"Lost" Beatles Interview Details First Meeting of Lennon and McCartney

A Beatles interview from 1964 that was recently unearthed from a film canister in a south London garage aired yesterday on the BBC. In the interview, John Lennon and Paul McCartney discuss how they first met as teenagers. "I was playing at a garden fete in the village where I lived just outside Liverpool, playing with a group, and he came along and we met," said Lennon, while McCartney credits a friend named Ivan with arranging the chance meeting that helped fuse the most successful songwriting duo in rock history.

Lennon and McCartney also discussed how they composed songs together and how they arrived at the famous "Lennon/McCartney" credit. "Normally we sit down and try and bash one out," McCartney said. "But then again, there's no formula, because [John] can come up with one one day completely finished. We still say we both wrote it, though." Despite the damp conditions of the garage, where the canister sat after the interview premiered 44 years ago in Scotland, the audio portion of the nine-minute film was still salvageable. The interview was recorded in the months following the Beatles' triumphant trek to America and their famed Ed Sullivan Show appearance.

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

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