Macca on whether McCartney III will be his last album: “When we did Abbey Road I was dead, so everything else is a bonus”

Paul McCartney has laughed away suggestions that his forthcoming solo album McCartney III will be his last.

• READ MORE: “We turned into aggressive, crazy people during Wings”: Paul McCartney

“Everything I do is always supposed to be my last,” McCartney told Loud And Quiet. “When I was 50 – ‘That’s his last tour.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, is it? I don’t think so.’ It’s the rumour mill, but that’s OK.”

“When we did Abbey Road I was dead, so everything else is a bonus,” he added, referring to the infamous ‘Paul is dead’ urban legend.

McCartney III is set to be the musician’s 18th solo album, and was recorded during COVID-19 lockdowns. Although it completes an unofficial trilogy of eponymous records – following 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II – the musician admitted that its creation was “kind of unintentional”.

“I’d just been stockpiling tracks,” McCartney revealed. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of this – I guess I’ll hang onto it,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a McCartney record,’ because I’d played everything and done it in the same manner as McCartney I and II.”

The musician also discussed the “common denominator” between all three of his eponymous albums: sudden free time. McCartney was written after the Beatles broke up; McCartney II came out of a similar situation when Wings broke up. Now, it’s the COVID-19 restrictions that inspired McCartney III.

“It was the pandemic that stopped things,” McCartney explained. “We were due to go on a European tour this year, but very early on Italy got the virus, and gradually all of the other gigs, including Glastonbury, which was going to be the culmination of it, got knocked out.

“So then it was, ‘Ok, well what am I going to do?’ And that’s my fall-back situation – to write and record.”

McCartney III is due out 11 December, watch the trailer for it below.

For more music news, click here.