#Story of my life song album series#

#Story of my life song album series#

Anyone who has read more than a few interviews with him knows that he has a series of anecdotes, mostly Beatles-related, primed and ready to roll out in situations like these. It is not so difficult to get Paul McCartney to talk about the past, and this can be a problem. 'I use it to intimidate people like you,' he says when I ask about it, then adds that actually he usually hangs his jacket over it. When he faces me, behind him is a rather disturbing sculpture in black leather of a wrestler wearing a balaclava. As we do, McCartney periodically reaches out and touches my shoulder to add some kind of emphasis to whichever point he is making. I've walked through, but I've not had the luxury of lounging. Years ago I used to work close by, in my first real job, and this square was a place we'd sometimes go in the middle of the day, so-as much as anything to cover the oddity of standing here staring out a window with Paul McCartney-I mutter to him about how in the past I've been one of those people out there, lounging on the grass. 'For us,' he says, 'it was just a quiet place where no one would go.' 'We were mischievous little boys.' But these days, McCartney can sometimes sound almost wistful when he speaks about such things. 'Of course, when you're a little bit stoned, it's scary.РІР‚В¦' He laughs. 'Can you imagine us all sitting, a bloody great echo coming?' McCartney will say to me the next day, picking up the same thread. So the Beatles learned to sit there and smoke in silence, and as they did this, every so often a disembodied boom of a voice would surround them ('all these big vocals coming, Tom Jones, Manfred Mann') and echo round the chamber-also bouncing off some slightly spaced-out Beatles-before being recorded back in whichever studio it had come from. The echo chamber was connected to every studio in the building, and whenever an echo was required during a recording session in any of these studios, audio would be fed without warning down into the echo chamber where they'd holed themselves up. When they felt the need for relaxation and inspiration, that was where they would go, and although, at first, they thought this was a room that wasn't being used, they soon discovered their mistake. 'There was a room round the back here through those doors, which was an echo chamberРІР‚В¦,' he begins, and fills in the details. For instance, between two songs that demonstrate how what the Beatles did in this building progressed ('Love Me Do' and 'We Can Work It Out'), he begins to relate the traditional evolution-of-the-Beatles lore that 'at a certain point, we started to likeРІР‚В¦ smoking' and explains how this was something they needed to hide from their producer George Martin, 'because he was a grown-up.' McCartney then turns and points to an entrance behind him. Abrams, Amy Schumer, British grime superstar Stormzy, Nile Rodgers, and naturally, Stella McCartney. A raised stage is set up in Abbey Road's studio 2, and a couple of hundred people stand in front of it, more than a few of them familiar faces, these mostly consorting with one another in a cluster on the right-hand side of the room, among them Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Liv Tyler, Kylie Minogue, J. Right now, though, he has a concert to play. That's one of the many subjects McCartney will reflect upon in a series of conversations we have over these weeks-conversations that will sometimes turn out to be far more intense, and flat-out weirder, than you might expect. At the other side of it all, more often than not we discover ourselves to be who we already were. There are ways in which it sometimes can, of course, but what is far more notable is that we are who we are, and that-no matter how much fame and acclaim and money and experience are added to the equation-we tend to change very little, both for better and for worse. A dominant but wrongheaded myth of the modern celebrity era is that great fame and success changes people. One of the first things McCartney will say to me when we meet is 'I'm still very competitive,' another is 'Do you know anyone who doesn't have insecurities?' and those are barely the beginning of it.