"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

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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