All language subtitles for McCartney.3.2.1.S01E04.720p.HULU.WEBRip.x264-GalaxyTV

For us,
the worst thing was to be bored.

We're young, 20‐year‐olds,

um, and we've already got
some success.

So we've got
the excitement of youth

and the sort of speed of youth.

‐ Yeah.

‐ And a lot of the engineers
had come up with us.

‐ Yeah.

‐ So they knew
how stupid we were

and how cheeky we were

and how, you know,
ambitious we were

and it rubbed off.

‐ Yeah.

‐ You know, saying to them,
"Come on. More of this.

More of this.
More of this. More‐‐"

And he'd kind of, you know,
they'd get a little look on their face

like we're all naughty boys
in the studio.

We're going to actually break
a few rules here.

‐ Yeah.
‐ And if it worked, we'd go...

‐ Yeah.
‐ "Yes."

Two, three, four.

Remember the song
called Nowhere Man?

We wanted like a really cutting
electric guitar sound.

So George did it once
on a very cutting tone.

His amp was full treble
and his guitar was...

sounded pretty good.

We thought we wanted
to try and push it,

so the engineers sort of put
full treble on it.

And we said,
"No. Can you do more?"

They said,
"Well, no, that‐‐ that's it."

Said, "Well, what about
if you took that..."
‐ Yeah.

‐ "...and put it over
to this set of EQs.

Couldn't you do‐‐ do it all again?"

‐ Wow.

And they'd go,
"Well, you know."

So we'd have them go
through a few channels.

‐ Wow.

‐ Each time
putting this treble on it.

It's a nice sound, though.

Where do you think the confidence

to ask for that came from?

‐ I think just gradually with the success
of The Beatles records.

‐ Yeah. Yeah.

‐ We started to have
a bit more freedom

and allow ourselves more freedom,

and George Martin
allowed us more freedom.

So we could then kind of push
the envelope a bit.

‐ The first thing
that's fascinating about it

is that that sounds
really more like a horn.

‐ Tuba.
‐ Yeah, a tuba.

‐ Yeah, I think I was trying
to get that effect just playing‐‐

‐ How do you do that?
‐ Well, you play it very short.

You don't let the bass ring on,

which a tuba‐‐ ‐ Yeah.

It really sounds like that.
I mean, it's remarkable.

‐ Well, I think, you know, the character
of the song is kind of‐‐

‐ Yeah.
‐ A parody.

‐ Yeah.
‐ You know?

‐ So let's see what we have here.

What... what instrument was that?

‐ That's Moog.

‐ Really?
‐ And that was‐‐

Robert Moog was there.

One of the great things
about working at Abbey Road was,

they were at
the forefront of technology.

So, one day we were just told
that there was this guy

called Robert Moog
in one of the upper rooms,

and he'd got a load
of equipment in there.

All these instrumental sounds
were made electronicall y

on a single musical instrument.

It's called
the Moog synthesizer.

It produces sounds
in a matter of minutes,

which would normally take
radio phonic experts,

with their complicated equipment,
days of work

and multiple re‐recording to achieve.

‐ This was the whole wall.
‐ Wow.

‐ It's like an ancient computer,
you know.

It was the whole wall
filled with stuff,

and he was just showing us
all the various filters and that.

So I was just messing around
and I thought,

"I've got to use that
on something."

So I thought, "Well, this is okay.
You could use it,"

because it's, it's kinda,
it's quite tongue in cheek.

‐ Yeah.
‐ So‐‐

It's also interesting
'cause it's such a,

I'll say, traditional style song...

‐ Yeah.

‐ ...rooted in the past,
yet it's a really modern instrument.

‐ We did a bit of that.
‐ Yeah.

‐ You do one style
and then juxtapose it with another,

and the sum of the parts
was okay.

‐ Yeah, new.

‐ Anvil?
‐ Bang, bang.

That was our roadie, Mal. Yeah.

We had a‐‐ We wanted
the sound of an anvil.

‐ Yeah.

‐ So, you know,
now you sort of dial it up.

But then you had
to get an anvil.

So we got this bloody great
blacksmith's anvil,

and he hit it with a hammer.

‐ Hard to get it in there?

‐ Yeah.

‐ They're heavy.
‐ He was a big boy.

‐ They're really heavy.
‐ He was a big boy.

‐ Yeah.

So I think you played a lot
of the instruments on this one.

‐ Yeah. I was wondering
about the piano though,

'cause there's these arpeggios,
it's a bit flash for me.

Makes me think that was George Martin.

‐ Because, you know, I can play piano,
but I'm not that good.

‐ George‐‐
‐ Would he sit in and play sometimes?

Yeah, if we wanted anything
that was a little bit difficult.

George Martin
was like our teacher,

just because of the age.

He was a little bit older.
It wasn't much.

I mean, I think we always thought
of him as an old man.

I think he was like probably 30
when he started with us

which I certainly
don't think of as old now.

But it was a great team thing,
you know.

We were going in the studio,

George Martin
might not even know

what we were going
to come up with.

‐ Yeah.
‐ We'd come up with it.

And then by knocking it around,

we'd have a Beatle record,

rather than just this little song
that we'd come in with.

You know, you'd write it just as
the keyboard and the vocal.

That's, that's me writing...
‐ Yeah.

‐ Pretty much like this.

‐ See that's how
I would write it. Yeah.

‐ And then you get in the studio
and you make up

all the little vocal things,
all the guitar lines.

Or because Mr. Moog was upstairs...
‐ Yeah.

‐ ...you'd grab his Moog.
‐ Yeah.

‐ Gets a bit funky.
‐ Yeah.

Guitar in this one too.

‐ A little bit of glide.

‐ Bit of acoustic.
‐ This, yeah.

That's not me.

The way I could do it,
which I don't think this is,

would be to slow the tape by half,

'cause the great thing
about four track machines

is if you take it down,
you take it down by an octave.

‐ So the arpeggio, you know,
it might just be‐‐

You know?
‐ And then you'd speed it up?

‐ I'd be able to do that,
but then it'd become‐‐

‐ And you'd play it an octave lower
than you want to hear it?

‐ And you played an octave lower.

That was always
a great experimental thing.

Just with one flick of the wrist.

Boom, boom.

So we used that
quite a lot, that feature.

A Hard Day's Night,
there's a great guitar solo.

Half speed, straight up.

Regular. It's‐‐

It's up the octave.
‐ Wow.

You can hear the effect.

‐ Incredible.

But that would have been
too fast to play.

‐ Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
and get it really accurate.

And also, these were
the great, fun experiments.

‐ Yeah.

You'd sort of say, "Well,
if George is having trouble‐‐"

You go,
"Okay, wait a minute. Let's think."

So George Martin
would probably say,

"Look, if we took it half speed‐‐"

So you can hear that
and then it comes back up

and it's got a ringy,

it's got a slightly
synthetic sound to it.

Sounds like George might've‐‐
‐ It's also cool.

‐ Yeah. That's‐‐ I mean,
well, we loved all of that.

It was like being professors
in a laboratory.

We were just discovering
all these little things.

And the chord at the front‐‐

George Martin
was helping on film music.

Yeah.

‐ So because this was
the opening to this film.

‐ Yeah.
‐ The Beatles' first film,

bang, we'd do the chord,

but he augmented it.

You can see he's thinking film.
‐ Yeah.

‐ Bang!

George Martin
was very interesting.

He'd been in the Fleet Air Arm,

which was the Navy Air Force.

We said, "What did you do,
fly the plane?"

He said, "No."
"Did you navigate?" "No."

"Were you the tail gunner?" "No."

It turned out,
he was a producer.

‐ Always.

‐ Kind of.
‐ Yeah.

‐ He was putting the package together.
‐ Wow.

‐ And then he talked to us about
sort of quasi‐scientific things.

‐ Yeah.
‐ So he had a little board.

It was an oscillator,

and he could generate
various pitches.

So he'd start‐‐

And then he'd say,
"You hear that?" We'd go, "Yeah."

He'd go...

"You hear that?"
We'd go, "Yeah."

"Yeah."

He said, "Now here,
where I'm going now,

where none of us can hear it..."

‐ Yeah.
‐ He said,

"But dogs can hear this."

‐ Wow.

‐ We were doing Sgt. Pepper
around about that time, so we said,

"Okay, we've got to have
that pitch on the thing,"

'cause we wanted it to come in
and a dog in some room go,

"What's that?"

So we put that. It is there somewhere.

‐ It is?
‐ I can't hear it.

‐ Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have to do a dog test.

‐ That's why dogs love Sgt. Pepper.

But he'd tell us
these stories and stuff.

So you knew that you could talk
to George about these things.

"George, what if we
played it backwards

and then what if we did that?"

"Well..." and he'd sort of,
he'd go along with it.

‐ Yeah.

‐ 'Cause there were a lot
of other producers on EMI.

I'm sure they would've just said,

"Another time.

Let's get the record done,"
you know.

And, and wouldn't have been interested
in backwards noises

or tape loops.

I had an old tape recorder
that you could put‐‐ make a loop.

Instead of the two reels of tape...

you could make a little loop
that would go round and round and round.

There's a little button
that says super impose.

It keeps recording forever and ever
and ever and ever and ever.

So once you've gone round,

what was there is still there

but it's now going
in the background a bit.

There's always
a random aspect to this

because you don't really have
control of the rhythm.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

It's a bit of an art 'cause
you got to know when to stop.

‐ Yeah.
‐ 'Cause you kind of go‐‐

And, you know, you've got
to sort of stop soon

because otherwise you wiped out
those two original ideas.

‐ Yeah.

‐ But when you set it
against the band‐‐

‐ It sounds like it's played.
‐ Yeah.

‐ One chord.

‐ And then we put
that other chord in there.

‐ But, but the drone chord
is still going.

‐ Yeah.

‐ Cool drum there.

‐ You know, I think we have
an alternate version here.

Let's just hear
what was different.

‐ Now that's alternative.

That's cool.

‐ Different beat.
‐ Yeah.

Still pretty slow, if you ask me.

‐ So that might've been on the way
to finding the sound?

‐ I think it must've been. Yeah.

‐ And would that happen
relatively quickly?

Like, you'd have played it
this first way‐‐

‐ Yeah, I think so.
You know, um,

as time went on,
we had much more freedom.

We had much longer to do things.

But it actually spurred us on
to do some new stuff.

‐ Yeah. Yeah.

‐ So, I mean, the drum sound
on this is, I love it.

‐ Yes.
‐ It's a really great Ringo sound.

Ringo's a very funny guy.

And he used to say these,

I don't know if
it's malapropisms or whatever,

but he had an aptitude
for just saying something

a little bit wrong, you know,
but it sounded right.

Me and John would go,
"What'd he say?"

"Yeah, he said
hard day's night."

"I don't believe it.
That's great."

He wanted to order
sliced bread for toast somewhere

so he said,
"Can I have some slight bread?"

We never used that one,
but it was still good.

It was a Ringo‐ism, you know.

"Well, I don't know. What are we
going to do about this?"

He said, "Well, I don't know.
Tomorrow never knows."

That was one of his.
‐ Yeah.

‐ I mean, now, you know,
you say a hard day's night

and people sort of,
"Yeah, I get it."

It sounds like‐‐

‐ Because it's in the culture now.

But when you first heard it,
it was like,

‐ "That's a odd, funny expression."
‐ Yeah.

Also, the name Beatles
is in the culture now.

So if you say Beatles, nobody goes,
"Ooh, creepy crawly!"

But when we started, everyone did.
‐ Yeah.

What do you remember
when you first met Ringo?

‐ We first met Ringo by seeing him
playing in Hamburg.

Yeah.

He was kind of suave.
He was more grownup.

‐ Yeah.
‐ I mean, he always was

the oldest in The Beatles, and still is.

'Cause he'd been working
professionally before we had.

We were kind of much more amateur
than Ringo was.

He had like a big car.

None of us had cars.

And Ringo's great thing,
he's so suave.

He would light, if he was with a girl,
he would light two cigarettes.

‐ Like Humphrey Bogart.

‐ He'd seen it in the films.
‐ Yes.

‐ The drink he had
was bourbon and seven.

We didn't know what that was.
We could get it at the bar,

so we all started
drinking bourbon and seven.

We went back to Liverpool and said,
"Bourbon and seven, please."

They said, "What? What are you
talking about? What's that?"

Because they didn't have bourbon,
and they didn't have seven.

So it became scotch and Coke.

There was one thing we were
particularly impressed with,

which was the drum part
to What'd I Say?

The Ray Charles record that I loved.

From a high hat.

Yeah!

Not many drummers could do that.
‐ Yeah.

‐ But he could play like that.
‐ Yeah.

‐ So it was like, "Wow!"

Yeah. So we saw him
doing that in Hamburg

with Rory Storm
and The Hurricanes.

‐ And it was like,
"Wow, he's really good."

And so we admired him,
and we'd go around

to watch them, um, just to hear him.

So that was it.
We knew him from Hamburg.

And once our then drummer, Pete,

didn't show up
and Ringo sat in for him,

I so clearly remember me,
John, and George

as the front line,

standing in a line in the front
on three mics

and this guy behind us.

And when he kicked in the drums,

it was like, ""

And we were, like, thrilled.

Wow, he just lifted us.

This is different.

I'm, like, looking at the others
just as we were singing it.

It was like, "Wow!"

It was a moment.
It was like a big moment.

"Wow, I hope we can stay
with this guy."

‐ Great.

‐ He'd just brought
the whole band together.

‐ One of the things I noticed
in listening to the tracks

is that sometimes
the songs will start

as a... a folk song or a ballad.
‐ Yeah.

‐ And then the rhythm section comes in,

and the rhythm section
is thinking something

completely different than that.

‐ And it changes the whole picture fast.
‐ Yeah.

Um, yeah. Well,
you say, you know,

you bring a song in,
you kick it around.

‐ Yeah.

Then if someone gets an idea,
"Why don't we do that?"

Or, "How about this on the drums?"

Or Ringo, like,
on a song like Get Back,

we were just kicking it around
as a little jam‐‐

And then he gets on the drums‐‐

So he's got this little kind of
almost military thing going.

Well, that really then,
"Great. Different."

‐ Absolutely.
‐ As you know. Instead of just‐‐

Yeah.

‐ Then somebody else needs to fill in.

‐ Yeah.

But he was doing‐‐

Made a world of difference.

The rhythm track is flawless.

‐ That's pretty straight country.

‐ That swings.
‐ Yeah.

Me and Ringo
kind of always knew‐‐

You know...
‐ It better be good.

‐ If‐‐ Yeah,
if we don't get this right,

this is going to be
on the record.

We've screwed it.

So it was kind of a little bit scary.

You had to get it.
‐ Yeah.

‐ Early days, particularly,
one of our things was

if the producer doesn't notice
a mistake,

it's not a mistake, you know.

Don't, shh, don't say anything.

You know.

That's the rhythm.

‐ We got it.

‐ Finally.

‐ Who played the guitar on that?

‐ I'm not sure.
‐ Really?

‐ I mean, I'm wanting to say it's me
'cause it's bad enough.

‐ It's a bold choice for you to play that.
‐ Bold mistakes.

‐ That's beautiful.
‐ That's me.

I specialize in bold mistakes.

I mean, that's
the funny thing now

'cause you've got
the opportunity to go back in.

‐ Yeah.
‐ I would've‐‐

Those couple of little licks that I miss,

where you go...

And you can see, I got stuck.
‐ Yeah. Yeah.

‐ You'd go back in and fix that.

‐ Yeah. But maybe
the reasons that this‐‐

‐ But there's kind of an innocence.

Absolutely.

It's real.

‐ It's real, alright.

‐ It adds to the energy
of the track of, like,

"It's so cookin'
that he can barely even play it."

You know what I mean?
Like, it's, it's running away.

‐ Okay. I'll, I'll go
with that explanation.

Okay.

‐ I wish I had you in school.

"No, he didn't make a mistake.
He was just enthusiastic."

Yeah.

Did you ever hear
any of the other music

that was being made
at Abbey Road at the time?

Like, when your session was over,

would you hop around
and hear different stuff?

‐ Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we would.

Floyd came in after us.
‐ Yes.

‐ Pink Floyd, and did a lot
of cool experimental stuff.

This was more Wings period,

but they were next door
making Dark Side Of The Moon.

- Wow.
- And that was pretty cool.

‐ Did you get to hear anything?

Did you listen ever?
‐ Yeah.

The engineers were
quite interchangeable.

‐ Yes.

‐ So an engineer that would work
on their stuff would work on ours,

and he'd, he'd play us some,

some, some of
the Dark Side Of The Moon stuff.

‐ Wow.

A guy who ran our record company

came up to me one day, he said,

"Would you have any interest
in doing a Bond theme," you know.

I said, "Yeah."

So he said, It's Live and Let Die.

And I think he gave me
a copy of the book.

So I read the Ian Fleming book.

‐ Um, on the Saturday,
I think it was.

‐ Yeah.

‐ And on the Sunday,
day after, I wrote the song.

Went to see George Martin.
‐ Yeah.

‐ Started developing it with George.

So, um‐‐

How's it go?

George Martin.

Wow.
‐ This is straight George.

‐ So cool.

‐ Well, it's for a film.
‐ Yeah.

‐ So we could go further.
‐ Yeah. Yeah.

So cool.

‐ Yeah. Completely unexpected.

Because it was in the Caribbean.

‐ Yeah. Great.

So when you wrote it,
it would be like‐‐

‐ All these little
strange little moments.

I love it.
‐ Beautiful.

‐ This is very film‐ic.

‐ Yeah, and it's‐‐ and it's not an ending.
‐ It almost...

‐ You know, it doesn't tell you
something's over.

‐ No.

‐ It kind of tells you
something's starting.

‐ I should have done‐‐

‐ And then it would've been the ending.
‐ That's an ending.

‐ You know, for real.
‐ That would have been the thing.

James Bond comes walking in,
dressed as Charlie Chaplin.

Come on now.

‐ It's just a groove.
‐ Yeah.

‐ Because I'm, I'm just‐‐

‐ It's so good.

‐ I'm just enjoying the little groove.

That's what these kind of records
are all about for me.

‐ And it's interesting
how certain phrases

you can hear over and over again,

and it's interesting
when there are other phrases,

you hear them three times
and you never want to hear it again.

‐ Yeah. Yeah.
‐ Who knows why? Like...

‐ Yeah.

And also, when you make
this kind of recording,

you're just going to keep going
with the "Check my machine" thing

to see if it kind of gets anywhere.

‐ Yeah.
‐ And so in the end,

the story of you trying
to get somewhere

becomes the vocal.
‐ Yeah. Yeah.

It's just like,
"I thought I was going

to just select that bit and that bit."
‐ Yes.

‐ But it's kind of,
it's kind of nice.

‐ It, it develops.

‐ Yeah.
‐ Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like jazz really.

You know, like repeating a‐‐
‐ Yeah.

Phrase.

‐ Yeah, phrase over and over

and, like, finding new ways
to interpret it.

Really interesting.

Good evening and welcome to Slaggers,

featuring Denis O'Bell.

Come on, Ringo, here we go.

Let's hear it for Denis, ha hey.

Good evening.