Paul McCartney reveals his recurring nightmare
He’s been a household name for 50 years, but Paul McCartney still has the same fears and anxious thoughts about performing as he did back when he first started.
Talking to Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 program during his recent tour of Australia and New Zealand, Macca described the nightmares he’s been experiencing for decades.
“Ever since I started performing there’s like a recurring dream which is, and I still have it to this day, which is you’re in a stadium and you’re playing with The Beatles or with a band and people start leaving and it’s like, ‘OK, what are we doing wrong?’
“And we’re trying to pull out the big one like, ‘Quick, play Hey Jude, quick!’ And they're still leaving. ‘Quick, Long Tall Sally!’ And they’re just drifting away and you wake up in a cold sweat.”
But if you thought he would have grown sick and tired of all our favourite songs after playing them at concert after concert over the last 50 years, think again.
"The funny thing is, particularly these days, it’s like I’m rediscovering them,” he told Sales. “You don’t just sing and think of nothing. So I’m thinking of being in the studio with the guys when we did it.
“I’m thinking of how I wrote it, and on some of them I’m looking at them thinking, “This is a 24-year-old kid who wrote this,’ which happens to be me. I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t bad, it’s pretty good.’
“So that’s what keeps you going. You’re always hearing lines in the songs. Like Eleanor Rigby, ‘The face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ … you go and rediscover it as you go along."
Tell us in the comments below, were you lucky enough to see Macca during his tour at the end of last year? How was it?