Paul McCartney once feared he’d killed an elderly concertgoer with pyro
“I can’t stop the song and go, ‘Cover your ears, love!’”
Paul McCartney. Credit: Don Arnold/Getty
Paul McCartney has recalled the time he feared he’d killed an elderly concertgoer with pyrotechnics.
Though he doesn’t specify the venue or the date, the former Beatles man remembers having a huge pyro setup for Live and let Die – the Bond song he wrote for the 1973 film of the same name – and says he thought a loud noise one night might have proved too much for the OAP.
“It’s a big song for us,” Macca says on a recent episode of his A Life In Lyrics podcast [via The Sun]. “We have pyrotechnics and it can get a little hot up there.
“As we know the explosions are going to happen, we look at the people in the front row and then ‘boom’. It’s great to just watch them and they look at each other and they are just shocked.”
He continues: “In the early days we did it and there was an explosion. “I noticed when we started it there’s like a 90-year-old woman, very old, in the front row. I suddenly go, ‘Oh, shit, we’re gonna kill her’. I can’t stop the song and go, ‘Cover your ears, love.’”
Meanwhile, the final Beatles song, Now and Then, is currently on course to claim the top spot on this week’s chart in the UK.
The track – which has been teased extensively over the past few months – is the final time we’ll ever hear sonic contributions from all four Beatles: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and was brought to life with a little help from AI.
Now and Then was originally written and recorded by John Lennon circa 1977 as a solo piano home demo, but was left unfinished. Recent advantages in AI, however, have enabled the surviving Beatles to put the finishing touches on it some 46 years later.
Its music video was directed by Peter Jackson, the mastermind behind 2021’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary series.
“Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me,” he says. “Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on Now And Then, and gave all that to me.”