Paul McCartney has shed light on the decade following the break-up of The Beatles at a Q&A for the launch of new documentary Man On The Run. “It’s such a story,” he explained, after a private screening of the film at London’s Ham Yard Hotel last night (February 18). “I’m reminded we tried to follow The Beatles. It’s mad. Do I see the bravery in that? I actually just see the madness.
“I think it was so impossible to do something like that, that the only way you could do it was just in the kind of loony way that we did it – yeah, we’ll just go back to square one, and we’ll go and show up at a university, don’t book hotels, and take the dogs in the van. For some reason we thought that was a great idea!”
Directed by Morgan Neville, the Prime Video documentary follows McCartney through his early solo career and then the tumults of Wings. The screening was attended by many of McCartney’s family and friends including Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller, Chrissie Hynde and Sharon Osbourne.
“Oh God, there are so many bits in it that are so embarrassing,” McCartney said in the Q&A. “You know, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ with the little red nose, and the look on Henry McCullough’s face. He’s not happy! So I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe we could just cut those bits… Maybe I should just cool out my image and just lose those bits.’ And [Neville] said, ‘No no, let me keep them in because you’ll see all of that stuff, and then the fact that you overcame it all and found yourself in the end, and won.’
“It’s natural to me to be very enthusiastic about something, so I don’t always see the pitfalls, because I’m not looking for them. ‘Hey, let’s make some music!’ I just enjoy it. So you know, that’s me. That’s how I do it.”
Asked by interviewer Lauren Laverne what most surprised him about seeing the film, a visibly emotional McCartney replied, “I think all the stuff with the kids and Linda, you know, is lovely to see. I mean, obviously the Linda stuff was very emotional, because she looks so beautiful… she’s so cool. So that comes over.
“If there were ideas that were a little bit crazy, I’d say, ‘Should I do that? Could I do that?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s allowed.’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s brilliant.’ It’s a great philosophy in life: ‘It’s allowed.’”
McCartney also expanded on his relationship with The Beatles, which was crumbling as the film begins but had largely been repaired by the end of the ’70s. “I loved [John], you know, I loved all the guys in The Beatles. We had so much in common, and we were like a little magical foursome. I try and think of how else it could have been, just with me, John, George and Ringo, it was a magic grouping. And we did OK.”
The film is entirely made up of archival footage, including a great deal of the McCartneys’ home videos, many of which the man himself believed were gone. “I thought I’d lost it all, because in the in the ’60s and ’70s, you’d have a lot of break-ins where you wouldn’t really bother locking your door too much. So fans would come in and just nick a lot of stuff. That was how it was! But the kids in my office looked in every storage unit and every little drawer and they found it all.”
“Next to a presidential library,” added Neville, “Paul has the best archive, and I got very excited. It also helped that you married a photographer too, because Linda took pictures of everything and took home movies.”
“It’s a heck of a story,” said McCartney, “so I think it would be nice if people took away that in my craziness and my enthusiasm, that we did this crazy story, but we stuck with it, and we made it work. So there’s something brave about that. It didn’t have to work out, you know, but it did.”
Man On The Run is in cinemas from today and on Amazon Prime Video from February 27.