Sir Paul McCartney has paid tribute to the ability of music to bring together warring factions — and pointed to his own song “Hey Jude” as a perfect example.
During a recent appearance on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, the Beatles legend, 83, answered questions from fans about his songs and said: “Particularly these days, you do something like ‘Hey Jude’ and you see this whole audience singing together.”
He continued: “I mean, in Trump’s America, and the Republicans and Democrats all at each other’s throats — when we do that song, they’re not. They’re all loving it, and it’s like, wow, this is pretty amazing.
“You know, suddenly this room has forgotten all of that, and it’s not, you know, going to argue with each other, they’re just going to sing together. So those kinds of things, I think, are valuable.”
“Hey Jude” was originally released by the Beatles in 1968, and is now a staple of McCartney’s solo live shows.
In a review of McCartney’s 2022 show at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, The Independent described “Hey Jude” as a “unifying singalong.”
Elsewhere in the podcast interview, McCartney explained why he doesn’t take selfies with fans.
Speaking to hosts Richard Osman and Marina Hyde, he said that phones have changed everything when it comes to fan interactions.
“Now – phones. So if I meet someone, they’re reaching for their phone, and I say: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t do pictures.’ And that is radical these days,” he said.
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“I told that to Oprah – I’m name-dropping now – and she said, ‘You don’t do pictures?’ I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to.’ It’s as simple as that.”
As for why he always declines selfie requests, the singer-songwriter said that he doesn’t want to feel like the performing monkey that he sees on the beachfront in Saint-Tropez.
“The minute I start thinking I’m something above myself, I won’t like me. It’s very important for me to just be me,” he explained. “So I say to people: I don’t want to do photos. And they say, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘I’ll tell you what…’ – and I go into this long explanation about how, down on the south coast of France in Saint-Tropez, there’s a man on the beachfront who has a monkey, and you pay to have your photo taken with the monkey.
“I really do not want to feel like that monkey. And when I take a picture with someone, I do feel like him. I’m not me anymore – I’m suddenly something else.”
McCartney’s eighteenth solo studio album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, is set to be released May 29.