Press interview with Paul McCartney • May 1967 for The Beatles Monthly Book

Published by:: The Beatles Monthly Book

Interview by:: Johnny Dean

Timeline More from year 1967

Interview

“I can’t understand where they all got it from,” he said, “but I keep getting long letters, particularly from overseas, mainly America, which either say ‘Thanks for all the fun you’ve given us, we’re sorry to hear you’re no longer together’, or ‘Why are you and the other Beatles no longer friends?’, and so on. It’s all a bit of a mystery, but obviously they must have got it from somewhere. Perhaps they’re going by articles in magazines or things disc jockeys have said… I don’t know. Some of our recent interviews could be the reason.”

CHANGED

“The trouble is, it never gets printed exactly the way we say it,” and Paul was obviously very anxious to make this point quite clear, “none of us has ever said that we’re never going to record together again, or anything like that. But we have told reporters that we don’t want to tour any more, or do dozens of television spots every month. And we’ve also said that we’re unhappy with some of the recordings we made in previous years, but what artist isn’t unhappy with some of his earlier work?

“As for breaking up, we’re here together now, aren’t we? And in fact, we’ve been here every week-night for months now, all working together.

“Perhaps people were confused because we said we were going to do things separately —John’s done his film, George is studying Indian music, and so on. But just because we want to do different things, it’s nothing to do with our recording activities. We’ve never done everything together anyway. The first real holiday we took, I went off with Ringo, John went off with Eppy to Spain, and George went off by himself. I shall be going to America on Monday. None of the others are coming with me, but we will all get together again as soon as I return, to work on new ideas.

“Sometimes people say we’re impossible to get hold of, or talk to, but it’s not true. I mean, I’m talking to you now, aren’t I? And we’ve got a photographic session for the new L.P. cover tomorrow, and the people from ‘Life’ magazine were in a couple of weeks ago, in fact, people seem to be here most nights.

BREAK-DOWN

“The whole thing is break-down in communication somewhere, particularly as far as America is concerned. It could have been put right so easily. We could have done a special tape-recording and sent it to all the radio stations in the States, but it didn’t occur to us, because we knew the rumours weren’t true”.

“Do you ever run out of ideas for new songs?” I asked Paul.

“No there are millions of ideas,” he said, “The trouble is, not getting ideas, but finding the time to work on them.”

“What’s happening about the film, then?”

DIFFICULT

“The big difficulty there is, is that we know what we want to do, but it’s so difficult to explain to the people who are looking for storylines or writing scripts for us, exactly what we want, and we don’t want to do anything that isn’t right for us now. If only we knew how, we’d write the script ourselves. In fact, we may have to end up doing just that. But at the moment there just isn’t any time.

“Before we start the film anyway, we want to do this television show. There’s so much rubbish on television that it shouldn’t be difficult to produce a good show. But, here again, we want to do it our way, to put our ideas into the show. We’ve tried using other people’s ideas and so often they’re all wrong, so the only answer is to do it ourselves.”

George Martin looks a bit perplexed by Paul’s remarks, but he probably has to put it down in music.