Paul McCartney in concert (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)
On what would’ve been Record Store Day, Paul McCartney has been speaking to BBC Radio 6 Music as they spend the day inviting listeners to acknowledge the delivery workers and retailers who continuing to keep physical music flowing during lockdown.
“Hello music lovers, this is Paul McCartney speaking to you with his voice,” he said on the station. “The song that I would most like to post to the 6 Music listeners is Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent. Now this is the first record I ever bought when I was a kid, and I saved up my pocket money for months, and then I took the bus down-town to the record shop, and I remember going into the back of the shop and listening to the record and loving it.”
“It was just very early days of rock’n’roll, so it was just such a thrill, and then I got back on the bus, went home and played it endlessly, and these memories, of Gene Vincent and The Blue Caps, singing Be-Bop-A-Lula will stay with me forever. And of course what happened later was, when we were in The Beatles, we played in Hamburg, and we played alongside Gene Vincent, who was the big American star topping the bill.”
“So we used to have drinks with Gene and became really quite friendly with him, and who would have thought the day I walked into that record shop and bought is Be-Bop-A-Lula, that I would one day end up hanging with the man himself. Here it is, is Be-Bop-A-Lula, I love it.”