Elizabeth Alker
It is a sunny October afternoon and I am sitting in a long wood-panelled hallway in an old converted townhouse in London waiting to be called into the office of Paul McCartney. I am dressed in my best clothes and trying not to let nerves get the better of me. I am here to ask him about an aspect of his career that is rarely discussed but which, I believe, helped cement his reputation as a world-conquering compositional force and which made the Beatles the most interesting and influential band of all time.
In the mid-1960s, as well as topping the charts, turning a generation of teenage girls hysterical and finding themselves the focus of obsessive media attention, the Beatles were also engaged with, and educating themselves about, the work of classical music’s most audacious and important composers.
McCartney watched the communist and free improviser Cornelius Cardew play the prepared piano at the Royal College of Art in London. He saw Karlheinz Stockhausen deliver an address about the development of synthesised sound. And he went to meet Delia Derbyshire (“She was in a shed at the bottom of her garden full of machines”) to ask if she wanted to write an electronic score for Yesterday. He attended a lecture by the Italian composer and electronic experimentalist Luciano Berio, who later arranged a series of songs by the Beatles for his first wife, the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian.
The Beatles, McCartney tells me, also took their cue from the 1956 piece Radio Music by John Cage for one of the band’s most famous songs: “Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he says, “and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”
On a purple velvet sofa in his office, McCartney talks to me with the same irrepressible energy that has driven his contribution to music for more than 60 years. He also has a very endearing way of never assuming knowledge and very politely checks, for instance, that I know about his friend, John. “You know, John Lennon?” (I do.) And did I know the Beatles had “this song called Yesterday?” (I did). He seems delighted to talk less about his own achievements and more about the people who helped broaden his scope….
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After the truth-shower 