Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s creative approaches to music were wildly different.
The Beatles bandmates had one of the most prolific and successful songwriting partnerships during their time together in the band but Paul, 83, admitted their approaches differed hugely, even though they inspired each other.
Speaking to Elizabeth Alker on BBC Radio 3’s Sound Sources, he said: “I would read about people, I would get fascinated. But then I started to think, well, particularly when I heard tape loops, I’ll just play with it myself.
“So, I did on these Brunel tape machines. I actually got two of them in the end, so that I was able to make tape loops, cut a piece of tape up, and then join it, say you use guitar. You go down, down, down, down, down. So, you could add to it. The second time it came right down,
“People say to me ‘you work so hard in music’, I say, ‘we don’t work music we play music’ and so this idea for me was just when I’ll play around on these Brunel tape machines so it came out of listening to Stockhauser [the German composer], being inspired by that music and the [idea] to experiment myself so I was showing John one day, John Lennon, and he was fascinated.
“I said, wow, you know this. Because we turn each other on with just, you know, whatever was the new thing, ‘listen to this’. And yeah, he eventually said, ‘oh, I’d love to do this’.
“So, I got him two Brunels, he had them at his house. And I showed him how I did it and just built it all up. And the difference between me and John was, I like to do it in a slightly controlled way, like with Tomorrow, Never Knows. So, I liked it to perform as a solo within the music.
“And he did a piece called Revolution Number Nine.
“I never wanted to make an album of the ideas, you know, I always wanted to put it on a bed of something perhaps more musical and more formal and I thought these things coming in on that was the ultimate sound that I want to hear.
“You don’t expect it. You can do something apparently very strange with a piece of music and then you listen to it, and you go ‘Oh I really like that’. It’s like abstract art … I mean, not everything we see is clear and figurative.
“Sometimes when you’re asleep or you rub your eye, you see an abstract. So, your mind knows about it. We know about this stuff. So, it was the same with music.”
Listen to the full programme on BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fm1s