Paul McCartney Claims The Beatles "Weren't That Good"

The Beatles are, for more, the best pop group ever to have lived. I love their early stuff, their late stuff, and even those Ringo Starr songs that appear on every album. In short, I don’t think they’ll ever be beaten in terms of a back catalog of songs and albums that remain timeless.

However, Paul McCartney doesn’t actually think The Beatles were any good. At least when they started out. He’s clearly referring to the very early days, even before they departed for Hamburg where he thinks they truly learned their craft.

According to Digital Spy, in an interview with XFM due to be aired from November 16, McCartney speaks about being turned down by Decca, gaining audiences in Germany, and then coming back to the U.K. better prepared than when they left. He says:

“We obviously weren’t that good. We were formulating it all. You wouldn’t have thought we were that great. You’d have turned us down if you were a record company. And they did – Decca turned us down!”

“When we first went to Hamburg, there’d be no-one in the club. You’d see a couple of students, maybe a guy and his girlfriend, and they’d look in a bit tentatively, look up at the price of the beer, see it was too much and start walking out. So we’d go, ‘Come on, everybody, get back in here! It’s all happening!’ So we’d learned to attract an audience. After a few weeks, we’d be really packing those clubs. It taught us that game of how to win over an audience.”

“We learned loads of songs, so by the time we got back to England, we had quite a big repertoire.”

Maybe he has a point. I’m just glad The Beatles found their mojo and went onto record the albums they did. They took the British music scene to foreign shores and paved the way for so many artists who followed.

[Photo Source: Amazon.co.uk]