Paul McCartney Said This Artist Made Him Cry the 1st Time He Heard His Music

In the early 1970s, Paul McCartney traveled to Nigeria to record music, which upset some local artists. One of these musicians was Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, a musician and political activist. McCartney eventually formed a friendship with Kuti, but he started off as a fan. When he first heard Kuti’s music, he said he was moved to tears.

Paul McCartney said 1 artist’s music made him cry 

In 1973, McCartney traveled to Lagos, Nigeria to record music for his band, Wings. They were working on the album Band on the Run.

“I thought it’d be good to get out of the country to record, so I asked EMI where they had studios round the world,” he told Club Sandwich, per The Paul McCartney Project. “There were some amazing countries where they had studios and I thought ‘Lagos… Africa… rhythms… yeah’, cause I’ve always liked African music.”

He said one of the artists who really won him over was Kuti. McCartney found his music incredibly moving.

“And they are brilliant, it’s incredible music down there. I think it will come to the fore,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974. “And I thought my visit would, if anything, help them, because it would draw attention to Lagos and people would say, ‘Oh, by the way, what’s the music down there like?’ and I’d say it was unbelievable. It is unbelievable. When I heard Fela Ransome Kuti the first time, it made me cry, it was that good.”

Paul McCartney said the artist did not appreciate his presence in Lagos

According to McCartney, Kuti was not initially happy about his presence in the city. Kuti believed Wings was there to appropriate African music.

“I think old Fela, when he found us in Lagos, thought, ‘Hello, why have they come to Lagos?’ And the only reason he could think of was that we must be stealing Black music, Black African music, the Lagos sound, we’d come down there to pick it up,” McCartney said. “So I said, ‘Do us a favor, we do OK as it is, we’re not pinching your music.’”

McCartney said that he eventually built a friendlier relationship with Kuti.

He wanted to record a Picasso-inspired track

According to McCartney, he wanted to record in Lagos and Paris “just for the fun of it.” His goal was to record a Picasso-inspired song.

“We thought we’d do this Picasso number, and we started off doing it straight,” he said. “Then we thought, Picasso was kind of far out in his pictures, he’d done all these different kinds of things, fragmented, Cubism and the whole bit. I thought it would be nice to get a track a bit like that, put it through different moods, cut it up, edit it, mess around with it – like he used to do with his pictures.”

He said he based his idea for this off of footage of Picasso.

“You see the old films of him painting, he paints it once and if he doesn’t like it he paints it again, right on top of it, and by about 25 times he’s got his picture,” he said. “So we tried to use this kind of idea, I don’t know much about it to tell you the truth, but what we did know we tried to get in the song, sort of a Cubist thing.”