“Is something special happening?” an American tourist asked, holding her phone aloft as she prepared to snap a photograph of a small queue forming outside Abbey Road Studios. Little did she, or the other tourists gathered to pose on the zebra crossing made famous by the Beatles in 1969, know that, behind the doors of the London studio, Sir Paul McCartney was gearing up to unveil his forthcoming album The Boys of Dungeon Lane to an audience of a few dozen devoted fans (and a select group of journalists).
It marked McCartney’s return home to the studio where the Beatles recorded many of their greatest songs: Please Please Me, Come Together and Strawberry Fields Forever. The 83-year-old, wearing a dark bomber jacket, jeans and trainers, settled on to a stool in front of a bookcase packed with memories. A globe, colourful glass vases and childhood photographs filled the shelves. This set the tone for a rose-tinged event.
The album’s main draw is aided by McCartney’s fellow surviving Beatle. It seems unthinkable that McCartney and Ringo Starr had never properly duetted on a (non-Beatles) song before now. A misty-eyed McCartney introduced Home to Us, an ode to both Starr and their shared hometown of Liverpool (where, despite growing up on “the poor conditions of the housing estate”, they had been happy), on which the pair sing alternating lines. While Starr’s absence at Abbey Road was keenly felt – he now lives in Los Angeles – Home to Us, which sounds like Springsteen meets Sgt. Pepper, will surely be performed live by both men together eventually.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane, named after a street in Liverpool where McCartney used to birdwatch, also features a new, remastered version of Lost Horizon. It’s a bluesy track McCartney superfans had long considered lost to history. “I must’ve [recorded] it on holiday somewhere and forgotten it,” he told the small crowd, who often broke into shouts of “Love you Paul!” before thanking his late recording engineer, Eddie Klein, for helping to rescue it from the vault.
The showcase, also attended by his son, James, featured poignant anecdotes about McCartney’s childhood in Liverpool – meeting George Harrison aboard the school bus as a young boy, then spending bored summers hitch-hiking together to Chester and Wales, desperate for a passer-by to give them a lift (this cheeky activity turned into the wistful new song, Down South). He remembered his late parents, James and Mary, and how they managed to raise a family and live a normal life amid the onslaught of the Second World War, just as people “in Ukraine and Gaza are doing now”.
McCartney looks older, and his voice is slightly frailer – he’s 83, after all. But this showcase offered a tantalising look at what promises to be his most personal work in years.
Home to Us by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will be released on Friday, May 8; The Boys of Dungeon Lane will be released on May 29, via MPL/Capitol Records.