Interview for BBC 1

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As part of the promotional campaign for his forthcoming album “The Boys Of Dungeon Lane“, Paul McCartney appeared on BBC One’s The One Show. In a short pre-recorded interview filmed at MPL’s headquarters, Paul was interviewed by Lauren Laverne about the album.

LAUREN (voiceover): In a career that’s helped shape the soundtrack of the last half century, Sir Paul McCartney has rarely stood still. And for his latest album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, he does something that he’s never done before. This time, Sir Paul’s songwriting takes us back to post-war Liverpool — to family, friends, and the early memories that formed one of the world’s greatest songwriters. And I’ve been invited to join Paul as he revisits the memory of those streets and the stories that have stayed with him ever since.

LAUREN: Paul, so lovely to see you. So, The Boys of Dungeon Lane takes you back to the Liverpool of your childhood. What were you looking for? Why did you want to go back there?

PAUL McCARTNEY: When you’re writing songs, you know, you think: what do you draw on? I have very fond memories of growing up in Liverpool, starting to write music. I immediately kind of go to smoky bars, cheap guitars, and all the things that made up how it was back then. I was lucky — I had a great family, and it’s kind of emotional.

LAUREN: Dungeon Lane — what are your memories of it?

PAUL McCARTNEY: Dungeon Lane was right on the edge of where we lived. A lot of council houses. And what I would do as a kid — I had a little Observer’s Book of Birds, and I would take that stick out of my pocket, walk down Dungeon Lane, which led to the Mersey, looking around for nests, eggs — the last verse of the song. I say to people, “Have you seen a skylark rising?” Because it was so beautiful.

LAUREN: The song talks about the beginning of your friendship with John Lennon, and you mention a secret that you kept. Are you able to tell us what that secret was?

PAUL McCARTNEY: No, I mean — that’s the secret, you know. The lyric is, “we met at Forthlin Road and wrote a secret code.” So I’m meaning, we wrote songs. You had secrets that only you two know — that’s what brings you together.

LAUREN: I mean, it takes you right back into your childhood memories that actually you haven’t written about before.

PAUL McCARTNEY: I think maybe as you get older, you know, you start to look back and think, “Wow, was it really like that?” You know — I mean, there’s a song on the album called “Salesman Saint”, and my dad was a cotton salesman, my mother was a midwife.

LAUREN: So they’re coming out of the experience of the Second World War, and the song says, you know, our difficult times were for them.

PAUL McCARTNEY: I just imagine myself as my dad — just newly married, got a new baby, but you’re in the war. A fireman, which he was, having to put out all these incendiary bombs. And she will have had to deal with all sorts of injuries. So I just thought, the courage, the bravery of that, is striking.

LAUREN: The album also talks about the early days with the Beatles — with George and John — the song “Down South”. What was your relationship like back then?

PAUL McCARTNEY: It was great. So I just started thinking about one of our hitchhiking trips, as I would suggest — cheap holiday.

LAUREN: Where were you going?

PAUL McCARTNEY: Anywhere. Like, down south. We would take our guitars. So then you’d learn the chords that he knew, he’d learn my chords. When he came to make records, you didn’t have to say, “It’s a chord I know.” You just said ‘…’

LAUREN: It’s also wonderful to hear you reuniting with Ringo on “Home to Us”. It just sounds like the two of you were having such a blast.

PAUL McCARTNEY: I’d worked with Andrew Watt, who’s the producer on this album. So I was talking to Ringo. Ringo went over to see him, I played a bit of drums. We were sitting around in the studio one day, and Andrew, I said, “What happened to those drums?” So we listened to them — I thought they really got you. So I made up the song, and the idea was, we’ll give it to Ringo.

And suddenly we realised we had a Paul-and-Ringo duet, which we’d never done. So that made it very special.

LAUREN: The album also takes us back to the psychedelia of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Did that come out of the subject matter, or did it just happen naturally?

PAUL McCARTNEY: There’s one track called “Mountain top” about a young girl. You can imagine her dancing. “Little girl, you’re tripping / everybody’s flippin’ / gotta get a grip and slip away.”

LAUREN: And what do you think that young lad — little Paul, there he was on Dungeon Lane going birdwatching — what would he make of the fact that you were still recording and releasing music all these years later?

PAUL McCARTNEY: He would know that I had a lot of ambition, and that I was gonna reach for it, whatever it was. But he wouldn’t believe it. So I’m very grateful. It’s quite a blessing.

LAUREN: That was a beautiful album. Thank you so much, Sir Paul McCartney.

PAUL McCARTNEY: Thank you, Lauren. Back to the studio!