Interview for Club Sandwich

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Paul sits down with Geoff Baker and Mark Lewisohn and jaws through the day about the songs he’s been singing.

The Song We Were Singing

Paul McCartney: The song represents for me good memories of the Sixties, of dossing around late at night, chatting, smoking, drinking wine, hanging out, jawing through the night. I think it works as an opening track – it creeps you into the album and sets it up nicely. I played Bill Black’s stand-up bass on the recording; it’s the wrong way around for me, being left-handed, but I have a go – and I can just about play ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on it as well.

The World Tonight

This one was written on an acoustic guitar when I was on holiday, so it started out folk-y. I don’t “go to work” to write songs, they just come when the mood strikes me and that’s usually when I’m on holiday, perhaps after a sail or a swim, when I’m chilling out and relaxing with a piano or a guitar. My studio manager, Eddie, usually expects me to bring home a couple of cassettes from a holiday.

If You Wanna

We had a day off in Minneapolis when we were on tour. Linda was going off to do something and I stayed behind in the room and wrote a song on guitar. Recording wise, I used the same process as the other songs I did with Steve Miller: me on drums, Steve on guitar, both playing acoustic guitars, I did the vocals and produced Steve’s guitar stuff. This is the kind of song you might hear when you’re driving across the desert in America, Easy Rider country.

Somedays

This was written the day Linda was doing one of her cookery assignments. I went along too, taking an acoustic guitar, and asked the lady in the house we were using if she had a little room where I could go and sit quietly. She offered me her son’s room and I went in there. In these situations I tend to make up a little fantasy, thinking: well, they’re going to be two or three hours, and when it’s all done they’ll say to me, “What did you do?” And I’ll be able to reply, “Oh, I wrote a song!” So I just started writing, with my guitar, and came up with ‘Somedays’ -“Somedays I look, I look at you with eyes that shine, somedays I look into your soul” The first verse came quite well, then the second and the middle, and whereas, at another time, I might have thought, “I leave the words there and finish them next week”, I finished them there and then. John and I used to do this too, occasionally: I don’t think we ever really took more than three or four hours on a song. I’d go to visit him, he’d come to visit me, and we’d sit down and write. 

I’m not a great reader into moods: I don’t naturally say that if I wrote a sad song then I was sad that day, or if I wrote a happy song I was happy. I wrote ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know a Desmond or a Molly. I compose songs like playwrights write a play. They don’t have to know everyone in the play, they don’t have to know anyone in the play, it’s just a product of their imagination. I remember George Harrison saying to me once, “I always have to write from something that’s happened to me, something in my experience.” Well, that’s certainly a good way to write but I’m more fluid, more flexible than that. Sometimes.

Young Boy

I hadn’t seen Steve Miller since one night at Olympic Studios in 1969, when there was an unfortunate business meeting and a Beatles session broke down. On the spur of the moment Steve and I had got together and by about three or four in the morning we’d done ‘My Dark Hour’ together, which he released on his next album. I played it recently to my son James, who’s interested in finding out what his Dad did back then, and he liked it. He even liked my drumming, although it’s a little bit heavy on the tom-toms. So that reminded me of Steve, I called him up, we got our friendship going again, I told him I had a song and reckoned we could do it well together and he invited me out to his studio in Idaho. We had a great time there, hanging out and recording. Working with him again was like falling back into a pleasant old habit. Steve’s tough to produce because he’s a great perfectionist, but I just told him to whack up the guitar. I love his guitar playing.

This was another song written when I’d set myself an arbitrary deadline. We were in Long Island and Linda was cooking with Pierre Franey for a New York Times article. I had taken my guitar, and was sitting around in a nearby room when a song came up. It wrote itself: I was thinking about all the young people I know, and remembering my own early days. There’s a funny side story to this: I left the room after I finished writing the song and when I went back in there a few minutes later I got a shock because a girl was lying on the couch. She’d been there all the time, and I hadn’t seen her.

Calico Skies

I wanted to write something acoustic, in the vein of ‘Blackbird’, something that could be recorded without drums or an arrangement. We were in America and Hurricane Bob had knocked out the power for about a week. That caused enforced simplicity: it was primitive and fun and I sat there with an acoustic guitar and wrote ‘Calico Skies’.

Flaming Pie

We had some funny moments during the making of the Anthology, when we remembered things differently. The biggest was “who thought of the name Beatles?”. George and I both remember it the same way: John and Stu had come out of their flat in Gambier Terrace, Liverpool, and we were walking towards the Dingle, chatting, when they told us of their new name for the band. But, what with one thing and another, we didn’t exactly say this in the TV and video series. 

I was working with Jeff Lynne on ‘Souvenir’ when we decided that we wanted to add some raw, heavy-ish guitars. We had the amps belting in the studio, playing the guitars in the control room with long leads, and while the engineers were getting the sound we started vamping and found a few chords and some funky riffs. I started shouting a little bit of a melody and so I asked the engineer to stick on a DAT tape. We just jammed, but then I suggested we turn it into a song. The words came to me a few days later when I was out horse riding with Linda, going through some birch woods. I was musing and dreaming about the lyrics, looking for a rhyme for “sky”, going through the alphabet, when I got to “pie”. The words “flaming pie” fitted and I got quite excited about it. “Making love underneath the moon” became “Making love underneath the bed” – it was great fun to write.

Heaven On A Sunday

This is the most recent of all the songs on Flaming Pie, written shortly before I finished the album. I like to sail when I’m on holiday: just me, the wind and a little boat – a Sunfish. I was having a very relaxing time, and this is when I came up with the song. The opening line led me through. I like the idea of heaven being busy in the week and peaceful on a Sunday, and I like mentioning Devon – there are a few places called Devon in America, plus the original here in England. 

James is getting really good on guitar, and though we’ve not played together in a band for 20 years we are simpatico because we’ve lived together for almost 20 – he’s 19 now. It didn’t take long and he wasn’t too nervous: I played some, he answered it, I played some more, he answered some more, and he came up with some really good phrases. It was very satisfying. People have always asked me “Are any of your kids musical?” And yes, they all are. James got a guitar when he was 9 or 10. He loves it. He’s good enough to be on this album on merit.

Used To Be Bad

I like blues but don’t do a lot of it, so when Steve Miller said that he wanted to get me singing “Texas blues” it sounded like a good offer. I got on drums, he got on guitar, all live, and we had fun. Then Steve came up with some words, suggesting we use old blues lines like “I used to be bad but I don’t have to be bad no more”. I put bass on it, Steve did some solos, and we decided to sing alternate lines, singing at the same microphone. It was a jam, based on Steve’s riff and made up in the studio, and the vocal came in one take. Steve and I are donating our royalties on the track to LIPA.

Souvenir

As I have said, I write quite a bit on holiday, when the pressure’s off, and one afternoon in Jamaica I sat down and started writing a song that turned out to be ‘Souvenir’. It was a real lazy holiday, very laid back, so there was no tension at all in the writing of this song. The phone went in the middle of my making the demo, and then a tropical downpour happened, but I kept on recording and love the demo for its atmosphere.

Little Willow

A good friend of mine died, someone we all loved, so I wrote a song that conveyed my mood. It’s heartfelt – instead of writing her kids a letter I wrote a song. It was a very sad day for all of us, and Jeff Lynne and I gave it our all in the studio.

Really Love You

Ringo was at my studio to record ‘Beautiful Night’ and we were getting a great sound from the instruments. The next session we did three jams in half an hour, including this one. I got on the Hofner bass, Ringo started drumming, Jeff Lynne was on guitar and the three of us got an R&B riff going. I had to fulfil the actor’s worst dream, of being on stage but not knowing what play he’s in – my version of this is that I have to sing words to a song that is being made up on the spot. This is why there’s one verse that doesn’t make any sense, which is well surreal, but that’s OK.

Beautiful Night

I wrote ‘Beautiful Night’ quite a few years ago, and I’ve always liked it, and people who heard an early recording that I made in New York, with some of Billy Joel’s players, have said that they liked it too. But I always felt that we hadn’t quite “pulled it off’ – you know? We had a good evening and a great time but I just didn’t feel that it was the one. Also, I was still changing a few lyrics. So I did it with Ringo instead – I’ve been saying to him for years that we should do some more work together. He’s great. 

I sat at the piano and Ringo sat at the drums. It was so comfortable and lovely to work with him again. Jeff Lynne and I produced. Ringo was very happy with it and we tagged on the fast bit at the end, which wasn’t on the original recording. 

Ringo came here, to the studio, to do ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, and brought his kit with him. It sounds great when it’s recorded, the snare, the bass. He then left his kit here, in storage, so I phoned up and ordered exactly the same pieces, and set up my new kit in exactly the same way. In fact, Ringo used my model of his kit for ‘Beautiful Night’.

Great Day

This is here to balance the “big-ness” of the previous track, following on from ‘Beautiful Night’ in the way that ‘Her Majesty’ came after The End’ on Abbey Road. ‘Great Day’ is a song that Linda and I used to sing when the kids were very small, a simple acoustic number with a good feel. I’ve always liked the song but never really had an opportunity to record it, so during the ‘Calico Skies’ session with George Martin, since it had been so easy to record that one little acoustic thing, I told George that I had this song too. The song is identical to how we used to do it 25 years ago.