"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

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry | 1984

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.

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