Vintage Clothes

‘Vintage Clothes’ is the eighth song on Paul McCartney’s 14th solo album Memory Almost Full.

For me this is about my clothes from the Sixties and the fact that what’s out comes back – fashion going round in circles. I meet quite a few young guys in bands and a question they always ask is, ‘Did you keep the clothes?’ As a matter of fact I did. The Beatles had a tailor, Dougie Millings – he’s in a scene in A Hard Day’s Night. Instead of just going to get a suit as you did before, for a job interview or whatever, suddenly you were going to get epaulettes and fancy buttons, materials and linings.

That to me is where the song is coming from. The message is: vintage clothes are great but don’t live in the past. It’s the opening of a medley. The next four songs are designed to run together, with this as the opener. I hadn’t done that since Abbey Road and I thought it would be quite nice to flirt with that idea again. It just means it’s a slightly longer form. You’ve got to think, ‘What came before?’ ‘What statement are you going to make now?’ ‘How’s this going to lead on?’ It’s not that different from just sequencing an album, but you suddenly think of them as a suite of songs, and it’s interesting to write them in that way.

Although McCartney claimed this was his first medley since 1969, he had, in fact, included medleys on Red Rose Speedway and Press To Play.

The track features the Mellotron flute setting famously used on The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

I like some of the electric guitar sounds because it’s evocative of some of the sounds they achieved at Abbey Road like on the ‘Sgt Pepper’ reprise.