Paul McCartney on playing guitar with Paul Mescal: 'He knew it better than I did!'

"Hey, I know you!" exclaims Paul McCartney, gripping my hand as we walk into his office in central London.

I'm instantly disarmed. All my nerves evaporate. And while I'm realistic enough to know he doesn't really hold treasured memories of our previous encounters , I'm impressed by his ability to defuse the tension of Meeting A Beatle.

We gather in Soho at lunchtime. Instead of Wild Honey Pie or Savoy Truffle, McCartney has opted for a simple bagel (topping: a terrifying blend of Marmite and hummus), which he prepared in a kitchenette next to his assistant's desk.

As he eats, he scans a printed list of film titles – mainly vintage comedies – looking for something to play at his family movie night.

"It's hard to find something I haven't seen," he laments.

Lunch finished, we settle next to a Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner of the room. McCartney places his phone face down on the table – revealing a case printed with a colourful holiday photo.

"Yeah, that's my grandkids. Four of Stella's and four of Mary's."

"They're all very bright," he beams, pointing to each one in turn and listing their Ivy League achievements. "Yale, Brown, Brown, NYU, Yale again."

" Yeppp !" he confirms. "They're very lovely. I love them."

McCartney has always been known as the sentimental Beatle. A committed family man who wrote a love song defending the concept of love songs (" It isn't silly, love isn't silly ," he protested).

So it's no surprise that family and friends are at the heart of his latest album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane .

Over 14 tracks, and almost as many musical styles, he delivers a suite of "memory songs" that reflect on his childhood in Liverpool, birdwatching on the banks of the Mersey and knocking about with his Beatles bandmates John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.

"I like to go over memories, because it brings me back to the time," he says.

An air of opportunity

Born in 1942, McCartney grew up in a time of transition.

The aftermath of World War Two weighed heavily on Liverpool, one of the most heavily bombed cities outside London, but a busy regeneration programme and a booming dock trade fostered an air of opportunity.

"Things were pretty good, actually," says McCartney. "My uncles and aunties and my parents were so relieved that Hitler wasn't sending these bombers any more - so it was piano, it was music, it was jokes.

"It didn't matter that you weren't that well off. They made it okay."

McCartney's father Jim infused the house with music, bashing out self-taught tunes on an old piano.

He was also a storyteller who loved wordplay – something that later informed his son's lyrics.

"He loved to do crosswords, and he would be very keen for me to know certain words that you wouldn't otherwise have known," the musician recalls.

"So I was the only kid in my class who could spell 'phlegm'."

McCartney pays tribute to his parents on the new song Salesman Saint, a tender ballad with bursts of the dancehall jazz they'd have heard on the radio while subsisting on a diet of "tea and cigarettes".

By contrast, the album's opening track, As You Lie There, finds the 83-year-old in full-on scream mode as he recalls the surging intensity of a teenage crush.

It was the first song written for the album, back in 2020, as McCartney shared a cup of tea with Andrew Watt – a producer for Lady Gaga and Katseye, who's become the go-to collaborator for ageing rockers like Ozzy Osbourne and The Rolling Stones.

"It was a green tea," the singer discloses. "I was in LA, so I thought they're not going to be able to make a good cup of builder's."

As they shot the breeze, McCartney started strumming.

"One of my recent tricks is to find any weird chord that may intrigue me," plucking the opening notes of As You Lie There on an acoustic guitar.

"I played this, and I got lucky because I don't know what that chord is.

"Somebody classically trained will be able to tell me it's a 'G demented', or whatever, but that started something."

Another song, Lost Horizon, was rescued from an early 2000s demo that McCartney's late engineer Eddie Klein had cherished.

"It was his job to archive all my old tapes and he said, 'This one's good, you should listen to it.'

"If Eddie liked it, I knew it was good. So we played it, and it was very complete.

"Sometimes, if you were working to a cassette, you'll have half the lyrics, maybe a little suggestion for the chorus - but this [song] was all there. So we copied exactly what was on that cassette, with a little extra guitar."

This raises the question: Are there other undiscovered gems sitting in the archive waiting to be released?

"Hopefully there are no more," he laughs. "But, you know, I do think about it.

"John and I used to say we should just delete the outtakes - but it's a good thing we didn't because, until recently, they were still being released, and they're not bad."

He's referring to The Beatles' Anthology project, which offered a glimpse into the band's creative process via studio outtakes and alternate versions of their biggest songs.

But, for McCartney, the most revelatory archive came from Peter Jackson's eight-hour Get Back documentary, which observed the sessions for their final album, Let It Be.

"I had a strange view of that period," he says. "It was business hell, and I was blamed for a lot of things.

"The headline on the front of the papers was, 'Paul breaks up the Beatles', and I had to shoulder all of that stuff, even though I knew it wasn't true."

He admits that the gossip and speculation, combined with bitter, post-break-up interviews by his bandmates, dented his ego.

"It changed my attitude to me," he says. "I thought 'OK, I am overbearing', and, yeah, I can be like that.

"But when I saw the film I thought, 'Oh, no, I'm not like that at all. I'm trying to make a record. I'm trying to encourage these guys to be as great as they are.'

'John and I understood each other very well'