In an excerpt of his forthcoming new memoir provided exclusively to The Times UK of London, famed Beatles frontman Sir Paul McCartney said that “eroticism was a driving force behind everything” he wrote.
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Speaking about the Beatles’ song, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” McCartney said, “There was an eroticism behind it all. If I’d heard myself use that word when I was seventeen, there would have been a guffaw. But eroticism was very much a driving force behind everything I did.”
McCartney added, “You know, that was what lay behind a lot of these love songs. ‘I want to hold your hand’, open brackets, [and probably do a lot more!]”
McCartney went on to talk about the value of “happy accidents” in songs, saying, “One of the things about the Beatles is that we noticed accidents. Then we acted upon them. I was with our roadie Mal Evans and he said, ‘Will you pass the salt and pepper?’ I misheard him and said, ‘What? Sergeant Pepper?’”
The writing of a song was no different. McCartney shared a story about the writing process with John Lennon saying, “When I sang, The movement you need is on your shoulder, I immediately turned around to John and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll change that,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘You won’t, you know. It’s the best line in it.’”
McCartney has been sharing stories of the Beatles’ past. He recently spoke to the BBC Radio 4 series This Cultural Life — set to air October 23 — getting to the bottom of the fab four’s breakup.
“I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny,” he said of Lennon. “John walked into a room one day and said I am leaving the Beatles. Is that instigating the split, or not?”
He also added, “This was my band, this was my job, this was my life, so I wanted it to continue.”
