Breakfast meets Sir Paul McCartney
Friday, 4 November 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/breakfast/4405190.stm
Sir Paul talked to Breakfast's Mishal Husain
BBC NEWS:VIDEO AND AUDIO
Breakfast's interview with Sir Paul McCartney:http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/40982000/rm/_40982530_mccartneylong_vi.ram
Sir Paul McCartney's career shows no sign of faltering and he's working as hard today as he ever was.
At the moment, he's touring the USA, and Breakfast's Mishal Husain has been to Denver, Colorado to meet the legendary musician in an exclusive interview for BBC Breakfast.
She tells the Breakfast website what it was like to meet one of her heroes:
It was a pretty long and winding road for the Breakfast team to get to Denver to meet Sir Paul, but the experience looks likely to remain an all-time career highlight.
For a start, the man has extraordinary energy: he's two-thirds of the way through a gruelling three-month US tour - something he really doesn't have to do at this stage of his career.
But he told me he just loves what he gets back from American audiences and after the concert in Denver - I can vouch for the fact that the legacy of Beatlemania is alive and well here.
He also gives his all to his audiences, performing for close to two and a half hours with a mixture of Beatles favourites (the venue erupted for an anthem-style rendition of Hey Jude), the Wings years, right up to offerings from his current album.
On stage he looks ageless, and close up during our interview, I thought he looked at least ten years younger than he actually is.
I'd been told before that he's generally easy-going and affable during interviews, but at the same time this is the man who has lambasted the British press of late.
The interview began after he came off stage for the pre-concert soundcheck, and in person he was utterly charming.
He was keen of course to talk about his new album and also his new children's book (several signed copies will be auctioned for Children in Need), but he was pretty open to everything I asked about, even John Lennon - despite his minders warning me off that subject.
He struck me as a man at peace with himself and really enjoying a stage in his life when he no longer has anything to prove. I asked him if he ever tired of people going on about the Beatles, after 35 years of a solo career.
He said, no he was proud of what the Beatles achieved and proud to have that as part of his life.
I also asked him for his reflections about John Lennon, as we're now close to the 25th anniversary of his assassination in New York.
Sir Paul re-lived the moment when the phone call that would break the news came through, and spoke of how the loss was much more than just a fellow Beatle and songwriter.
It was the loss of someone he had grown up with in Liverpool, with whom he had shared good times and bad times.
He said they had patched up many of their differences, but admitted that he regretted how their relationship had soured in the post-Beatles years.
Twin Towers
He was also fairly forthcoming about politics, saying that he no longer performed the song Freedom, written in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.
He had witnessed the Twin Towers burning from the window of a plane stranded in New York that morning, and the lyrics of Freedom include lines about the God-given right to live in a free world, and fighting for that right.
I asked him if he still felt that way, but he said the song had been hijacked: he had written it thinking of the poor and dispossessed arriving in America in search of a better life, not about invading countries.
On stage later, I watched him captivate the 20,000 people who were there to hear him sing, and I marvelled at a life that has had such an extraordinary impact.
Here's a man who's been in the game for over 40 years, whose songs defined a generation but also strike a chord with that generation's children - and now even their grandchildren.
The children's book written by Sir Paul McCartney is called High in the Clouds (with Geoff Dunbar and Philip Ardagh). It's published by Dutton - and we have five copies to auction for BBC Children in Need . More details later.
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Topic: PAUL ON BBC BREAKFAST TOMORROW, Friday, November 4 (Read 912 times)