and have some ideas of what i wanted to do and i knew i wanted it to be in liverpool particularly the orchestras liverpool i'm liverpool so um what happened was we're sitting at the piano with carl and i sat beside him and he strikes a c major chord very hopeful and and i said what he said well paul mccartney c major she's like let it be i said no no no no i'm thinking of do hold it hold it hold it and he then he scribbles it down and then he was able to play it back for me great so this became our process and um we made this whole thing up liverpool oratorio and performed it at the cathedral in liverpool which is huge i think it's the biggest biggest cathedral in europe this is a very daunting place yeah i know and amongst as you go through this book you're constantly turning a page and just getting these sort of oof images yes it's so they're photographs but there's paintings of this but when you turn and you see that cathedral full of yeah that choir of course the other thing for me was that i'd uh auditioned as a choir boy in that big place to talk about intimidating as a like you know 11 and 12 year old and i went in the because the idea was you'd get loads of free books if you if you passed and you went in the choir um but i failed it was great because it was it wasn't my kind of thing so do you know the uh guy auditioned just me in a room with this guy and he would just play a phrase on the piano and say now sing that just to see how whether i could retain i go to one or two notes wrong so i never heard back but then going back with the liverpool oratorio was kind of yes that's here i got that's showing up you turned me down but i'm back and you and you've written for for others not which feature here i mean not hugely but there's bad finger there's mary hopkins um as well as having you know your reference to joe cocker covering how do you feel when your music is in other people's hands i love it i do love it so some people aren't that keen they don't like it being messed with but i love it i feel very um flattered that somebody else likes my song enough to have a go at it joe cocker did a little help from my friends which turned the song into a sort of rock classic you know and it was done by people like john belushi and uh so i love that i i like it and i love her one of my early ones was covered by a soul singer called lester phillips and she did and i love him so you know i'm i'm very flattered i'm honored that all that distance away she's heard it and she wants to do it and what's to complain about and and i think one of the great things again about this book is that we've got now that your thoughts are beautifully distilled on each of these books do um do artists come to you all the time to to seek sort of insight and inspiration as to what inspired these lyrics what sits behind this song to inform their own engagement with it not really no i mean the nearest i get to that is my old school is now a performing arts school called lipper liverpool institute for performing arts and i go up there and talk to the songwriting students so that's the nearest i get about trying to impart any wisdom but i must admit when i walk in the room it's always one-on-one with one of the students i walk in the room i say let me tell you first i don't know how to do this you'd think i'd know but each song's different you know it arrives out of this black hole and i've no idea how it happened but play me your song and i'll talk talk to you about it and if i think anything could be improved uh then i'll tell you but generally it's just encouraging people but writers professional writers other than that wouldn't really sort of come to me for advice i don't know why well it's it's um you were really the first it was buddy holly as well but but you were the first to write and perform your own songs yeah and that seemed sort of a hugely sort of innovative and exciting thing do you now see the arc because most things in life follow arcs yes oh exactly yeah we didn't know people didn't write their own things and so we'd get a record and we would discover the people who did little richard always had credit on on his things buddy holly was pretty much on everything that he that he performed and so when we saw him we liked that he'd written it that he was singing it and that he was playing guitar because a lot of other people just stood there without an instrument so it became very much something for us to emulate and the other thing was john loved the fact that he wore glasses because john wore glasses but always took him off um if he thought there were girls around or you know if he wanted to look good um so when body holly came with glasses john put him on proudly but yeah body was a big influence and other people chuck berry again a composer who played the instrument so that became our group we became composers who played instruments the everly brothers same thing they played guitars so that's what attracted us we loved elvis but we would go and see elvis films and he would pick up a guitar and we would not be looking at him we'd be looking at his fingers to see is he playing that and he he did he remember a d shape he had we thought that's okay but the other thing about this book which is two big volumes so there's a lot lot in it it's 154 songs which but it's just the sheer amount of hard work because as you although you're going through a zed you keep on seeing just the years are going by through these songs you were really working yeah i say to people when they say you work harder so we don't work music we play it and even though it might sound a bit glib it is true to me it's it would be a hobby if i didn't do it professionally uh it's just something i love it's because you you know you're creating this thing out of a black hole and it it's very satisfying so i love to do that so i just keep on and on i mean i've always got a song on the go i've got a few on the go at the moment you know um just because i like the whole puzzle of let's try and make this song work is it interesting enough does it say it in a good enough way maybe i should change that line but it's an ongoing interesting thing for me uh and then when you feel you've got it right it's a okay that'll do and it's very satisfying so it's i can't see myself ever stopping so yeah there's a lot of work or a lot of play penguin the great publisher of this book alongside norton in the us has invited some authors to ask and send in questions so can i read you some of those and i'll do it just in the order that i have them um carlo rivelli the physicist and and author of the order of time amongst other works hi paul i heard the fool on the hill when i was 15. the song has been the inspiration for my life your own life is the opposite of the life of the fool nobody could say but nobody ever hears him or the sound he appears to make about paul mccartney you've been heard like few others so here is my question when you four guys did what you did you were heard by many as the singers of a changing world you even sang we all want to change the world are you happy with the way the world has become loaded question um in some ways i am you know there have been lots of advances um i happen to be a vegetarian of sort of 40 years so i'm very thrilled to see that that is catching on and that it's tying in with climate change the environment that's a great thing to see that wars and atrocities continue isn't such a great thing you know we i suppose we'd always hope that as we get more and more civilized as we learn more um that kind of thing would lessen it doesn't seem to i think you're always gonna have warring factions um so yeah in one way it's great and it is changing you know we've got the climate change conference and that's good we're not doing it fast enough and then the minute someone like greta turnburg comes out and says it we make fun of her because she's just some daft little school girl but she's actually the one making the most sense um so yeah i think there's some great things happen and there's great things happening but there's always that sort of bad side and will the talented kid in liverpool today find the ellen dub and find that space to have the opportunities and become this creative force that you have been yeah i think so you know um you can look at it and you can say well it's not as easy because the field is very much more crowded than it was for us um but there was no reason why we should have been called famous you know just kids from liberal and everyone said you'll never get famous from liverpool um but just with one thing and another we you know we got better and got better and became famous so i'm sure those kind of opportunities are still open for kids um it wouldn't be the same it now will involve devices and youtube and all that which we didn't have but i think people still come through i mean you see someone like ed sheeran that's happened to him and from nothing it wasn't anything but his own talent so yeah i think i think stuff can still happen johnny pitts the author of afropean um there was a rumor that the beatles would sit around and say stuff like i'm gonna write myself a new swimming pool thinking of what you could buy with the money a hit record could would make could you speak about the pros and cons of writing for love versus writing for career where and if the two meet brackets thinking here of stephen pressfield's notion of turning pro when accepting money for work sometimes fuels good work it was only later that we discovered that what we were doing was art and there were things like muses and when we first got out of liverpool we were it was money we were kids without jobs suddenly here was a job and so we wanted to get paid and the more money the better you know and it's true me and john did used to laugh uh it was it was kind of a joke half joke and we once we started to get a hit and knew what kind of money a hit could bring in we said well let's write a swimming pool or you need a new extension let's write it come on sit down um and so yeah it came out of that you know what we did and then i think he then start to think oh uh you know is this is it more noble if if we don't write for money or we just write for art or love but that comes in anyway it's not like it's excluded because you're accepting money i mean what we wanted was a guitar a car and a house that was it that was that was our the height of our ambitions so you know then you suddenly could get that you could get them um so yeah so i've never been one to think that um there's something dirty about accepting money i think most people in the world do it so there's got to be something okay about it and love and marriage and friendship most people in the world do that too so i think the two can coexist and yeah i'm happy to enjoy both and to have stood for causes at times which perhaps occasional record executives might have thought you should not no that it's true that you don't just use money for yourself there can be someone who's desperate need of an operation who you work with or you're very friendly with and you can say look get up to harley street get that operation i don't want you waiting around it might take months and it might be so that is one of i think one of the great things about money being able to change someone's life with with something like that and uh to be able to donate to great causes so you can see things changing you can see um how you can help people so there's plenty of good stuff about money you know that doesn't you don't have to just take it all you can distribute it a quick one here from william c card uh the founder of the forward prize and editor of the poetry pharmacy are you ever inspired by other poets yes i am yes um in fact if i'm writing a song and i get a bit stuck i will open a poetry book and just look and just look for some nice words that flow and then i'll massage it and make it my own um my own thing but in the early days yeah dylan thomas was somebody we were you know very keen on um yeah uh we said charles dickens uh a lot of that was was great shakespeare sort of entered into what i was doing in ways i didn't realize but yeah i like poetry so i will you know buy a slim volume and keep it in my pocket and just there's there's something it's more than romantic uh it's something there's something kind of noble about it but something like that these people would do that would write poems that's their motivation so i like to see what they came up with and um it's often very inspiring yeah so i read quite a lot of poetry um richard osman uh the presenter and and now huge best-selling author thursday murder club um you were the greatest songwriter of all time and i refuse to listen to anyone who says otherwise but what's the greatest pop song ever written by somebody else and what makes it so great um oh there are a lot there are a lot i think paul simon's written some amazing songs um i wouldn't want to just say one of them but he's certainly written some great stuff bob dylan ken has written some great stuff um i'm really pleased that richard because i i you know i'm a big fan of this guy he's uh as a bookseller i assure you i am yes you are yeah um yeah no so yeah i think i think there's a lot of great songs been written that weren't by me or us um and those two people have mentioned paul simon particularly dylan i think neil young has come up with some classics beach boys god only knows i think that's a great classic and in a way i could say i wish i'd written them but i've written enough i've got enough to go on with you know so but yeah there's some great writers and artists out there that and i love to feel that when i'm writing something here they're writing something there and you get you get a little bit of rivalry going we had a big rivalry with the beach boys i suppose i had a little one with uh paul simon that uh it's good i had one with john rivalry with john you know if he'd write a good one they go oh oh god i better write something better so it's that's good that it's a little bit of competition's a good thing but yeah no i i would think there are lots of classic songs that you need to give me three hours and i'd write you a very long list we can we can have you on desert island discs i mean maybe you've already done that um james rebanks um shepherd and best-selling author of english pastoral have writers other than songwriters influenced your lyrics if yes then which writers and how did they influence your own work to which i would say my own answer to him was buy this book and read it and you will get a lot of the answers to that but um yeah you know having this teacher in the liverpool institute turned me on to literature which i never pursued um in the kind of academic way uh but i did in a more sort of freewheeling way but having access to all these things and being able to dip into little things just like james thurber you know they color what you think so as i used to read quite a few plays on the bus you know i'd have a little play going salome uh or camino real was one of my favorites and i used to fancy myself as a bit of an artist you know because once you get involved in it you you want to become it you want you want it in your life even more than just reading the book there were certain things like camino real was one that i thought i want to direct this i want to direct a version of this um and jari alfredjari ubu kaku this one uberwat is his famous one but i had a great production on the bbc as i was going up to liverpool in the car so uh so i love that and that again that was something i wanna i wanted to direct i'm not sure i do now because i realize now it's a hard job and it would be very much in public i wouldn't just be some little regional director having a go um but yeah i i i think it all adds to what you do you know and what you love all just becomes part of you if you're lucky michael lewis who's the new york times bestselling author of the premonition the big short money ball and others um have you ever written a song about one thing only to have it taken by listeners to be about something else and if so have you ever then thought hmm that's sort of right uh it's not so much the song it's it's lyrics within the song that people have misheard and i quite i like that phenomenon of mishearing so in my case um i wrote a song called high high high which got banned by the bbc but um in it as i say lie on the bed and get ready for my polygon because i'm kind of channeling jerry and and sort of he's he uses with polyhedra oh my my polyhedra it's just nonsense anyway so i've got lie on the bed and get ready for my polygon and people thought it was body gun lie on the bed and get ready for my body gun which i thought is much better you know yeah you know people mistake things and i like that um elvis costello's manager i'd always heard it's the opening i think of strawberry fields living is easy with eyes clothes and he always heard it as living is easy with nice clothes and you know guys almost better kind of thing you know and i remember the story that alan ginsberg told me about going to william borrow's house and he saw a book there or a manuscript or something and um it was called naked lust but he's read it he's a bit short-signed he read it as naked lunch and he told boro that or was that so i i like that when things just go a little bit skew and they're better last one on this page is paris lee's author of what it feels like for a girl what is the song or book or anything you wish you'd written hmm there's quite a few um you know i got to the stage where i i don't really wish i'd written him because they wrote it and i'm very happy and i remember thinking was um a billy joel song said stay the way you are something like that that's a nice song i like that there's a sting song field of gold that i like and maybe tambourine man by bob dylan i would have liked not a bad one than that there's a lot of them out there you know and i think at first you go oh i wish i had written that but then you realize i've written enough now they didn't trust me to be able to read so we have some of these that are on our ipad hello i'm daniel handler often known as lemony snicket a long time ago i was driving with my young young son and we were listening to we are the robots by kraftwerk and he said are they really robots and i said no and he said are they pretending to be robots and i said yes and he said all the beatles really beetles and i said no and he said are they pretending to be beatles and i said no and he said are they pretending to be sergeant pepper's the only hearts club band and i said i don't know i don't know anything and so my question is were you pretending to be beatles were you pretending to be wings were you pretending to be sergeant pepper's the only hearts club band are your songs you or are you pretending to be something or is there no difference and we're all lost and alone thank you daniel um we weren't pretending to be beatles that was just we thought that was just a great group name that a lot of girls particularly thought was creepy uh i wasn't pretending to be wings it was again it was a group name but we were pretending to be sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band because that was the whole idea of that record so daniel that's the one we were pretending to be and you can tell your song that yeah the whole idea for that record was that we were going to have alter egos and we were because we thought if we make another record under the beatles when i walk up to a microphone it's paul walking up to michael john walks up it's john singing the song so we thought it was kind of quite nice if it's not paul if it's this guy out of another group it kind of we freed ourselves i made a very free record because of that but that was that was the one that we were pretending to be we have the great mary beard oh not mary hello i'm mary beard i'd like to ask what difference it makes putting these songs together as poems in a book um do you read them differently uh is it more than a collection i'd are you done murray i'd love to ask if you'd come on my bbc title oh now mary you're pushing your luck [Laughter] i'm gonna pause you i'm sorry it's great fun you're paused it's all over mary um what was the question what was the first bit anyone remember it they have to go out do they when you have them in the book do they come across differently that's right when you read them do they um yeah there is a bit of that uh i did a poetry book with norton and um with the help of a great friend of mine adrian mitchell and uh when i saw they wanted some lyrics in there so i put in for instance the lyrics to blackbird and when i saw it written out uh not just as a songsheet it did seem to have a bit more significance than me just singing and so that's really good because then when i sang it after that i sang it with more significance to me and i'd said to her to adrian i said if i do if i do a reading which i was due to do i said how do you do it what do you do you just read the poem stand there he said well if you can remember any little stories about writing it about the poem it's good to say that and then read the poem so i thought about blackbird and i'd i discovered things that i'd forgotten that that it was in the era of civil rights and that i i'm watching the little rock um episode where the kids were being booed and shouted at and as the black kids as they were going into the school um and so this idea of blackbird became a black girl in my mind so um yeah so so then you you do read it differently and then when i perform in concert i tell that story and i will say you know in this silver a lot of people in my audience don't necessarily know where it came from so then i'll say yeah what is to do with that and so it makes it a little bit more significant for them particularly if we're playing in alabama we we did play in uh arkansas we played in little rock and the two ladies who you see in the black and white footage very courageously going through that crowd to get their education they showed up at the concert so it was a real full circle moment i was able to talk to them and explain how my song had come up come about from um seeing them in that footage so yeah i think i think once it gets written down and um as as it has in the in this book you do look at them differently they do have maybe a little bit more significance than you thought wonderful we have annette gordon reed sir paul do you set aside a time to write each day or do you wait for inspiration and has that changed over time okay good um so no i don't set aside a time to to write it's nearly always um when i've got a free moment so i might be at home and i've done the things in the morning that i want to do and now i've got the afternoon and not quite particularly any plans so and i've always got a guitar around and there's always a piano in the house so then that's my favorite moment when i just sort of think oh i've got time i could i mean nobody's coming for three hours so i could just get myself off into a corner and write a song about something so that's when it happens and i find that if i do sit down i do that occasionally but very rarely um it probably feels a little bit official and i i like it to feel just free like it just appeared by magic i will do it sometimes and i have done it but i don't think the songs were as good as the ones that just came out of the air when i had some free time i think that's that seems to work better for me so there's a few in the book where you you seem to have been sort of working and working and trying to find them and then they become formed yeah i think what happens there is you'll write the song quite quickly um and then you go over it and you think oh that's not really good maybe i could do that better so you'll you'll think of a better idea and then you've got to play it because writing and singing lyrics is a completely different thing you can write something on the page that looks like a great insightful phrase now you sing it and it jumbles so we can't use that so it's it's a process but yeah sometimes you are you know scribbling out things and yeah you're hopefully just trying to work it till you get it right until it just sounds like my song and i can sing it and it sings easily i know bob dylan is very aware of that because again alan ginsberg because he was questioning something of bob's and bob said it's a song it's not it's not a poem it's quite a different thing you know you're going to sing it and perform it so um you don't have the same rules have you missed performing in this curious and strange time that we we are living the only the only time i performed since covert was at my daughter stella's 50th birthday party and she said to me dad would you get up and you see he said there's going to be a band there i said um oh i don't know maybe i said stella i want to have a party it's a birthday party i don't want to feel like i'm the entertainment so i said well maybe maybe i'll just get up and just do one quick song like a drunk at a wedding and i said well so that was my plan but then what happened was they had a they had a band and now i might i'm i'm the drunk at the wedding so i'm having a drink and i'm enjoying myself and i suddenly think oh my god i've got to do something so i go and watch the other people and they were good people there's uh chrissy hind did something and now i noticed chris he's doing like three songs and i'm getting up as the the the old drunken uncle then noel gallagher gets up and he does three or four songs and he does his big hit um so i'm going oh my god and i'm in the audience ready to be pulled up so i get pulled up and then one of the guys in the band well thank forever said do you fancy doing birthday which i hadn't thought of i thought good call so now i had that song and the one i was going to do so now i had two songs and yeah i did it and i really loved it they were a good band and i'm up there performing to the audience but also mainly to my daughter who's there right in front of me and i'm going um you know they say it's your birthday so that that worked great as a performance then afterwards i thought wow i really enjoyed that and then so the next day i thought yes because you were you'd had a couple of drinks so that's not gonna necessarily uh translate to when i go on tour but it was good did feel good i feel like i nailed it and you've nailed this book i nailed it there it is and you i hope you feel enormously satisfied and proud i really do actually it's it's one of those things that from a little meeting little lunch i saw it develop and my people who run my archive started to come out with suggestions and then the norton publishers started to come out with their suggestions penguins started to come out with theirs so we we had an amazing team that made it more than i thought it was ever going to be and turned it into something i must say i didn't imagine but uh just with all and found stuff that uh i didn't know we had it it is full of treasures and and i think as a as a bookseller and and having now talked about this book and shared it with with booksellers um i i cannot tell you how pleased we are and how delighted we're going to be to have a lovely autumn selling it it's going to be tremendous fun wow and thanks for doing this and taking me through the uh it's a few more questions absolutely thank you you

Channel: Waterstones

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Id: chROemnJfIo

Length: 64min 10sec (3850 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021