Interview for Melody Maker

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PAUL McCARTNEY this week answered criticism that during the Beatles’ stay in the Bahamas they had showed “bad manners and equally bad language” towards journalists and autograph hunters.

On the phone from the Beatles’ cottage in Nassau on Monday, Paul said:

“Anyone who doesn’t realise by now that we are not clean-living little angels must be mad. We don’t pretend to be anything like that. We also swear, and I thought that most people who were interested in us knew that already. But we have not been rude or anything to anybody particularly. It’s simply that certain people struck us as more friendly than others, and so I suppose we might have appeared more friendly to some people than we were to others. But that’s normal human behaviour, isn’t it? We have not been any more rude than we normally are.”

Paul, reporting on Beatles filming progress in the Bahamas, said everything was “on schedule”, and they were enjoying their stay there.

“John and Ringo were working this morning— they had something to do with smoke bombs, and Ringo nearly got smoked to death. They thought he was acting, but he wasn’t. We are now finding that some of the shots begin to link up and make sense. But sometimes, we’ll start making a piece of the film out of sequence and they’ll explain that it goes in before the thing we shot yesterday. Interesting, but peculiar, when you can’t follow properly what’s happening.”

McCartney said they had no definite title yet, but they had thought of several possibles.

“We’re leaving it for a while to see if anything better turns up,” said Paul.

The Beatles have already seen some of the scenes they have filmed.

“We’ve had ‘rushes’ of what we’ve made put on locally, and the colour is marvellous,” Paul continued. “Dick Lester is controlling us well! The film’s on schedule, apart from one afternoon thing when a piece of machinery went wrong and that put one thing out. Apart from that, it’s fine. It’s been boiling hot and we’ve had a good time. Also, the press out here has been very good.”

Next week — Beatles in Austria! Exclusive!