Classic Clash Cover Feature: Paul McCartney

From 2007, our star of issue 21…

He’s seemingly never out of the news, let alone the release schedules, which you’ve got to say is mighty impressive given he’s now comfortably into his 70s and, arguably, his best-received material is some years behind him. But still he works, he creates, he inspires.

Paul McCartney might be nothing more than an old-timer with his face on a few of their parents’ LP sleeves to select younglings whose musical spectrum stretches only from One Direction to Ed Sheeran, but as a collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye West and his contributions to the Destiny soundtrack show, he’s unafraid of aligning a craft founded in the late 1950s and 1960s into the present day. It’s unlikely that the music of Macca will ever be irrelevant.

Back in 2007, McCartney appeared on the cover of Clash, for issue 21. The full (almost 6,000 words long) interview is still available online; but for our Classic Clash Cover Feature series, we’ve cut the piece down to a more manageable length for you short-on-time online visitors. Because we’re nice like that.

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Paul McCartney, ‘Hope For The Future’, from the soundtrack to Destiny

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We questioned whether you’d be a suitable cover star for Clash. What makes you think that your new album, ‘Memory Almost Full’, is going to be relevant to a younger audience?

Well, I don’t know if it is, that’s the truth. I suppose that’s for you to decide. If you do this article and it’s crap, you won’t use it. Which is fair enough, you know. Um… I don’t wanna have to justify it, but as I am going to have to, I would say that like a lot of music that people do today is rooted in the music that we did in the 1960s. A lot of it kinda comes from then. In something I’m doing, there may be some sort of crossover relevance. It depends if people like it. I like it so, you know, it’s okay by me.

What made you release ‘Memory Almost Full’ through Hear Music, the “Starbucks label”, after such a long relationship with Parlophone?

About a year ago I was making ‘Memory Almost Full’, and really enjoying being in the studio singing and writing, and it suddenly hit me that the minute it was gonna be released I was gonna get really bored by entering the machine and the corporate world, and I was gonna be talking to people who were semi-enthusiastic about what was going on in the world. So I started talking to my producer, David Kahne, who’s a cool guy, and I just said: “We should do something so that it isn’t boring. No matter what it is. We should maybe talk to people who’ve got a different slant on it. We should look at another way to release it, so that it just doesn’t go through all the old boring moves that you do.”

David had a mate who had just been appointed one of the heads of music at Starbucks. So he said, “You should talk to him.” So I started talking to him. He said, “Oh, we do albums. We’ve got 400 stores in China…” So he started actually sounding interesting. It was nothing more than that, really; it was just it was more interesting than what was going to happen, more interesting than the bad dream. So I just went, “Oh okay, let’s have a look into that.” And you know what happened? They had a passion. They actually were wide-awake – well, [they would be], doing all that coffee! They were like: (speaks very fast and excitedly) “Yeah, we can do this man! I love that track! This is great! That’s a really cool track, man!” And I was like, “Yeah, okay, well I can work with you.” So that happened, and then iTunes happened.

There had been a dispute between The Beatles and Apple – our Apple and Mr Jobs’ Apple – and that was getting settled. That’s gonna be settled, so I knew I could do stuff with iTunes, so that became exciting. So we got the Starbucks release, the iTunes thing, talking to different magazines, doing different radio shows, doing different TV things – promoting it in just a different way, all with really one thought in mind: keep it exciting.

Releasing a record used to be really exciting. It probably is for a young band for the first time. But in actual fact, I still think even for a young band it’s a little less exciting than it used to be. It used to be a buzz and a half you know? So we just said, “Well, we’re gonna make that happen.” So that’s what all this stuff is about.

Do you think the fact that Starbucks has a label of its own represents another nail in the coffin of the major label machine, as it has been?

Yeah. David Kahne said that the majors now – God bless ‘em, because, you know, they’re cool, they’re good people, they’ve lost their way a bit, they’re floundering, they don’t quite know what’s happening – he said it’s like the dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. And there is a bit of a feeling of that. Even the companies themselves will tell you that. I mean, it is changing. It’s a changing world. And now a lot of music is bought via the internet, a lot of stuff is bought in Tesco or in coffee shops and things; it’s not record shops anymore. So the idea was either change with it or don’t. And to me, the idea of just doing something different fitted with all of that.

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There is this myth that you can’t get out shopping, that somebody brings stuff to you all the time, but it’s not true. I do all that…

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The internet’s become the primary resource for discovering new music, which must suit you as I guess you can’t just go out to a gig?

No, I can get out anywhere. That’s a myth about me and about people with a certain degree of fame. You’d be surprised. I can get out anywhere I wanna get out. Okay, if I fall down a little club, if I happen down some club one night, yeah I’ll get noticed. I’ll get looks that they won’t give to other people, because it’s Paul McCartney down here and it’s kind of weird to see him down here. But then, people get over it really quick, and it’s just like, “Oh well, it’s only Paul McCartney down here, and we’re still having the same buzz…” As long as I don’t wreck the vibe! Which I generally don’t!

There is this myth that you can’t get out shopping, that somebody brings stuff to you all the time, but it’s not true. I do all that. I go to the pictures regularly. If I want to go and see a band and stuff, I can do that. But it’s maybe not [something] I do as much as I would have when I was actually [in] a young band. We would go up to Station Hotel and see, like, the Stones, or we’d go and catch The Yardbirds, go and catch Georgie Fame, whatever, the people of our generation. I just don’t happen to do that that much now, just because my life’s different. I’ll go out for dinner instead, that kind of thing.

But I can do it. You’d be surprised. It’s great. I just make sure I can do it. All you have to do is go and do it. I’ll go on a bus and people will look at me a bit weird, you know, “What is he doing on a bus?” And then they go, “Well he’s on a bus,” and I go, “I’m on a bus.”

Do some people think it’s not you, and tell you that you look like Paul McCartney?

Yeah. I say, “I get told that all the time.”

You do look like him, to be honest.

I’ve given up saying it because I think it’s a little bit over the top, but there was a time in the late 1960s when I used to be in New York and people would say to me, “Hey man, you look just like Paul McCartney,” and I’d say: “I wish I had his money!” And it was so vulgar that they thought, “Well, that can’t be him. He wouldn’t say that.” I told that to Bob Dylan once. He said, “I must use that line, man.” He liked that.

For ‘Memory Almost Full’, did you have a specific idea or goal that you wanted to achieve? You started these songs back in 2003, but ditched them to start all over again on new songs that would become (2005’s) ‘Chaos And Creation In The Backyard’ with producer Nigel Godrich…

I was working on these new songs, with the band I tour with. We’d just come off tour and we just said, “We’ll have a little break and then we’ll get in the studio.” So I had a few songs and we were doing that, and then the idea to work with Nigel came up, and I thought that would be quite cool, so I just transferred the whole thing and went in to work with him and the band.

But then Nigel started to say, “Look, maybe you should try playing all the instruments yourself.” He’d got a concept of where he wanted it go; he wanted me to drum, play bass and stuff. So it gradually became that album, ‘Chaos And Creation In The Backyard’. After I’d finished that, I thought, “Well, I can’t leave this other stuff half finished.” so I went back and finished it. That’s why [this album is out] quite quickly after the [previous] one.

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The Beatles, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (from the album ‘Revolver’, 1966)

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‘Vintage Clothes’, on the new album, has a great, remix-ready beat to it. Back in The Beatles, you were using the latest cutting-edge technology to experiment with sounds – but so many bands citing The Beatles as a key influence are guitar-based acts nowhere near as groundbreaking. Do you think, then, that it’s the more electronic acts of today whose boundary-pushing qualities are more in tune with what you were doing in The Beatles?

You’re right, that’s where it happens. It’s an obvious platform for [experimentation], dance music, because if you’ve got a trance thing that’s gonna go on for 10 minutes, you’d better experiment somewhere, or it’s gonna be awfully boring! Whereas if you’re looking at shorter songs, then it’s actually not as easy to just break the song and come in with something. So I think it’s probably true that it happens more in dance music. I’ve always been interested in that.

I always loved the tape loops on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s the same thing I’m trying to do now though, which is just do something to interest and excite myself. It’s very selfish really, but why not? I mean, why else do you write music and write songs? It’s not really for any other reason than to turn yourself on, you know? On this album there’s a few more bits like that, just because I wanted [them].

I think the bit you’re talking about is a Mellotron thing. I’ve still got an old Mellotron – I think it’s the original one! But it’s a great sound! It’s not actually a loop, but it sounds like a loop, so you can get that kind of sound. There’s some backwards stuff. Some of it is kind of revisiting that [Beatles] thing, just because I haven’t done that for a little while.

Despite the experimentation, The Beatles’ sound never lapsed into self-indulgence, a frequent risk in experimental music. How did you achieve this?

We were just very good. We were just really good. We were just really, really cool people! (Laughs) No, we just got it right. We followed our noses and if it didn’t sound good we would blow it out and just say, “That’s rubbish.” The good thing about being in a band with four like-minded people was that there was always someone to say, “I don’t like that,” if it was just slightly not making it. Whereas yourself, you might think, “Well it only slightly not makes it. I can still do it.” [With The Beatles], there would always be someone with us who’d go, “Hmm, it’s crap.” So generally whatever stuff we’d do would go beyond self-indulgence and it would just have to work.

And also, we had George Martin, remember, as the kind of final arbiter. We were like the boss. We were like the four-headed boss, but then George was the producer and it had to pass his test as well. So we had five pretty good heads on anything we did. It was only the good stuff that made it to the final cut.

The Beatles were innovators in and out of the studio, and revolutionised music to the point where, to some, there’s nearly nothing left to do. Do you think you ruined it for other bands to push the limits of music?

Well, you know, not really. (Laughs) You do what you do. There was a period, maybe like the end of the 1970s into the beginning of the 1980s, where people said, “Well what can you do? You’ve done it all. There’s nowhere left to go.” And you’d go, “Um…” But there is now. There’s always somewhere left to go. You’ve got the people who give homage, heirs to The Beatles – bands, and then you’ve got people who throw that over and have got a different thing going.

We found [something new], now [new bands have] got to find it. And hey, with my new album I’ve got to find it, too. It’s the same deal for everyone. But that’s the fun, that’s the excitement; you’ve got to find it. You can’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. If you’re a player, you’ve got to find something that’s cool. It’s all there – it’s just down to finding it.

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Original interview: Simon Harper

Paul McCartney online

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