Paul interviews | Page 13 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The NME interview’s a good one, but also interesting for slight slips of memory, especially on timelines – even on recent events.

Firstly there’s the nice moment when he’s asked if he still judges his work by what the other Beatles might have thought if he brought it to the table:

Haha. Yesssss… the bells! The bells! You know, what you do is you reference things. And not all the time, most of the time you don’t. That interview was probably from closer to the breakup of The Beatles.

For some reason, he’s decided in that moment to suggest it’s been a long time since he’s thought that way, until the interviewer points out it was his 2013 NME interview to promote New.

Well, that’s a bit closer.

he muses, before going on to a proper response to the question, rather than pass it off as an old habit that he longer has.

I’m not suggesting that Paul should remember that it was something he said as recently as 2013, just that’s it’s interesting that in his thought process in responding to the question he thought that had to be a much older statement from him than it was.

I also found his remarks on Despite Repeated Warnings interesting, and flawed:

Another track, Despite Repeated Warnings, is about global warming, but could equally be about Brexit or Trump. It’s a sci-fi analogy for the clusterfuck world we’re living in now. Is he sure it isn’t about Brexit?

“It was written pre-Brexit so that wasn’t even on the horizon,” says Paul. “Erm, yeah.” A pause. “Luckily it wasn’t, so I don’t have to go there. It was about climate change, the idea that some people think it’s a hoax, and some people – notably Trump – say it’s a conspiracy theory perpetrated by the Chinese. I could never believe people actually thought the Holocaust was a hoax, until I met people who did. In many ways, America is isolated, just because it’s its own place, and a lot of American people don’t travel, a lot of American people don’t have passports. You don’t have to – you just go to Vegas and you can be in Paris or London. So you can be a bit isolated, so someone can say, ‘Oh, the holocaust was a fake’, or ‘the moon landing was fake’. And there’s always going to be people who go, ‘Yeah, that sounds plausible’. But to me, I don’t agree, and I think that climate change is a reality. So the idea that [the American] leader was suggesting it wasn’t, I wanted to do something about that, try and find a way to address that. And I saw this phrase, ‘Despite Repeated Warnings’ and thought, OK, that’ll start me off.”

Now, he suggests it’s about Trump, and was a reaction to “the idea that [the American] leader was suggesting it wasn’t”. Only problem is, if it was written pre-Brexit, as he claims, the American President in question would be Obama – who definitely did, and does, believe in climate change.

The Brexit vote took place on 23 June 2016 (and had been on the horizon since the Conservatives promised the referendum in their manifesto for the May 2015 general election), Trump didn’t even become the official Republican candidate until 19 July that year, elected on 8 November, and took office on 20 January 2017.

Timeline-wise, since he has said he got the idea while in Japan, I would suggest it probably dates to his April 2017 dates there. His first public mention of the song was in July 2017, as reported in the Liverpool Echo on 28 July:

Beatles legend Paul McCartney has written a song about Donald Trump on his new album. Macca was speaking to students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) when he made the announcement. While McCartney, 75, didn’t imply whether the song was in favour of the US President or not, he did say that he felt he HAD to write it.

He told students at LIPA: “Sometimes the situation in the world is so crazy, that you’ve got to address it.”

That timeline makes sense to me in his suggestion about it being about Trump, and it responding to the leader of Free World being a climate-change denier. The suggestion Paul makes about it being written pre-Brexit just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe he just wants to avoid commenting on Brexit but I find it hard to understand how he wrote a song taking aim at President Trump pre-Brexit.

His previous dates in Japan, in April 2015, were before Brexit, but also before Trump had announced himself as a candidate, so they seem unlikely as the time he started writing the song.

Transcript of the recent 60 Minutes interview on the CBS site.

Very interesting read. I can’t access the actual interview myself but was still fascinated by reading what he had to say.

Interestingly, a “behind-the-scenes of the interview” interview was also done with the segment interviewer and producer: