6 things we learned when Gary Barlow met Sir Paul McCartney
As part of his We Write The Songs series, Take That frontman Gary Barlow sits down with Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney to hear anecdotes from his incredible career.
McCartney vividly recalls the band’s early days in Liverpool’s Cavern Club, their heady rise to superstardom, collaborating with Kanye West, and much more.
Here are 6 things we learned when Gary Barlow met Sir Paul McCartney...
1. Radio was his first musical inspiration
Before he picked up a guitar (or a trumpet, which was actually the first instrument he learned to play), McCartney was raised on the sound of the radio.
He remembers hearing grand-sounding theme tunes to beloved radio shows blaring out from the wireless. “It would be whatever my mum had on while she was doing the ironing or cooking, [when] I was little.”
The “harmonies” from these theme songs - “some of which were classical pieces” - gave him a “sense of musicality,” he says. “So that was the real beginning... but then when I was about 14 I got this idea to write a song of my own, so I suppose that was the lightbulb.”
2. In their pomp, The Beatles wrote an entire album in one week
They had an incredible hit rate, releasing 12 studio albums between 1962 and 1970, all while touring the world and attracting Beatlemania. The secret to their success? A relentless schedule that saw McCartney and John Lennon penning an entire album’s worth of songs in their “week off.”
According to McCartney, “We’d be given a week off and we’d go ‘Wow. Great. A week off, we’ll do the whole album.’ You know, a song a day… virtually. “We’d just sit there with our guitars, me and John, and George and Ringo would have never heard the song previously - there [were] no sort of demos. George Martin, our producer, would have never heard it. So it was only me and John knew this song. And we had an hour and a half to finish it, which you know, those were the conditions.”
Did he and John find that kind of timeframe stifling to creativity? “You accepted [it]. We didn't go ‘What, an hour and a half cuts? Not long enough!’ We just went, ‘Yeah, OK’.
“Looking back on it, it's like, wow!”
3. He once had a hilarious encounter with Jerry Seinfeld
‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the opening track on The Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ album, remains one of their most iconic tracks.
Its opening lyric (“Well, she was just seventeen / You know what I mean”) was originally “She was just seventeen / She’d never been a beauty queen.” McCartney remembers looking at Lennon and thinking, “Oh god, there’s something terribly wrong with that line.” The pair were “brutally honest with each other,” he says. “ If John had written something or if I had written something that wasn't good, it was like just a look between us [that said] ‘OK, let's fix that’. So we changed that to “seventeen / you know what I mean,” which is kind of a much better line.
Several decades on, the song remains the subject of dinner party talk. Television star Jerry Seinfeld once approached McCartney and said: “Paul… “Just Seventeen, you know what I mean’? I'm not sure we do know what you mean!”
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4. He uses his phone to write songs, but prefers the old days of remembering ideas
In 2019, you can pen the foundations of a song simply by recording a voice memo into your phone. It could be a new melody, a lyric that’s sprung up in your imagination, or a full verse that’s ready to be recorded in a studio.
McCartney marvels at today’s technology, but says he prefers the test of not having to rely on it. “We could write the lyrics down, but we didn't write music, so we’d have to remember it. Now, you put half an idea down, [until you have] thousands [of ideas] and it's just like, ‘Urgh, I’ve got to finish that one. That's a good idea, but you've got fragments.’
“So, it actually sort of seems like a great advantage [to have phones], but I don't think it is..”
5. He has an inspiring message to future musicians
During their in-depth conversation, Barlow asks McCartney to list just one vital tip for anyone looking to get into the music business. What would that piece of advice be?
“The trick is to write a lot,” he said. “The more you write, the better you get.
“So once you’ve got your passion, you've written your first song, write your third, fourth, fifth. Probably round about your sixth you go, ‘You know what, that's actually not too bad’. And so I think that's it. I remember a painter being asked how this guy could become a better painter and he said… paint more! So I think that is the trick. Just write more.”
6. He thought Kanye West had cut him out of a song
In 2015, McCartney showcased his ability to stay on top of current trends by collaborating with pop and hip-hop superstars, Rihanna and Kanye West, on the song ‘FourFiveSeconds’. They performed the song at the Grammys, and The Fader magazine later named it the second best song of 2015.
Putting the song together, however, wasn’t a simple process. McCartney first had sessions with the enigmatic West, but he wasn’t sure if they’d completed a song. “We both said if it doesn't work out, we just won’t tell anyone!”
Instead of a normal collaboration, where a song is pretty much recorded there and then, Kanye took fragments of those sessions and invited other musicians to add their own parts. “You record everything and he takes it away and kind of does stuff with it. And just a month or so later, he sent back this record and it had Rihanna singing on it. So I had to ring up and sort of say, ‘Am I on this? Did I have anything to do with it?’ I couldn't tell!
Fortunately, he was very much still a part of the song. “Kanye said, ‘Yeah, that's you on guitar, so all the chords and the musical idea is yours, but we’ve sped it up to suit Rihanna's musical key. I did it in A and now it was up in D. I said ‘Oh I've co-written this thing?’. He said ‘Yeah’. So it was a great experience, and I thought it was a really good record, because [Rihanna is] fantastic. And I thought the production was great, because it was very minimal.”
