Paul McCartney Finds Radio Play He Wrote With John Lennon
Paul McCartney said he recently rediscovered a radio play he wrote with John Lennon many years ago.
In an upcoming BBC interview to be broadcast Oct. 23 on Radio 4, McCartney also discussed his upcoming lyric book and explained once again that Lennon quit the Beatles before his own announcement about the band’s end.
“For years I’ve been telling people that me and John wrote a play,” he said (via the Guardian). “It’s quite a funny thing, called Pilchard, and it’s about the messiiah, actually.” He added that the story ran four pages and was inspired by the popular kitchen-sink drama format, with a mother and daughter discussing the mysterious lodger who shares their home.
McCartney said it was “amazing” to find his lyrics for “Tell Me Who He Is,” a track that was never recorded, which will appear in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, out Nov. 2. “It’s my handwriting, but I don’t know how it goes,” he reported. “It would have been a love ballad, rock thing. I would have probably had a tune to it. But you could not put things down. You didn’t have any recording devices so you had to remember them.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he recounted that Lennon was the first to leave the Beatles, but manager Allen Klein had persuaded them to keep the fact a secret while he worked on business deals. “So for a few months we had to pretend,” he said. “It was weird because we all knew it was the end … but we couldn’t just walk away.” Eventually, he added, he “let the cat out of the bag” because he “was fed up of hiding it.”
McCartney said he resorted to taking legal action against his bandmates in December 1970 because it was the only way he could protect their legacy. “I had to fight and the only way I could fight was in suing the other Beatles, because they were going with Klein,” he recalled. “And they thanked me for it years later. But I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny coming in one day and saying ‘I’m leaving the group.'”
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