Sean Lennon interviews Paul McCartney | October 4, 2020.

songwriting partnership with paul mccartney is unparalleled in the history of rock and roll it is a very big deal to beatles fans all over the world and it may come as no surprise that it is in fact a big deal to me too when paul and i got together to talk about dad we spoke about many things i'd never heard before i began by asking him when it was that he realized dad was a special guy yeah well the funny thing about your dad was that i'd seen him around a couple of times because um i realized later what it was was my bus route he would take that bus but he would be going to see his mom who lived kind of in my area and then he'd take the bus back up to his auntie mimi's so i'd seen him a couple of times and thought wow you know he's an interesting looking guy um you know and then i once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips and and i said oh that's that guy off the bar this is i'm talking to myself in my mind i thought that's that guy off the bus you know he's pretty cool looking yeah you know he's a cool guy and did you know he was a musician already at that point no i knew nothing about him except that he looked pretty cool you know um he had long sideboards and uh a bit of greased back hair and everything you know was that the teddy boy kind of look at that yeah exactly it was a teddy boy look yeah was that your look as well then or were you more of a rock i think all of us were trying to do a bit of that at that point you know so if you ever noticed anyone who was trying to do it you thought oh yeah probably get on well with him but i didn't know anything about him um and i didn't know who he was except that he'd i'd seen him on the bus and had seen him in uh the fish and chip shop but then my friend ivan who i knew at school was a friend of john's and uh took me up to the village fate and introduced me there so it was like oh that's that guy who i've been seeing and then obviously i knew he was a musician because he was in the little band the quarry man and i got to sort of hang with them in the interval and they were sort of rag tag right i mean we're talking about no guitar amplifiers kind of a skiffle washboard thing no it was very pre rock and roll it was um you know they'd been the old-fashioned kind of music which was my dad's music some of which i liked and you know enjoyed um and then there'd been skiffle which kind of broke it open um this was a kind of new kind of music to us it was like bluesy folksy but you only had to have an acoustic guitar you didn't need much equipment um and for the bass they used to use a tea chest where we used to come in you know all the tea came in it from india or somewhere and you had a broomstick on the top and a string so um their group was pretty basic little acoustic-y kind of thing was it good though i mean did you think they sounded good i thought john was good i thought the group um it wasn't that good you know i didn't think they were bad but you knew because you your dad played trumpet and you actually sort of had more of a real musical family in a way i mean right you were more exposed to jazz i was lucky my dad played music around the house a lot and uh it was a very musical family i was in all the big family sing songs at new year's you know were quite quite huge occasions um and you know the funny thing about this was that i thought everyone had families like mine you know who were just sort of ordinary and just you know all seemed to like each other and or you know visited each other and sang and played the piano and stuff and it was only later when i realized probably through your dad's life man you know of how a difficult one what a difficult upbringing he'd had compared to me my grandmother julia did did play uh banjo and ukulele do you remember what she was like because i've actually never really spoken to anyone about my grandmother who actually met her in person before what was she like this is one of the sadnesses about life you know that you you would have just loved her she was a a doll you know she was just a very um cool lady she had long red hair and she was very spirited and she would you know she would sort of joke and stuff and she did play um a little banjo thing and she taught john some chords so when i met him he used to play these kind of banjo chords and so we had to swap it round to guitar but she was lovely and he idolized her and it was so sad that he wasn't living with her and his half sisters um but yeah she was a terrific lady a lot of fun and we'd go around to their little council house which was in the area where i lived which was um not quite as well off as the people up on the hill where john liv right he was in menlove avenue or something he was in menlo avenue and i was off an avenue called madison avenue posh kind of relatively posh right compared to the rest of us in the beatles he was the posh one that's so funny because people people didn't really think of it that way i think early on did that exactly well you know in all the working-class hero and all that you know um but um no so so john would come down visit me and then we'd walk um a mile or two down to where julia's house was and um we would just do a visit it was a little line of terraces there's a little council house very modest and we just have a visit so you know she'd make us a cup of tea and a sandwich and stuff and we'd sit around chatting and stuff it was very obvious to me that uh john absolutely loved her and she absolutely loved him so uh as i say she was she was fun she was uh really ready with a joke um she was witty and i suspect that's where he got a lot of his wit from and was julius she knew you guys were starting a band when she's supportive of it or was it and what about your dad i mean did every were the parents into it or were they thinking it was a bit of a waste of time yeah i think she thought it was fun a fun idea you know because she could she was a bit of a musician herself so uh and my dad was the other one who had actually been a musician in a little band so he was super supportive and we would go around there to rehearse but sometimes we take our guitars around to julia's and sort of play a little something you know and she loved it she was very supportive i always got the impression that dad felt and it may be expressed in different ways over the years that somehow he wasn't officially a true musician or something and that everyone else was i mean was there that kind of feeling that he thought you know i'm not a real musician i don't think any of us were tell you the truth um and i think that was a very good strong thing about us actually funnily enough that we all had to learn together so um the nearest to john feeling like he wasn't a true musician could have been that you know in the skiffle craze when everyone else is playing guitar chords he only knew a couple of banjo chords but but that only lasted you know a week or two and i would just show him chords i knew which is very basic but um it was great bonding you know just learning chords off each other and i think the minute he knew those chords he was as good as anyone and uh he might have had a little bit of a hang up about not being a sort of musically trained but none of us were um and i think that was one of the strengths of the beatles that none of us knew what we were doing so we had to dis discover the route for ourselves you know and each of us discovered it together at the same time so that was lovely it meant that when we came to record or play live we all were new at it and we were so we all learned at the same speed um and it which i think when we came to record with george martin later on meant that john and i could bring in a song and just play you know there's anything that you want kind of oh wait a minute show me let me take those chords down it was like no no no no we we'd grown up together so we just read each other i remember the story of you learning b7 or something and that was sort of a big breakthrough that was a breakthrough major breakthrough now it was it was well it's a kind of slightly complicated chord in that set of chords because you know a a and e they're not too bad but you can't really play the blues if you don't also have that last chord can you you've got to have that last chord you know so it was true i mean it's a distant memory for me now and i've told the story so many times i'm beginning to think it's not true but it is it is true that we actually did go on a bus to some guy's house who somebody had said oh no this guy's good he knows b7 and we went and we we learned it off him you know it was kind of good that we didn't know too much because you had to just say oh it's this chord and i'm showing this chord yeah okay and even with this complicated timings in things i don't like here comes the sun you know where there's a ticket who was more sophisticated than the other or whatever and there maybe is some truth that musically i had an edge because my dad had shown us some things and and i'd i'd learned the guitar chords a bit before john but it wasn't so much that the sophistication it was attitudes so my attitude would be this is what i want to do and then john would bring another edge to it so what was the great thing was the combination of those two attitudes you know and i i look back on it now like like a fan you know i think wow you know how lucky was i to meet this strange teddy boy off the bus who who turned out to play music like i did and we get together and boy we complimented each other you know it was a bit yin yang um you know they say with with marriages uh you know opposites attract and i think i mean we weren't like madly opposite but i had some stuff he didn't have and he had some stuff i didn't have so when you put them together it it made something extra it really did i mean i l when i look at you guys just you know from my as a fan myself i he when when you wrote yesterday it just seems like a real like a like a comment from outer space it's just kind of it's really like a breakthrough for you guys musically do you remember i also always felt that might be true or i've heard that that was true of my dad writing strawberry fields do you remember feeling anything special about him writing that or playing it for you oh yeah yeah in fact it's funny i heard it on the radio coming in this morning really yeah i thought this is a sign the time i was there it had been closed down and john would say oh look you know this this is strawberry fields and there's you know should be all kids playing in there and stuff um so when when we came to get the song together john it was essentially john's song and he sort of brought it in um but it was it was such a lovely piece and i very i think very ahead of its time with all the lyrics you know i think uh yes i don't um maybe hello i and i i know i had um one of his first lps at home before the beatles you know i just um i used to play that quite a lot so i was steeped in him and i think your dad was too so uh but that was just one of the influences you know um there's an awful lot more um because strawberry feels in penny lane those are very much us remembering our youth and you know it's a funny thing we used to say when we were a little older i mean older like 20 something yeah you were really young they looked like babies you know but we thought we were we thought we were kind of men of the universe a big man by that you know it's uh as we got a little bit older if ever there was like a a problem with a song or recording we often say what would our 17 year old self think and we like we refer back because that was the wisest age we reckoned you know 17 you go nah it's a load of crap right you had it all yeah that's that's great needs more drums or you know just a very basic thinking it was a whole very exciting time and i say with strawberry feels for penny lane there you know if i'd say penny lane and talk about the barbershop i i got to i don't know if i'm allowed to say but i've i've i've had little glimpses of some of the um studio banter from the let it be period and it just made me think like wow you know growing up there was always this myth that you know things were a bit grumpy or whatever and there was this kind of like there was this mythos around the film and everything but actually what surprised me you know was that you guys then and throughout your career just always seem to actually be having so much fun like it's very light-hearted and you guys are joking around and enjoying yourselves i think is that true like do you think it was a bit of a myth and that looking back do you feel like do you notice how much more fun it seemed or something because i remember seeing in an interview with you saying i think it was the fact that the beatles were breaking up which was a very difficult time for us it was like a divorce you know so it's very difficult to collect your thoughts and to just be jolly and by the time let it be came about that became the story of the film and then that coupled with the fact that we'd broken up left it a gloomy left sort of cloud in the room you know saying that you saw a picture of you guys at the i think it's from the let it be session and you just are obviously so close like you're writing one some song together and that reminded you i was a picture linda had taken it really gave me hope that picture before i before the peter jackson thing that was like one little picture i held on to in fact uh we had an exhibition where linda's pictures were blown up and i bought one of them um and it's a great big one of that thing you're talking about me and john writing and you can just see that we're into each other you know and we're like smiling and like we're writing down something so we're engaged in doing something artistic something interesting and i say you know that every time i felt a bit down i'd look at that picture and go no that's the reality and so i'm loving the fact that peter jackson discovered more of that reality i'm excited about it and you guys famously you know started writing i guess more and more independently as you as the records progressed but was there still a kind of was there still a kind of input or influence happening anyway would you say i think so you know um we the the reason we originally wrote separately was because we were living separately um in the early days we'd been on tour all the time so we were kind of living together once the touring eased off and we might have one tour a year or something um there would be plenty of time to be at home and so you'd pick up a guitar or something and let's say i wrote yesterday or something like that john would write strawberry fields so you were writing separately then you bring it together for the record um but um so you would then get some uh collaboration um to finish up the song and to bring it in to the studio and then you collaborate in studio but the interesting thing is that ever since uh the beatles broke up and we didn't write together or even record together i think each one of us referenced the others when we're writing stuff i i often do it you know i'm writing something i go oh god this is bloody awful you know then i got then i and i think what would john say and you go yeah you're right it's bloody awful you've got to change it and so i'll change it you know and i know from reports that he did similar things to that you know if i'd have a record out he'd go bloody hell you know got to go in the studio got it got to try and do better than paul yeah i mean i i always felt like even on imagine he has that song that's just how question mark how can i go forward when i don't know which way i'm facing is this one coordinate that's sort of i guess i don't know what key but it's when you play like a c major over d on the bass and it's a kind of hat like a jazzier sound and i always felt like that was something that he would have been more influenced by your ears for like it sounds to me that he was paying attention to you you know throughout his career to me but i don't know i mean i can't ask him but it seems that way if i just listen you know to the chords and melodies seemed aware of what you were doing you even seemed still to be a bit in sync i listened to your first solo mccartney and his plastic gonna bend in a way what they they are connected to me maybe i'm stretching but they're connected because they're both so raw and stripped down in a way and i feel like they don't sound like the beatles in this similar way in the way that they're more kind of bare and um i really love them both but it seems like you weren't as you hadn't completely drifted apart necessarily like there was still a kind of you're on the same page to me yeah well you know if you know someone that long from your early teenage years to your late 20s um that's an awful long time to be uh collaborating with someone and you you you grow to know each other and even when you're apart you're still thinking about each other you're still referencing each other um so i'm i like to think that i i i always say to people one of the great things for me was that after all the beatles rubbish and all the arguing and the the business you know business differences really that even after all of that i'm so happy that i got it back together with your dad it really really would have been a heartache to me if if we hadn't have reunited it was so lovely that we did you know it really gives me sort of strength to know that you know yeah well that you be that you kind of touch base again i mean even i've seen interviews with him around the time when he's about to go and see you and he seems really genuinely happy that he's about to see i think he says like well actually i'm about to have a meeting with him paul i'm on my way or something and he kind of jokes but he sounds happy that he's gonna see you you know i can tell that you guys were real friends i think so much of what he did you know just obviously uh imagine and instant karma you know it's great and the nice thing was when i listened to the records i could imagine him in the studio and go okay i know what he's done he's just said to the the uh engineer uh give me some elvis echo right the slap ball gecko yeah bog is the toilet in liverpool but you know we just called it a bog echo it's really a tape delay but i can imagine him saying i want that and then getting in the headphones with that and and recording a lot of his stuff that way i also heard that he was kind of insecure about his voice like i've heard that you know when he was doing the solo records he would kind of turn his vocal down and then he'd go to the bathroom and come back and the engineers would have like snuck it back up it seemed it's just funny that he had these sort of insecurities although he also came across as very confident didn't he yeah exactly well the confidence was the shield you know that i i learned that early on was that um if you have difficulties in your life you can kind of go two ways you can just lie down and give up or you can put a shield up and you can um you can guard yourself from from the world in that way so for the minute i met john you know i i knew that was what was going on was that uh he had this wit uh that would um you know guard him from that and so the thing is you know insecurities i think so many people i can't think of anyone who doesn't have insecurities um so i can relate to that and i'm sure john would not think it was great enough i remember doing the vocal on eleanor rigby and saying to george martin god this is terrible i'm terrible i listen to it now i go oh no it's pretty good i like it you know it's pretty good yeah but you know we're all full of insecurities and then you know like you say if you look at it rationally you go wait a minute there's this guy john lennon who's like a genius clever witty confident and everything why would he have insecurities because we're all fragile beings and you know i do that with myself i think god if i haven't got enough awards you know i should just look at these awards and go yeah you're okay but you don't it doesn't work out like that you're as an artist i think you're always questioning it thinking i could do this better or could i and then sometimes you'll just hear it and go oh no it's okay but um you know i think we were all a bit like that how did you guys decide to even be songwriters because i thought mo i mean generally most groups would not necessarily write their own material was it buddy holly who really started that you know it was it was independent of all of that um i'd started just when i got a guitar my natural instinct was to sort of try and learn songs that i liked little blues songs or you know skiffle songs but beyond that i tried to write little things myself and um it turns out so did john so what i would do is i was just talking to someone about myself and they said what are your hobbies you know go i don't know i love drawing and all i like song writing i try and write songs and instead of these days where someone might go oh you do well that's interesting people would go oh yeah okay do you like football and they no one would pick up on that songwriting thing until i met john and then i said well you know aubrey i have written a couple of songs so so have i so we had just independently have in our guitars it it had struck us as a good idea to try and do something of our own and they were they were pretty basic little songs but when we got together we used to go around to my house um and we'd we'd play these songs and um that was we had that really just before buddy and then when buddy came along the evelyn's came along we took a lot of their style and and put them into our style but we had actually started to flirt with songwriting independent of one another without major influences just the fact that it was a guitar we loved this new kind of music and so we were having a go at it you wrote love me do before the beatles yeah we we did that we did a few before the beatles really yeah love me do one after 909 did you have any throwaway songs that you don't that you don't like that were sort of bad or i mean or was it kind of like you just you know struck gold from the beginning yeah no i there were a few songs that weren't very good well that's nice to hear actually honestly there were few that were thank god you know clearly young songwriters who don't quite know how to do it um there was one called just fun how's it going remember i got my guitar here it's like they say that our love is just fun the day that our friendship begun well there's no blue moon that i can see there's never been in history because our love was just fun okay just fun so wow that sounds almost like a country song well yeah there was a lot of conflict country influence in our early stuff yeah but um yeah no so eventually we started to write slightly better songs and then uh enjoyed the process of learning together so much that that it really took off and became the huge success that was the beatles for sure i mean but there's a lot of bands that were successful and great but you guys especially seem to always evolve and grow kind of exponentially i mean if i look at you know the history from i don't know from the first album all the way through to abby wrote and let it be i mean and then you wound up you know going on to write an oratorio and all this stuff like where did you guys get this kind of unique drive to just keep expanding i mean when i listen to because and and i want you she's so heavy it seems like even by the end of the beatles my dad was still sort of expanding his his ability like where did that come from because not everyone of that generation did the same thing okay number one we were good right there um number two we'd grown up together from little kids we we'd taken the first steps together we'd kind of learned to walk together then we learned to run and the the fact that each of us was influencing the other um was very important you know uh and we were learning not just about songs and stuff about life you know we would come down from liverpool to london and so we were seeing the london scene together even though we weren't living together we we would talk about it all and and the the same influences you know we'd maybe go to the same clubs and we'd do this and do that now and so all those influences were always there and the fact that we'd come along this journey together meant that hey we're just going to continue and who knows we might get better and so we did you know and if i did something that was a little bit um ahead of the curve then john would come up with something that was a bit ahead of my curve and then so i'd go well how about this and you know we were it was a lot of friendly competition do you feel like you guys absorbed each other in a way that the other person influenced you to become who you wound up being as an artist yeah i do yeah really very much so and as you say who knows um i mean i was looking at being a school teacher um uh you know and i don't know what john was looking at i mean maybe an artist or something i don't know and i think we rescued each other having said that like are there any are there any solo records of dads that you kind of remember thinking like oh he's doing a good job with that like i imagine you would have liked mind games the song or something but that's just in my head or number nine dream are there any songs or records that you remember being a fan of his when he was going solo yeah i mean i'm often asked um for my favorite tunes kind of thing um and i always include beautiful boy must have learned from you because you have a major six at the beginning of fool on the hill and i think you did a six before he did one i always i always think that i invented the major six you invented the major six chord no you know i love it i love what i do uh i say happy birthday john a lovely lovely boy and it's great speaking to you sean who's also a lovely boy thank you on this occasion it's great man thanks a lot i really appreciate it it's been really fun especially hearing about dad and hearing about my grandma tears is nice

Channel: Gissela Pereyra

Views: 1,779,670

Keywords: paul mccarrtney, sean lennon, the beatles, birthday, cumpleaños, 80, 80th, interview, entrevista, conversación, ringo starr, george harrison, john lennon, lennon, yoko ono

Id: iCe8fdBeTCs

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020