Sir Paul McCartney was “well chuffed” to be asked to appear on The Rolling Stones’ new album.
The Beatles legend features on his former chart rivals’ upcoming record Foreign Tongues, having previously played bass on Bite My Head Off from their 2023 record Hackney Diamonds, but Paul refused to be “blase” about the experience.
The 83-year-old star admitted it was “really exciting” to be involved, particularly because he doesn’t normally play “as a session guy”.
He told NME: “It was really nice to just show up at a studio with your bass and just say, ‘Right, where do you want me?
“You start playing, and they show you the song, and I start thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’
“And I’m well chuffed! You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way.
“It was like, ‘Wow, there’s Mick [Jagger]! Ooh, there’s Keith [Richards]! Woah, there’s Ronnie [Wood]!’ It was exciting. It was really good.”
And Paul particularly enjoyed the recording session because there wasn’t as much pressure on him as there is for his own records.
He added: “A great thing is all I had to do was play bass and not make mistakes, so it was good.”
The Yesterday singer also enjoyed seeing the group working out the structure of the song during the session.
He said: “I could hear Keith as we did various takes, working his lick out that ended up on the album, and Ronnie working his solo out, Mick working the vocal out.
“So yeah, I went home that day, and I’m saying to everyone, ‘I just played with The Stones!’
“I was glad I wasn’t blasé about it. It’s really exciting. Not everyone plays with The Stones!”
Elsewhere in the interview, Paul admitted his manager first asked him about the possibility of retiring when he turned 50, but he wasn’t angry about the question as “we thought 30 was really old [when] we were 20”.
The Live and Let Die hitmaker insisted there is “nothing like it” when it comes to hearing older artists perform their songs live.
He said: “But it came, and it went.
“People were still playing, and audiences like the music. If the music is from that period, they don’t get to hear it live any other way, so you’ve got to hear Neil Young live to get the whole feel of Neil – the Neil feel.
“Same with a lot of bands – the Stones, The Eagles. There’s nothing like it.”