Paul McCartney Says It’s Still a Mystery to Him That The Beatles Formed
Paul McCartney says it’s still a mystery to him that The Beatles formed. He doesn’t understand how four singer-songwriters found each other and started one of the most famous rock ‘n’ roll bands in music history. It’s pretty unbelievable.
Paul McCartney doesn’t understand how The Beatles formed
Apparently, Paul would consider The Beatles’ formation one of the world’s greatest mysteries. In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul explained that he still doesn’t understand how it even happened.
When he’s back in Liverpool, he does a tour to see The Beatles’ old stomping grounds. It makes Paul wonder about “the chances of The Beatles getting together.”
He wrote, “We were four guys who lived in this city in the north of England, but we didn’t know each other. Then, by chance, we did get to know each other. And then we sounded pretty good when we played together, and we all had that youthful drive to get good at this music thing.
“To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan [Vaughan] and I hadn’t gone to that fête [church garden party]? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around – in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing – and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know.
“As it happened, though, I had a school friend who knew John. And then I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make The Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they could lead.”
Meanwhile, George Harrison claimed The Beatles’ formation was destiny, which had been pre-determined by something they’d done in their past lives.
Paul McCartney said he didn’t appreciate or understand how well The Beatles made things work
According to journalist Anthony DeCurtis (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), Paul said he realized he hadn’t appreciated or understood how well The Beatles worked together when he was trying to form another band, which was most likely Wings.
DeCurtis claimed Paul said, “You know, I never really fully appreciated it or understood it, but with the Beatles it always seemed like we were able to fall in very quickly, that we would start something up, and we’d find a way to make it work.”
During a 1987 interview, DeCurtis told George Harrison, “He said it’s very difficult to find people to do that with all the time in that way, and he seemed to feel that having gone through the experience, [it] made him look back and understand and appreciate that.”
George replied that Paul was right to an extent. He said The Beatles started as a little unit and grew up together. By the time they were doing shows at places like Shea Stadium, although they were still a tiny band, “we completely understood each other. And if we did change in our recording approaches, that change took place also in our live shows, until it got to the point where we stopped touring.”
George felt Paul’s pain while trying to find a producer who understood him on his 1987 album, Cloud Nine. The Beatles had their issues, but they could not deny how well they worked together.
The Beatles’ split felt like an original sin
If The Beatles’ formation was a coincidence, their split was down to fate too. In The Lyrics, Paul explained that The Beatles’ split was an original sin. They weren’t perfect, after all. Toward the end of the group’s lifetime, their music became less important. All they did was go to business meetings that were “soul destroying.”
“We’d sit around in an office, and it was a place you just didn’t want to be, with people you didn’t want to be with,” Paul wrote. “There’s a great picture that Linda took of Allen Klein, in which he’s got a hammer like Maxwell’s silver hammer. It’s very symbolic.”
Eventually, Paul said those last months and The Beatles’ split weighed on him heavily. “That whole period weighed on me to such an extent that I even began to think it was all tied in with the idea of original sin,” Paul wrote.
“Even though my mum had christened me as a Catholic, we weren’t brought up Catholic, so I didn’t buy into the concept of original sin on a day-to-day basis. It’s really very depressing to think that you were born a loser.”
The Beatles weren’t born perfect, but what they did during their time together was pretty much the epitome of the word.
