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Kindle Notes & Highlights
We did a track called ‘My Dark Hour’. I drummed on it, played bass, a bit of guitar and singing. Steve did all the rest.
I like that. I could write a song saying, ‘I really love being in this room with you,’ and the great thing is it really works now. Cos you’d be going, [dreamily] ‘’E really luvs me …’ It will apply here now. But what’s great is when you get it to the session and you’re looking at the drummer: ‘I love being in this room with you.’ It’s a magic thing about songs, they will translate. Then someone gets it on their CD at home, they’re with their bird and looking at her, and it goes, ‘I really love being in this room with you.’ I love that reinterpretation that songs do. It’s magical.
McCartney has put up with being photographed ever since Please Please Me. The paparazzi were often intrusive, but the modern ubiquity of mobile phones has taken things to a new extreme. The soft snap and flutter of infinite camera shutters grows inescapable. Constant photography becomes a sort of tax on his existence.
Because now a lot of us from the Sixties are older than the Prime Minister or the President of America or the President of Russia, which is quite a trippy feeling.
for millions of years I’ve been planning this thing called Oobu Joobu
But we took it to America and they decided it was ‘multi-format’. I said, ‘Excuse me? What d’you mean?’ ‘Well, you’ve got “My Brave Face” which is kind of MTV/AM, then you’ve got “That Day is Done”, which is heavy-folk-ballad.’ In America everything’s pigeonholed: you’ve got to be an Adult Contemporary, which I hate. A contemporary adult? Can you think of anything worse? But then you have ‘rock’. And ‘heavy metal rock’ and ‘rap’. You’re supposed to fit into one of those categories. “That Day is Done” is a slow waltz, with kind of Irish funereal lyrics. You know that doesn’t go in any category.
A few years after she died, Paul revisited those early years to compile Wingspan: Hits and History, a CD anthology with a TV documentary:
the human mind is like fine underwear; all the better for being changed occasionally.
