This Never Happened Before

‘This Never Happened Before’ is the twelfth song on Paul McCartney’s 13th solo album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.

‘This Never Happened Before’ is a straight love song and, you know, I’m a lover not a fighter as they say. I think that’s such an important thing in the world and it gets spoken of, sung about a lot but I, certainly you know ‘Silly Love Songs’, what’s wrong with the message of that? I love that, I love to do that so this one was really exactly that. It just kind of wrote itself a bit, you know, it just [sings] ‘I’m very sure it’s never happened to me before.’ The chords, it’s always a big help if you get a nice little chord sequence and the opening chords to the verse of that go a nice place so they settle you down with your melody and you feel like you’re going somewhere.

The song was recorded at RAK Studios in London in September 2003. Producer Nigel Godrich was unhappy with the early recordings, and the bulk of the album was recorded in Los Angeles in 2004/5. ‘Follow Me’ and ‘This Never Happened Before’ were the only songs from the RAK sessions to make it onto Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.

I wrote it and recorded it, one of the very first things we did with Nigel at RAK, that was one of the things to see if we could sort of get it on and I thought, ‘This is good. We’re going to go somewhere with this’. That and ‘Follow Me’ were really the first two that Nigel and I did together.

‘This Never Happened Before’ was considered for release in 2006 as the third single from Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. Promotional copies were sent to radio stations in the US, but the release was cancelled.

A nice little story about it was, I was in America and I was actually getting a massage and I happened to play it. And the girl who was doing the massage said, ‘Oh, I love that song, it’s magnificent,’ and she happened to tell me she was getting married. So very quietly I just sort of sent her, a few weeks later, she told me when she was getting married and you know where it would be, so I got her number off her, sent her a little letter saying, ‘Look, if you love it that much, why don’t you play this at your wedding?’ So I said, ‘but this is highly bootleggable,’ I said, ‘so just play it and send it me back. You can’t keep it, but,’ I said, ‘I’ll send you the proper record when we’re done with it.’

And it was great, really lovely. They did do that. They got married to it and it was like their first dance. Highly romantic stuff, this, but it was very nice because she just wrote me a letter, thanks and all that, and told me about the wedding and all that, about her husband but she just put this one little line, she said, ‘You know we had a great time. We laughed. We cried,’ and I thought that sums up that song for me.