The Rest Is History - 670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

How was Paul McCartney influenced by life in postwar Liverpool? How did he and the Beatles first learn to make music? And were they influenced by literature as well as other musicians? Join Tom Holland as he asks Paul McCartney these questions and more in a very special interview for The Rest Is History which features a WORLD EXCLUSIVE reveal of one of the songs from Paul’s new album, Salesman Saint. The full album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, is out May 29th.  Salesman Saint' From the album 'The Boys of Dungeon Lane'  Written by Paul McCartney Published by MPL Communications, Ltd administered by MPL Communications, Inc Capitol Records ℗© 2026 MPL Communications Inc/Ltd under exclusive license to UMG Recordings, Inc Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at ⁠the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠⁠ _______ Advertise with us: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone, it's Tom here with news of a Rest is History special. I am interviewing none other than The Great, the one and only Paul McCartney. He has a new album out, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Lots of the songs on that album are about his early years growing up in Liverpool. So I'm talking to him about that, about the context, the history that gave rise to the Beatles. And we have a world exclusive here because one of the songs from that album, Salesman Saint, will be featuring in the interview. So incredibly exciting. Enjoy the song. Enjoy the interview. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years. Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements. Aspiration,

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new life chapters, backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's, internal customer data from March 2026. Hello everyone and welcome to The Rest is History and obviously on this show we have talked about all kinds of world historical figures but today is a first because it's the first time on the show that I will actually be talking to a world historical figure and this is a man who is the greatest composer of the 20th century with the Beatles he was a lightning rod for one of the most transformative decades in modern history.

And ever since I was about eight, he has been my personal hero. So this is unbelievably exciting for me. And I am talking about, of course, Paul McCartney. Well, that's quite an intro. It's not too much for you, I hope. Not excessive. Hey, come on. Adulation, I don't mind at all.

So we're talking because you've got a new album out. Yes. And this is an album that it's not continuously about it, but a lot of the songs are focused on your childhood, your teenage years growing up in Liverpool. And I was wondering, is this telling us something about what made Paul McCartney who he is? In other words, could Paul McCartney, could the Beatles have emerged from any other city apart from Liverpool, do you think? Was there something distinctive about Liverpool? I think so. Yeah, I was thinking about it recently.

I do think the character of Liverpool is a very strong one. I think with the Irish influence and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling. So there was a lot of music when I was a kid. My dad played the piano at home. There were a lot of jokes. And so they kept their heads. you know, above water by laughing at the whole thing.

And I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles. And I think it gave us a good sense of humor that no matter what we were gonna do, like arrive in America and have the New York press ready to make fun of us, we gave as good as we got. And that was because of our Liverpool upbringing. So you in the new album, you have this song, salesman saint, which is about your parents, your mom and dad.

And it kind of begins actually in the war, because you were born in 1942, all the Beatles were born in the war. How much of a kind of legacy did the warriors leave in Liverpool and on your kind of personal memories of it? A lot. You were very aware of it. Not the actual bombing. I think all of us were a little too young to experience much of that.

Ringo, who's the oldest, he might have some memories, but I don't. But the thing is, you know, the feeling that the grown-ups had, as I say, you know, having to laugh it off, this is a world war. Yeah. But they're just, they've got to carry on, they've got to talk to each other. Because that's one of the lines in the song, isn't it? They had to carry on. Yeah. And they did.

That's what I say, you know. And I marvel at that because now, you know, I mean, people can get defeated by the slightest little thing. So compare that to not being defeated by bombs literally raining down on your city. And you've got to find a way around it. And so when I grew up, there was a lot of joy. I think everyone was just so glad to be out of these terrible circumstances. And my uncles were all great joke tell us. And I never heard any of them sort of sitting around.

Oh, God, life's terrible. You know, there was an honor there. It just, they'd come through it. And so it kind of wasn't allowed. So the bomb damage in Liverpool, it took a long time to repair right. And then you went to Hamburg and Hamburg also was a city that had been wiped out. So when you were kind of making your music, were you aware, were you thinking of, oh, thank God, we're not involved in that? You avoided national service by, I think, by about a year, didn't you, a year or two?

Was the fact that the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool was starting to get back on its feet? Was that something that kind of served as an inspiration? Yeah, I think so. You know, as I say, all of us grew up expecting to go in the Army or National Service. So we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking, oh my God, it's going to happen soon. And then suddenly it was as if God opened the waters and the Israelites could just go through. And that was us We suddenly all of that had gone

Except for the evidence of it So where we played football Would be on what we called the Bommie Which was the bomb site And we didn't think anything of it was just the Bommi But as later then you go Why did we call it the Bommi Also if there's an un-exploaded bomb

It could Yeah But you know So that was all around us But we just lived with it and kind of made it part of our lives. And then we were able to, like our parents, able to kind of laugh at everything. And today is, we're recording this on International Midwife Day. Oh, wow. And so that song, Salesman and Saint, your dad was a salesman. Yeah. And your mom was

obviously a saint, but she was more specifically a midwife. Yes. That father was a salesman. My mother was a saint. Working every guard give a minute. To make you not to pay the rent. War was nearly over. The peace would soon begin. Living on the edge of the city.

That was very important, wasn't it, of where you would live because as a midwife she would get kind of houses and you could kind of move around upgrading with each house. That's true, yeah. We moved around quite a lot and didn't realize until we were much older that, ah, that's why we moved. But yeah, she would, and it was often on the edge of the city, you know. But there were nice houses, you know, it was always an upgrade to us.

Because Northland Road had an indoor toilet, didn't it, I think. Wow. The indoor toilet. Yeah, no, it's true. So, you know, we thought we were going somewhere. And my mom was very aspirational, like a lot of good mothers. She just wanted her kids to succeed, do well. I mean, my wife, Nancy, she will say to me, you don't talk Liverpool.

She said, people love it when you talk Liverpool. I say, yeah, but my mother. My mom tried to get us not to talk Liverpool. She tried to get us to talk posh. She was hoping we'd be doctors or something, you know. But I guess as a midwife, she's a community midwife, right? I mean, she's not working in a hospital. So she has to serve all the community.

So there would be, I don't know, people in leafy homes, and then there would be people with very little. And she would have to serve them all, and presumably she would know them all. Yeah, no, it's quite, it's something growing up. Oh, my mom's a midwife, and you don't really think much beyond that. But now you think, wow, you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies and the parents being so in love with you. I mean, they would come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette or something.

Very cheap stuff. but just to show the gratitude. I have one big memory of her. It was in the winter and it had been a heavy snowfall and she got called up because we had a phone, one phone in the house, and she got called to go to a birth. So she got on her bike,

because they didn't have cars. She got on her bike in this deep snow with her uniform on, with a little suitcase on the back and a little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the streetlights of us cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, that's pretty brave.

I mean, you know, you just, but you did it. They did it. I was asked to ask you this by my wife, who was a midwife, so she would be delighted by absolutely everything that you've said there. So just sticking with your parents, There's two other things specifically about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive, related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland, ultimately.

They're kind of lying. I think their origins. Their origins are in Ireland. The family came from Ireland. So that kind of generates a sense in Liverpool that it's not quite part of England, doesn't it? Do you think that was a kind of important part of... I'd never thought of it. You're like that, but you're right, yeah.

No, we were from Liverpool and, you know, you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone. Yeah. We were like, we thought we were special. And I think at one point it was the second city to London, because it was a big port. Yeah, fabulously rich. Yeah. So, you know, we had a great sense of importance, which waned through the years, you know. But when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great, grand historic place.

You used to go down and see all the liners off. Yeah. They all be going off to Canada, you know, places like that. And it was only later that you learn that this was slave trade. Yeah. That there was a lot of that. Only thing we would see would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended.

We didn't talk about it then. But there was, I guess, a sense of Liverpool as being open to the world. as well as to the rest of England. Yeah. So that what is often said about Liverpool is that it's more open to, say, musical influences, perhaps than other planes. Do you think that was true?

Because, of course, you know, your love of rock and roll was fundamental to what became the Beatles. Yeah. And, you know, sailors came back from a particularly merchant navy. A lot of them that we would know came back, from America, whether they'd been to like New Orleans or, you know, down south. And they had records that nobody else had. So how would you get hold of them?

You'd just, you know, you'd borrow them off somebody. Somebody would know the sailor who had it, and the sailor would let them borrow it. You'd borrow it off them. So it was like a little culture where you'd, the record would go around and we'd all learn it. Because I think for people of subsequent generations, it's hard to get our heads around how difficult it was to access music. You know, we can get it on whatever, just stream it or whatever now. But the idea that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on. So does that make, did that make it, if you were interested in rock and roll or whatever, that you were the, you were kind of a self-selected?

group of people who would know what you were talking about when you met up and discussed these people. Yeah, that was what it was. You would know certain chords and then someone would know an extra chord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra chord and you build up your knowledge through things like that. None of us ever learned to read or write music, which is kind of an interesting fact. about all the, pretty much all the groups out of the 60s. I remember talking to Jeff Lynn of E.L.O.

He says, oh, we just made it up. Yeah. And that's what it was, we made it up. But there's a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something. And it's just going from mind to mind. There's no paper involved. All of what we did, I mean, you know, in this very studio, would be that. It was really immediate transference of ideas and you know I say if you look back on all our histories and our legacy

it was kind of bardic you know a lot of them didn't write it down you know Irish music was not really I don't think written down it was just played and you learned it and then you played it your way so we had a lot of that And that was really nice for transference of ideas. You would just, should just, we would come in here on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going to record during the week. And it would mainly in the beginning be John and I. And we would have just written something the week before,

written some songs, and we'd come in and everyone would just gather 10 o'clock, 10.30, 30 in the morning. And George Martin would say, okay, Chad's, what is it? What are you going to do? And we say, oh, well, this one. And we'd play it. Me and John on two acoustics, we'd play it.

George Harrison would look at it and go, okay. Because immediately he knew what we knew. We'd all learned it all together. Ringo would tap out a rhythm kind of thing, and we trusted him to know what to do. And then 20 minutes later, We were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer. Well, I think, I mean, I think for anyone who's seen the get-back film,

watching you come up with get-back, it's been revelatory in those terms. You're kind of, come on, it's get-back. Then you realize, oh, no, he doesn't even know that yet. It's kind of an amazing sequence. Yeah. But presumably that is what, that's what you first bonded with John Lennon over, that you both knew these chords, you knew this music. Yeah.

And that's what happened when you, well, did you, what was the Walton Fate? Was that the first time you met him? Did you meet him before? First time I met, John, was at the Walton Fate, yeah, through a friend of mine, my best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughn. He was born on the 18th of June, 1942, same day as me in Liverpool. And he knew John, so he introduced me to John. But John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually, in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar because his mom had taught him those chords.

So I would sort of say, well, you know, that could go like this and show him how it was done on the guitar. But it was all very just one-on-one. And did you find that as the quorum formed and then, you know, you became the silver beetles and the Beatles and the Beatles and so on, that as you became better and better and your kind of musically, you became more sophisticated, more knowing, was the kind of infrastructure that enabled you to access music

and also for your music to be promoted, kind of growing up around you? Were there more record shops? Were there, was it easier to get radio stations or whatever? So were you kind of, as the Beatles, moving towards a point where you could have a global market in a way that maybe even Little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't,

back in kind of 1955 or something. We were hoping for that, you know, that was the idea that was prevalent at the time was that you would do what all these other people had done. Didn't quite know how you were gonna do it, but I think that's half the battle is just having that bold ambition. Yeah.

So we just assumed we could do it if they've done it. And we'd learned a lot of their tricks. So, and we showed each other how to do it. And then came down to London and there were certain guys down here, mainly guys, that would know the stuff we knew. So I remember the Isley brothers was something that we knew, it was an act we knew because they did twist and shout, which we covered. And then you come down to London and someone say, oh, you know the Isleys? So there was that kind of in-crowd thing, you know. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

But kind of so, again, just to reiterate, it's so mad that this music was so kind of exclusive because you had to know if you knew you knew and if you didn't, you didn't. Whereas now you can just kind of absorb it almost like osmosis. No, it's nothing like it is now. You can just hit a button and you can get all the music in the world. Now then it was, I think it made it more special. You know, if somebody had an interesting record, John's stepfather, who was a guy called Dykins, had some cool records. So we'd go round to the house and play the records.

And there'd be things like Carl Perkins. So we'd, that all got into our act. So we'd learn it, get all the words down. And so that was how you learned. It was just if someone had a record, you played the record and copied all the words out, worked out the chords and the riffs. It was a magic moment. I mean, I learned the riff to That'll Be the Day, Buddy Holly.

I think Little Richard and Buddy Holly were your great favorites. They were part of them. Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which not many of the singers did. Elvis had Scotty Moore who played guitar for him. But Buddy played the lead and did the riffs. So you'd learn off him. And he wore glasses, which I always loved. And he wore glasses, which suddenly made life okay for John.

John was embarrassed. Anytime he saw girls, he took the glasses off, you know. So you're learning these songs, but then you start to write your own songs. Yeah. And I saw you interviewed on a film that came out recently, I think on the BBC. about your lost bass and you were talking about how when you have a guitar you would kind of take it away and sit in a private room and kind of nurse it almost like going to a psychiatrist and you would talk to the guitar and the car would talk back to you and it would talk to you in the form of a song

yeah and I don't think that's what it's like for most people but clearly that's what it's like like for you when did you discover that guitars could speak to you and give you songs must have been amazing to realize it. I mean, I wrote my first song when I was 14, and I suppose that's when I discarded, you know. I remember the things that appealed to me about that song. The song was called I Lost My Little Girl. And someone pointed out to me, my mom had died not too long before that. So probably at the back of my mind, a therapist would probably say, that's what this was

about. But the guitar was your therapist? And the guitar was the therapist. so, you know, I had a couple of musical ideas. The chords went down, went from G to G7 to C. So there was a bamb, bum, bum, and then my melody went, bam, bum, bum against it. So you had those little tricks that you just learned

just from listening to music. And yeah, so you put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song, it was quite exciting and uplifting. So when did you and John start to realize that actually your songs were really good, that they could measure up to the songs that you'd been kind of learning and absorbing? I think we always thought they were good, because we were cocky little bastards. But as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the writing, I think then we started, I remember writing a song, we wrote a song together called From Me to You. And it was pretty straightforward. But in the middle of it, it went to a chord we'd never used before.

And I remember thinking, wow, we're getting sophisticated. We're in C to A minor. Now, suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So around about that period, you know, we started to think pretty good. And then you'd write a song, let's say, like, I mean, what would always happen is one of us would come in with the idea, and then the two of us would finish it up. So something like Norwegian Wood, which was a John idea, and then we sat down and finished it together. I think after that we thought, oh, we're getting somewhere. Well, because that also, I mean, George introduced the sitar. The sitar, yeah. And it was a detail from John, wasn't it? He didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling to Cynthia.

That's what said. I don't know whether that's true or not. But it's, so around then, the songs are starting to move from, I love you, you love me, she loves you, whatever, to more complicated, more. Almost novelistic stuff. Yeah, and I think that's when we started to think, wow, this is going somewhere, you know. And then you would feel encouraged to write more than just the sort of I Love You songs. I just watched you talking through all the songs in the new album.

And you said in that that your song salesman saying to about your parents, that you're kind of inspired by the example of Charles Dickens looking back to his childhood. And the sense I get with you and John as well is actually how kind of how literary you were as well, how informed by reading Lewis Carroll, Dickens or whatever. So was that part of what was starting to feed into the songs around 6965? Yeah, I think that's one of the things that made the Beatles special was that three of us were grammar school boys. So we'd had to learn or be exposed to things like, Lewis Carroll, as you say, Dickens, my case would be like Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and stuff. So even though we didn't like it at the time, because it was school, it's like, oh, this is boring, you know.

I think once we started writing, I started to realize, oh, it's fun in its way in here. It's something through. Yeah. It's just, you know, like sponges we'd got it all in our beings. And now we were writing songs. You're starting to realize that like a rhyming couplet, which I would learn about through studying Hamlet from, you know, A-level or whatever. And I always thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's.

He just finished up the thing with, you know, I'm going to do it do a bab and a diddla dddddl and going to the bap. Wow. Goodbye. That's the end of that. So I was only years later I realized I'd used that unwittingly in and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Proceeding that is golden slumbers, which you've kind of, it's literally word for word taken from an anthology of Elizabethan poetry. Yeah. Again, something else that you said about the new album, but I listen to you talking,

was you've got a song in it about a woman who has married a complicated man, but, you know, she's got the measure of him. And you were talking about how you love to write songs about people, almost like a kind of novelist. Is Eleanor Rigby the first in that kind of sequence? And it goes through Another Day and Jenny Wren. Yeah, probably. No, I like that. I like the filmic thing, you know, I, sometimes I'll write, and I love her, which is, you know, I love so, very straightforward and I think fine for what it is. But then you'll, then I'll start to, you know, because I, you've watched so many films, read so many books, that this character that I'd kind of known women like this, Eleanor Rigby, Lonely old ladies on the housing estate where we lived there were always a couple of old pensioners and I would go around and offer to get their shopping for them or stuff and it was very good because they'd start to tell me

stories of the war or I remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal radio So it was great. It was very exciting So I liked these ladies So they were always a kind of special character for me. So I kind of wrote Ellen Arrigby from the perspective of one of those ladies. Yeah, because it's an incredible kind of generosity and compassion in everything that you write. And one other song that for me completely exemplified this was a beautiful song. What's it called?

Life Can Be Hard. And when I say this song, Life Can Be Hard, you wrote it during COVID. People who haven't heard it may be expecting that it's going to be quite dark and somber. I mean it is so light and joyous and that seemed to me the kind of that is so Paul McCartney that you can get joy out of something as awful as COVID. Yes, well I think you know I think the people who are locked down with their family were forced to be with their family. If you love your family, that could be quite nice. You know, you're suddenly an enforced family time.

and I had the song and minute I heard myself writing life can be hard something told me to just say but then and then that's when we start to get it together again or whatever I didn't want to go down the dark route I wanted to say yeah life can be hard but come on gang we're gonna get this together we're gonna make it happen you know so it's like the salesman saint song you know you know, they had to carry on. I think it's a theme in my stuff, in my writing, that even though stuff is hard, you are going to have to carry on or let it defeat you. And I think that's very much from the wartime years that all of us grew up in.

Carry that weight. Yeah. But, you know, as I say, I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war. They would always have a joke, some great joke, that they would tell you. And so you kind of learned that even though that had been a terrible period, and we'd seen the film of Hitler's bombers, sort of clouding the sky, and you'd seen the Belsen pictures of the prisoners coming out

striped uniforms, which is why I can never believe people deny the Holocaust. I mean, that is so insane. But, you know, we'd seen all of that, and yet the people we knew, people were living amongst, had gone on and were now so glad to be away from that, that now they were making something of their lives. And I think that's why there was quite a rich period for us, our generation, that we could now, do good stuff and say, hey, it may be bad, but we can work this out. We can work it out.

You can work it out. So, I mean, I can understand hearing you say that, why now so many decades on from your earliest years that you might want to go back and look at those early years and see what kind of mirror it holds up to what we're going through now. Can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks that memory can play? You had a brilliant story about going on a milk flute with George Harrison when you were, I don't know, how, will you 16 or something? Yeah, it would have been. You were hitchhiking, yeah.

Yeah, and you've got a great story about a kind of electrical accident that happened to George, but he then, he thought that it happened to you. So can you just tell people what happened there? Yeah, well, we were hitchhiking down. south, which is what one of the songs of the new album is about, and we got a lift from a milk float, which was electric. Those are the only vehicles we knew that were electric, in about four miles an hour, but it was a lift, so we were quite happy. The driver was sitting on the right-hand side, then there was a battery in the middle, and then

there was the passenger seat in the left-hand side, and George sat on the battery, George Harrison sat on the battery, and... Everything's going fine. We're going along. We're getting our lift. And then suddenly bang! Ah! And he jumps up.

Look, what's that? What's wrong? And he had a pair of jeans with a zip on the pocket. And it had connected with the two points. I was on the crotch. I thought, not on the crotch. No, it wasn't much. No, this is his back pocket.

So he jumps up and he, oh, bloody. And it had connected up, and the battery had given it. him a bolt and later when we we got to our B&B he showed me yeah he had a great big zip tattooed into his bum but but and the point of what you were saying was so that was always my story and I told it to people then I met Olivia Harrison George's widow quite recently and she was saying oh I love that story of you and George going down to Wales and you sitting on the battery and connecting and you got a scar on your bum.

I said, it wasn't me. It was George. But I think it's amazing the way memory does that. It can just morph. And it must be even harder for you because you've been so written about. People know things about you that maybe never happened because it's been reproduced in countless That's very true. And that is history. It is. That is, and I now appreciate through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles, I realize, you know, that Harold with the arrow in the eye,

oh, I get it, it was for the tapestry or whatever, you know, all these little things. How can you have accurate history? This is the perfect moat on which you're in. Paul McCartney, thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening. Thanks. I think of all the things that the rest of history has brought me, the chance to interview Paul McCartney is absolutely up there at the summit. I mean, that's something that I've dreamed of doing since I was about eight. And it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the production booth

in which George Martin had messaged them when they recorded, please, please me. Gentlemen, you've just recorded your first number one. And there was Paul McCartney coming down the steps, having a little chat with him. It was just amazing. When I began the interview, there was a kind of slight tightening of the vocal chords, I think.

But he was amazingly generous, amazingly personable. I know he's done a million interviews, so he's very skilled at putting interviewers. getting them to kind of feel easy. But it really did feel like a conversation. The only time when it didn't was when Paul started talking about the recording of Norwegian Wood. And I abstracted myself and suddenly looked down and thought, here I am in Happy Road, listening to Paul McCartney talk about how John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood. And my mind went completely blank at that point and I had this great lurch of panic thinking what on earth am I going to talk to him about now. But actually the

the interview flowed in all kinds of ways that I wasn't entirely expecting, which is kind of what made it so fun. And I thought, especially at the end when he started talking about the unknowability of the past and, you know, is the Bay of Tavistry adequate evidence for the Battle of Hastings? And it, I kind of felt then that maybe that was a comparison that he'd never previously drawn in any previous interview. I may be wrong on that, but if so, then I feel very proud. Wonderful, that of all the things that he could have first talked about, his take on the Battle of Hastings, it was, the rest is history.