Paul McCartney Said It Only Took 20 Minutes for The Beatles to Get a Song Right
Paul McCartney helped create The Beatles in 1960. Over the next decade, they became one of the most popular and influential bands in the world. Their chemistry had a lot to do with their success. McCartney recently opened up about the band’s creative process. They understood each other so well that they were able to put songs together in well under an hour.
Paul McCartney spoke about The Beatles’ creative process
In an interview with The Rest Is History’s Tom Holland, McCartney said that the band’s creative process began with him and John Lennon. They wrote the vast majority of The Beatles’ songs and, at least in the band’s earlier years, worked on them together.
“We would come in here on Monday morning, let’s say, if we were going to record during the week, and it would mainly, in the beginning, be John and I,” he said. “We would have just written something the week before, written some songs, and we’d come in, and everyone would just gather at 10 o’clock, 10.30 in the morning. And George Martin would say, ‘OK, what are you going to do?’ And we’d say, ‘Oh, well, this one.’ And we’d play it.”
He explained that George Harrison and Ringo Starr always knew exactly what kind of sound they were aiming for. Because of this, songs came together seamlessly.
“Me and John, on two acoustics, would play it,” he explained. “George Harrison would look at it and go, ‘OK.’ Because immediately, he knew what we knew. We’d all learned it all together. Ringo would tap out a rhythm kind of thing, and we trusted him to know what to do. And then, 20 minutes later, we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer.”
The Lennon-McCartney chemistry was evident to those around them
While the band worked together well, people took particular note of the chemistry between Lennon and McCartney. In the documentary Man on the Run, Sean Lennon said that the pair had a “once-in-a-millennium chemistry that I don’t think we’re likely to see again.”
Even before they were famous, their friends noticed the dynamic between them. McCartney was never afraid to stand up to Lennon.
“Paul would have a school notebook and he’d be scribbling down words,” Lennon’s classmate Helen Anderson said in the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “Those sessions could be intense because John was used to getting his way by being aggressive — but Paul would stand his ground.”
This didn’t upset Lennon, though. Instead, Anderson said it only seemed to fuel him further.
“Paul seemed to make John come alive when they were together,” she said.
Paul McCartney shared when he realized The Beatles were changing the world
Beatlemania took hold in 1964, but McCartney said it was a few more years before he realized the seismic impact the band was having on the world.
“I suppose it was our first big success in America,” he said in an interview for his website. “I started to realize that the attention was not just local, and it was around the time of Sgt Pepper when we started seeing our clothes and the music we were making getting copied on an international level. Although this had happened before at home, with people getting the Beatle haircut and all dressing in a similar fashion, it was around about Sgt Pepper that you could feel the worldwide movement.”
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in 1967. McCartney said that at this point, people made the value of their music clear.
“You could feel that people in California were thinking about what you were thinking about,” he said. “And that’s when people started saying to us, ‘Wow man, you know your music changed my life!’ So, I think around about that time I started to think it was changing the world.”
