I’ve Only Got Two Hands

‘I’ve Only Got Two Hands’ is an unlisted instrumental track at the end of Paul McCartney’s 13th solo album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.

We’d done a lot of the album. We were almost finished and we just thought, you know, how about opening the album with just something for nothing, not like a song? Let’s just open it with like a little jam thing, a noise, just something to get your attention, then we’ll go into the first song.

I always like that where you sort of throw away the rule book and you go, ‘OK, let’s just do something completely different’. It’s not a song, it’s not a thing, you just go and play a bit and Nigel [Godrich, producer] said, ‘Why don’t you just have a couple of ideas, songs, and we’ll make them. They don’t need to be long. We’ll just see which one works,’ so he said, ‘Just go and do two things. While you’re doing one, do two,’ so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll do three just to show him,’ so I came out here. The piano was set up here and just sort of started doing the first little vibe, second little vibe and I said, ‘OK, I’ve got a couple of ideas here,’ so he said, ‘That’ll do,’ so we recorded the piano bit first’, just really nothing, just in your face, sticking your tongue out and erm, we were joking. It was like as if the grown-ups had gone away, you know, they’d left us the studios.

I just got on the drum kit, just thrashed that out and we recorded in the space of like about ten minutes, well, maybe an hour, but we just did all three of them. And in the end, instead of choosing one of them for the beginning, we stuck three of them all together and put them at the end.