Paul McCartney guided a group of around 50 lucky fans through his upcoming album, ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’, during a special listening event at Abbey Road Studios yesterday (Tuesday May 5), sharing stories of the songs that make up the record.
After locking their phones away, fans were led into the legendary Studio Two – the studio in which The Beatles recorded throughout their career. Echoes of McCartney’s voice could be heard coming from the control room before the event began, with fans craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the legendary musician. Eventually, he descended the stairs into the main studio space, taking a seat in a setup made to look like a living room, with records, framed photos, and other odds and ends – including a street sign with the new album title on – displayed around the space.
“Hello, welcome to Abbey Road,” McCartney said as he made himself comfortable. “I’m going to play the new album for you and try and think of stuff to say about it.” What followed was 90 minutes of the icon’s memories, harking back to his youth in Liverpool and the early days of his friendships with the rest of The Beatles.
He described the album as containing “quite a few” songs that “go back in time”, and pondered why he tends to write so much about the past. “It occurred to me that that’s where your big bank of information is,” he reasoned. “If you’re Charles Dickens, you’re gonna write about how your dad was in prison or something. [The past] is a very rich field of information.”
Some of those “memory songs” include ‘Down South’, an acoustic-led track, which holds stories of hitchhiking with George Harrison when they first became friends. “It would be me who’d suggest to John [Lennon] and George, ‘Let’s go hitchhiking’,” he explained. “I can’t see John doing that, or George. It was my thing.” He repeated the suggestion again, amping up his Liverpool accent and mocking himself, before sharing a particular story about hitching a ride with Harrison on a milk float, where the Beatles guitarist had to sit on the battery and got a burn from his jeans zip “connecting to it”.
“Memories are a weird thing,” he acknowledged at the end of the story. “I was talking to Olivia [Harrison, George’s widow] and she said, ‘Oh yeah, George told me about that and how you got the zip burn!’ I swear it was George!”
‘Days We Left Behind’, the first single to be released from ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’, references Lennon, whom McCartney says he still gets “emotional talking about”, even now. The lively ‘Home To Us’, meanwhile, looks back on growing up in Liverpool and the working-class areas that McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr were raised in. “The three of us were raised in quite poor conditions,” he told the crowd, joking that when he mentions the housing estates they called home to Americans, “it sounds like Downton Abbey”. “No matter how rough it was, it was home to us.”
The track features Starr on drums and vocals, the drummer and McCartney swapping lines. Getting the track to that point wasn’t without confusion, though, with McCartney explaining that Starr had laid down a drum track in producer Andrew Watt’s Los Angeles studio, but was “miffed” when he didn’t hear of it being used in anything. McCartney asked Watt to play him the track and described it as “really good – very Ringo”, and decided to “finish the track up and get it to Ringo and say, ‘Here you are, this is what you wanted’”.
When McCartney asked his former bandmate to sing on the track, he obliged – but only sent back vocals for the chorus. “I thought, ‘He must hate it!’” McCartney shared. After a conversation with Starr, they eventually got on the same page and created the first “Paul-Ringo duet”.
Elsewhere, ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ features the first song McCartney has written about his parents (‘Salesman Saint’ – an ode to carrying on through hard times “because they had to”), a song inspired by the “hippy mood” of Glastonbury (‘Mountaintop’), a love song for his wife Nancy (‘Ripples In A Pond’), and more.
Throughout the playback, McCartney mouthed along to the tracks, playing air guitar and drums, and occasionally picking up an acoustic guitar to demonstrate things to the audience. While speaking about ‘Life Can Be Hard’, he did just that, playing the song’s main guitar sequence. When he hit a bum note, he disclosed, “I haven’t been practising. You’d think if you knew you were doing this, then you’d have practised.” With a cheeky grin, he added: “But I don’t care!”
‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ will be released on May 29 and was produced by Watt between LA and East Sussex.
Hours after the listening event, McCartney was announced as one of the guest stars on The Rolling Stones’ upcoming album, ‘Foreign Tongues’. It follows his appearance on the band’s previous record, ‘Hackney Diamonds’.