Paul McCartney and Abbey Road Studios go way back. He first set foot in the historic recording studio with The Beatles in 1962 and has kept returning across the decades since, both with the rest of the Fab Four and for his own solo projects and with Wings. It’s a relationship that just keeps going, with parts of his latest (and 19th) solo studio album, ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’, recorded in Studio Two – the same room where the majority of The Beatles work was recorded.
- READ MORE: Paul McCartney – ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ review: a guided tour of the long and winding road
In early May 2026, McCartney returned to that room again for a special fan listening event of the new record, where he talked through each track to a group of around 50 people. “It’s always great for me to come back here, because there’s just so many memories,” he tells NME hours later, sitting in the same living-room-style setup from which he addressed his fans. “I can always think, ‘Oh yeah, I remember John [Lennon] doing the vocal on ‘Girl’ or ‘I remember me doing the ‘Love Me Do’ line’, or whatever. There’s always little specific things of the stuff we did, so many memories.”
‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ is another trip down memory lane for Macca, with the legendary musician looking back at his youth in Liverpool and the early days of his friendships with his fellow Beatles. Taking that journey, he says, was something that just happened naturally. “I didn’t think I was doing that, but once I looked at all the songs I’d recorded for this album, a lot of them are backward looking – but then I thought, what else is there?” he reasons. “Maybe I’m at a sentimental point in my life when I think of things like Liverpool, because a lot of memories will include John and George [Harrison]. The fact that they’re not with us anymore makes it even more emotional to be here and to think about them in songs.”
Stories of Lennon and Harrison are dotted through McCartney’s new album, while a duet with drummer Ringo Starr on ‘Home To Us’ completes the presence of all four Beatles. For the latest in NME’s In Conversation video series, Macca shared memories of his bandmates and discussed working with The Rolling Stones and his irrepressible passion for making and playing music.
When you’re writing about John and George, do you feel a sense of responsibility to honour them in the right way or represent them as they were to you?
Paul McCartney: “I suppose so. I never think of it like that. In one of the songs, ‘Days We Left Behind’, I talk about “we met at Forthlin Road”, which is where I used to live in Liverpool, and “we wrote a secret code to never be spoken”. I don’t feel like I have to be respectful. He’s just a mate – it’s just this guy who I met, and we wrote songs together, so I don’t feel a sense of responsibility. I hope it is responsible.
“The thing is, I have very good memories of the guys, John and George, even though towards the end of The Beatles, John was slagging me off a lot. At the time, it was very hurtful, like sticking little daggers in me. It was just annoying, because you thought, ‘I’ve got to answer him back, what am I going to do?’ But I suddenly realised, ‘Wait a minute, this is John. This is the guy I’ve known since I was 16. That’s just what he does.’ It didn’t sting so much once I realised it was just John being John.”
And it’s all water under the bridge now as well, as you guys made up before he died…
“Yeah, that was so important to me. I was lucky because we’d been separated because of the business trouble and stuff, and John eventually came round to my way of thinking that the guy they wanted to bring in [Allen Klein] was a crook, and I’d suffered because they all thought I was the nutter, I was the crook. So, when it turned out that I was right, it was good to hear John say, ‘I think Paul might have been right’ – begrudgingly. He wasn’t one to say, ‘Yeah, you know what Paul told me…!’ He was like, “[mumbles] Yeah, he was right.’ So that made it much better. Even though it was a painful period, we kinda had to go through it, or someone would have robbed us.”
There are a lot of of memory songs on this album, but good memories. In ‘Down South’, you sing about hitchhiking with George. You were saying earlier in the fan listening event that you can’t remember who would have suggested doing that, but you think it was probably you. Why? Were you the more adventurous, rebellious one?
“I think that’s just my character, to be a bit more of a planner. I would just think, ‘Wow, what a good idea’, and so I’d float it and say to George, ‘What do you think? We could go on a cheap holiday’. Because you didn’t have much money [then]. So yeah, I’m pretty sure it was me. I went on a couple of hitchhiking trips with George, which were great and very bonding. That was before The Beatles, so when we became The Beatles, we knew we had those memories already in common. When John was 21 – I think I was 19 – he got this amazing 21st birthday present of £100 from his rich uncle in Scotland, so we said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said we could hitchhike and then you can spend the money as we go. So we did! We were going to go to Spain, but we got as far as Paris. Loved Paris, and spent everything in Paris.”
Someone else with whom you have a very strong bond on this album is Ringo, who is drumming and singing on ‘Home To Us’, a song about growing up in Liverpool and what that was like for you guys. Why did you want him not just drumming but also singing – and singing the whole way through – on this song?
“I originally had kind of written it for him, because I knew he had done this drumming for [‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ producer] Andrew Watt, and I knew nothing was being done with it. So, I thought when I listened to it, ‘It’s good, nice drumming, maybe we should do a song about that.’ So I wrote especially with Ringo in mind. Even though it was rough, it was home to us, and I like to think that a lot of people can identify with that. A lot of people look back on their childhood and think, ‘We didn’t have much’, particularly my generation, because it was right after World War II. I like to think that, even though we didn’t have much, we loved it. We didn’t know any better, so this place was home to us – Liverpool in my case and Ringo’s case.”
You’ve played with Ringo a few times in recent years, including at The O2 at Christmas 2024. What’s it like when you guys get back on stage together and are able to perform for a few songs again?
“It’s great, it’s really lovely. The reason Ringo was in the group was that he was depping for our drummer at the time, who couldn’t make this engagement, so Ringo sat in. The three of us – me, John and George – were up front of the stage, and Ringo was behind us, and I remember we kicked in, we all looked at each other going, ‘Wow, this is different’. Obviously, his style was different from Pete Best, our other drummer, but there was just something that gelled with Ringo, and it was very special.
“So, nowadays when he comes on stage, we have to do something that’s not got a big, complicated arrangement because he’s normally just coming up for a laugh. So, we often do ‘Helter Skelter’, just this big sort of rocking thing. We listened back to the recording [once], and there’s my drummer, Abe [Laboriel Jr.], who always plays it great, but then this one night, Ringo gets in and plays with Abe, and it’s just very special because he was the original drummer on it, and also because it’s Ringo. He’s got a great style, and what he brings to a song is interesting to say the least.”
What do you think he brought to ‘Home To Us’, then?
“He brought the drumming. I liked the idea of us duetting because none of us ever did that in The Beatles. You never got John and George doing a special duet, so the idea that now, after all these years, we’ve suddenly done a song that’s got me singing the vocal and Ringo sharing the vocal, it’s really nice. It’s a first, and I think it works because it’s talking about how Liverpool was home to us. Ringo comes from a really rough area called the Dingle, and he tells stories where he would go to work and then, coming home, he’d have to go past a mob of guys on the corner, like teddy boys. He was kind of scared because you’d get beaten up.
“He came from that rough area, but there was so much goodness. I think family, mainly – all his aunties, all the sing-songs that happened in those days. It was just the way because nobody had all the iPads and phones and everything. If you wanted to have sing-song, you had to just have a piano or something and someone who could play it. It was different, it was very nice. In fact, it’s funny, we did some gigs recently in LA at a small club called The Fonda, and we outlawed phones because normally people are just not watching your show, they’re just holding their phones up and they’ll watch it when they get home. It was like an old gig, like how everyone used to play. It was really special.”
You said earlier at the fan event that, even if you didn’t have to, you’d still be playing, you’d still be touring. Can we still expect a lot more music and tours in the years to come?
“I don’t know. I never know, y’know? I remember when I was 50-years-old, my manager at the time said, ‘Well, are you thinking of retiring?’ I went, ‘Uh, I don’t think so.’ But he obviously thought, 50… which, I get it, because we thought 30 was really old [when] we were 20. So 30 was like that’d be unseemly, but it came, and it went, and people were still playing, and audiences like the music. If the music is from that period, they don’t get to hear it live any other way, so you’ve got to hear Neil Young live to get the whole feel of Neil – the Neil feel. Same with a lot of bands – the Stones, The Eagles. There’s nothing like it.”
You mentioned The Stones there. Just before I came in the room, it was announced that they’re releasing a new album soon, with you on it. This is your second time playing on a Stones album in the last few years after appearing on ‘Hackney Diamonds‘. What can you tell us about working with them on the last record and this new one?
“Well, it was all one day. These are two tracks over two albums, but it was really exciting because I normally don’t play as a session guy. It was really nice to just show up at a studio with your bass and just say, ‘Right, where do you want me? Where do I plug in?’ You start playing, and they show you the song, and I start thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ And I’m well chuffed! You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way. It was like, ‘Wow, there’s Mick [Jagger]! Ooh, there’s Keith [Richards]! Woah, there’s Ronnie [Wood]!’ It was exciting. It was really good.
“A great thing is all I had to do was play bass and not make mistakes, so it was good. I was able to just concentrate on my bass part, and at the same time, though, watch them – watch Keith working out [the song]. On the new album, the track is called ‘Covered In You’ that I played on. I could hear Keith as we did various takes, working his lick out that ended up on the album, and Ronnie working his solo out, Mick working the vocal out. So yeah, I went home that day, and I’m saying to everyone, ‘I just played with The Stones!’ I was glad I wasn’t blasé about it. It’s really exciting. Not everyone plays with The Stones!”
It’s very nice that you’re still excited at this point in your career about doing stuff like that. What would you say gives you creative satisfaction these days?
“Audiences are a great satisfaction. Creative satisfaction is just writing a song – it’s still the same old satisfaction that it was. There’s something magical about it, and I often think, ‘I never set out to be a singer-songwriter person.’ When I was at school, I thought the only thing left for me would be a teacher, because I didn’t have massive qualifications and unfortunately, that mean[t] you have to be a teacher. But I got in the band, and it just led me to this. So the satisfaction is just being able to write a song and, if you pull it off, that’s the same satisfaction that it always was. Some of them you pull off better than others, but it’s still a great thing.
“It’s still a great achievement to sit down with, let’s say, my guitar and there’s nothing there, and I’m just noodling around, and suddenly, maybe after three or four hours, I’ve got a song. I know how it goes, and I’ve written the lyrics down, and it’s a real achievement. That still is a magic feeling for me. I think that’s the creative buzz still, and hopefully always will be.”
Paul McCartney’s ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ is out now via Capitol Records.