Paul McCartney

Speaker: Rachel Roberts (Standard British accent)

At the age of 65, Sir Paul McCartney is a legendary figure. In addition to having been one half of the Lennon-McCartney team that wrote most of the hits for the Beatles, his subsequent work, both with his band Wings and by himself, has also been impressive. According to Guinness World Records, McCartney is in fact the most successful musician and composer in pop music history.
Nor does McCartney have any retirement plans, in spite of having passed the age of 64 of the famous Beatles song (as in, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”). This year he released another album, Memory Almost Full, on the Mercury label. He was asked to explain the title:

Paul McCartney (Standard British/mild Liverpudlian accent):

To me, what I like about a title is if it’s not very specific… in actual fact I’d seen the phrase and I wasn’t quite sure where I’d seen it, but it stuck in my mind. Then I realised it was off my phone, just warning me that I... there were too many messages and I had to delete some. So I thought, “Oh, ‘Memory almost full’: OK, that’s... kind of applies to the phone thing, so that’s sort of, you know, what happens in the modern world, but then, again, you know, when I talked to people about it, they didn’t see that, and they thought of, in... in a life, you know, your memory is often like a bit over-crowded, and you’ve got to, you know, delete some stuff, in order to put some more stuff in it.

THE EARLY DAYS

And, on the subject of memories, he was asked whether he had many of the days of the Beatles:

Paul McCartney:

Yeah, very vivid... you know, all our sort of early gigging memories.
I mean, they’re not... I probably can’t remember individual moments so much as a haze of, you know, being in a band. I probably can’t imagine… remember all the individual gigs. You remember some of them. You know, I remember going down to a place called Slough and we thought, “That’s a... you know” – we’d never been to places like that, you know, we were mainly around Liverpool. We went down to Slough and got there in an afternoon, like a church hall, and there... hardly anyone showed up, you know, ‘cause we weren’t known, we weren’t famous. So those kind of things you remember.

A SENSE OF SADNESS

Memory Almost Full contains a rather morbid track, “End of the End,” which deals with the subject of death. McCartney was asked whether his own experiences of death had made him weaker or stronger:

Paul McCartney:

I’d like to think it would strengthen me... It doesn’t weaken me: let’s start there. It saddens me because there’s mates and lovers that will not come through the door again. And that’s a very sad thing, you know, your... my mum died when I was a teenager, my dad died later, Linda died after 30 years of marriage, and John and George have since died. So all of those deaths, and... and some others, are very sad, just... just inasmuch as you won’t see that person again, in this life, anyway.