The Boys of Dungeon Lane

“There are lots of sort of lovely memories about these places.” Sir Paul mines his childhood for inspiration on some of the most intimate songwriting of his unrivalled career. Paul McCartney has written songs about love, loss, loneliness, attempted murder and countless other characters and topics from his earliest Beatles days. But with The Boys of Dungeon Lane, one of the most prolific and influential rockers of all time gets intimately specific: He mines his stomping grounds and family photos for inspiration—including the street where a pair of bullies mugged him a few blocks down from his childhood home in Liverpool. “When I say ‘the boys of Dungeon Lane’, I’m thinking of those two boys,” McCartney tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. In the softly strummed and sepia-toned “Days We Left Behind”, the “Liverpool scallies” who stole the young McCartney’s watch make an appearance, but so do memories invoking George Harrison and John Lennon, who he met as a teenager and wrote his first songs with at his house on Forthlin Road. While love songs like “We Two” and “Never Know” are very much anchored in the current moment, others stand out for their historical significance. “Lost Horizon” is a track that McCartney had shoved in a drawer and forgotten about. “Home to Us” is a jovial reunion with Ringo Starr (and their first duet since The Beatles disbanded). All of them strike a rare retrospective tone for Sir Paul: He has written about the loves of his life and family before, but never in such intimate, autobiographical detail. Below, McCartney takes us through a few tracks off The Boys of Dungeon Lane. “Days We Left Behind” “I started off with a little piano riff; we played it on guitar in the end, but I thought, ‘That’s nice, I like that. That’s an intro. There’s good notes.’ Then I got into photos, this idea of looking back. It should have been ‘looking back at black-and-white reminders of my past’, but I switched it to ‘white and black reminders of my past,’ and that fell into place. Then you go, okay, what am I thinking of? ‘Smoky bars, cheap guitars.’ My first guitar was a Rosetti Lucky 7 that I bought in Liverpool. When I got it to Hamburg, it broke, the crappy little thing. There are lots of sort of lovely memories about these places.” “Lost Horizon” “Eddie Klein was a tech guy at Abbey Road. He came to build my studio when I got my own studio. We were working on something and he was changing things from an old format to a newer format. He said, ‘Do you remember that “Lost Horizon”?’ And I said, ‘Uh, what? No?’ And he said, ‘It’s pretty good. So let’s play it.’ So what I liked about it, it was finished. From A to Z, it was all there—lyrics, tune, bridge. I just forgot it. It’s on a cassette, and I’ve just been doing other stuff on the cassette, and that one, it just got in a crack somewhere. Eddie thought it was good, it was good.” “Home to Us” “I came from a place called Speke, and [Ringo] came from a place called Dingle, and it was poor living. Nobody had any money, and the houses were pretty rough, but we didn’t know any better, and it was cool. We had friends, we had mates, we had uncles and aunties and all that stuff. You were on that level and you enjoyed it, you know. I knew that Ringo had been through that like I’d been through it, so the song says, ‘It might have been a bit rough where we live, but it was home to us.’ So we have the first Paul and Ringo duet. I’m really glad we did it. Once it became a duet, I thought that’s a great thing. After all that time we’ve known each other, it’s another gift.” “Salesman Saint” “During World War II, my dad was a fireman in Liverpool, and they were sending these firebombs down. My mum was a nurse. So they were going through it, fearing for their lives every day, pretty much. I can’t imagine what that’s like; I don’t think our generation can. How can you keep positive with all that going on? A lot of people didn’t, of course. But my mum and dad did, so I always give them credit in my own mind for finding a way through that.”