Paul McCartney Learned a Performance Trick From Little Richard That He Keep Use to This Day

By editorial board on June 7, 2022

Paul McCartney on Little Richard, “I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style, and he knew it”

Paul McCartney has posted his tribute to Little Richard this morning. The Beatles opened for Richard in Hamburg in 1962. Billy Preston was a teenager who came with Richard in his band. That’s how Billy met the Fab Four. Seven years later he’d be on a rooftop in London with them making history. In the interim, the Beatles immediately recorded “Long Tall Sally.” So many of John and Paul’s vocal stylings were influenced by Richard’s shrieks and woops.

Paul writes:
‘From ‘Tutti Frutti’ to ‘Long Tall Sally’ to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ to ‘Lucille’, Little Richard came screaming into my life when I was a teenager. I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style; and he knew it. He would say, “I taught Paul everything he knows”.

I had to admit he was right. In the early days of The Beatles we played with Richard in Hamburg and got to know him.

He would let us hang out in his dressing room and we were witness to his pre-show rituals, with his head under a towel over a bowl of steaming hot water he would suddenly lift his head up to the mirror and say, “I can’t help it cos I’m so beautiful”. And he was. A great man with a lovely sense of humour and someone who will be missed by the rock and roll community and many more. I thank him for all he taught me and the kindness he showed by letting me be his friend. Goodbye Richard and a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop.’

McCartney revealed in 2017 that he’d adopted Little Richard’s pre-show ritual as his own, and continued to do it throughout the decades. “I do like a steaming before I go on, which I was told was probably the best thing to clear your larynx,” he said. “I was taught that by watching Little Richard do it when we were kids in Hamburg. He used to do it before he went on.”

 

Paul McCartney has written 22 new songs for the musical It’s A Wonderful Life. He said that in an interview with American actor Alan Alda. McCartney assumes that not all songs will be used

Producer Bill Kenwright invited Macca to write the music for the play, which is based on the film classic of the same name from the nineteen forties. The script comes from Lee Hall, known from the movie/musical Billy Elliot, among others.

" I got the script and, I think I was on an airplane, reading it and I thought ‘I can see this, I love this, wow!’ And he (Lee Hall) put in a dummy lyric, with a little disclaimer saying ‘I’ve put in some dummy lyrics, but feel free to change them’.

So, I liked it, and I just left it and I thought ‘you know what? I’m getting intrigued by this’. And then one day when I was on holiday in the Summer, I had a piano, I just had the script and those dummy lyrics, and I thought ‘Okay, I am gonna throw something at this, just for a laugh. If it’s terrible, no one will know, only me’.

 

McCartney said he'd never considered writing a musical, but after meeting Kenwright and Hall three years ago,  “Like many of these things, this all started with an email,” McCartney said. “Bill had asked if it was something I might be up for. Writing a musical is not something that had ever really appealed to me, but Bill and I met up with Lee Hall and had a chat and I found myself thinking this could be interesting and fun.”

 

McCartney already has form in writing seasonal hits – Wonderful Christmastime reached No 6 in 1979 in the UK, and he recorded his version of The Christmas Song, popularised by Nat King Cole, in 2012 – but hasn’t commented on the songs being written for It’s a Wonderful Life.

 

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