Paul McCartney has declared that “so much” of what John Lennon and Yoko Ono believed in was, well, “crap”.
McCartney didn’t hold back during an appearance on BBC Radio (via Ultimate Guitar) when asked about Lennon quitting the band to “explore new artistic territory” with Ono.
“The thing is – so much they held to be the truth was crap. ‘War is over,’ well, no, it isn’t. ‘If enough people want the war to be over, it’ll be over…’ – I’m not sure that’s entirely true,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, McCartney opened up about the process of writing The Beatles’ 1965 hit ‘Yesterday’, revealing that the melody came to him in a dream.
“Somewhere in a dream, I heard this tune… when I woke up I thought, ‘I love that tune. What is it? Is it Fred Astaire? Is it Cole Porter? What is it?’ I fell out of bed and the piano was right there just to the side, I just had this tune and I had these chords,” he began.
He continued: “And to solidify it in my memory, I broke it down with some dummy words, ‘Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs, scrambled eggs.’ Using dummy lyrics wasn’t something I did a lot.”
“So I had this tune and I think the first person I saw that morning outside the house was John. I said, ‘What’s this song?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never heard it.'”
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“I got the same response from George Martin and my buddy singer Alma Cogan, who had a pretty comprehensive knowledge of popular songs.”
“After a couple of weeks, it became clear to me that no one knew the song, and it didn’t exist, except in my head. So I claimed it and spent time playing around with it, adding to it and perfecting it.”
“Not long after the song came to me, Jane [Asher] and I went to Portugal for a little holiday, and we landed in Lisbon and took a car ride for three or so hours, 180 miles, down to Albufeira.”
“I was in the back of the car doing nothing, it was very hot and very dusty, and I was half-asleep, ‘Scrambled eggs…’ blah-blah-blah… What can that be? ‘Yesterday, suddenly…'”
“By the time we got to Albufeira, I’d completed the lyrics.”
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Check out Paul McCartney discussing John Lennon on BBC Radio:
