Paul McCartney has finally made the admission all Beatles fans have been waiting for – that the quartet are the greatest band across the universe.
The musician, 83, has always modestly claimed that the best singer-songwriters of all time were crooning duo The Everly Brothers, whose songs included “Cathy’s Clown” and “All I Have to Do is Dream”.
However, in a TikTok Q&A interview ahead of his new record, McCartney revealed he feels fine saying The Beatles – made up of McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – probably pip them to the post.
“It is phenomenal, it is really phenomenal,” he said of the band’s stratospheric success.
“When we started out, we were just kids, and rock and roll was just really coming in, and we thought, ‘If we’re lucky, we’ve got a couple of years’ – that’s how long people normally lasted. They couldn’t really sustain much more after that.“
He said he only expected their music would be played for “maybe five years max”, adding: “Then that became 10, and we were kind of still going and the scene’s still there. Then it became 20, then 30, and now it’s right up there. It’s great, it is a lovely feeling.”
McCartney said he enjoys hearing people tell him their kids love The Beatles.
“That’s something, you know, because you can’t indoctrinate [kids], they just either like it or they don’t. I think The Beatles were the greatest band ever. I’m a fan.”
McCartney once named Don and Phil Everly as the musicians who inspired him and Lennon the most, stating: “To this day, I just think they’re the greatest. And they were different.
“You’d heard barbershop quartets, you’d heard the Beverley Sisters – three girls – you’d all heard that. But just two guys, two good-looking guys? So we idolised them. We wanted to be them.”
McCartney has also shared that Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, which depicted the band on the cusp of splitting up while recording Let It Be, “took a weight” off his mind.
"I had a strange view of that period," he told the BBC. "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 said that he spent decades thinking he was overbearing, 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’”.
McCartney’s new record, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, is out on Friday (29 May).
