There was no mention of artificial intelligence Thursday at Tribeca Festival’s Paul McCartney talk with Conan O’Brien.
Instead of going into further detail about his recent plans to use AI technology to extricate the vocals of his former bandmate, John Lennon, from an old demo to create a final Beatles record, McCartney took a trip down memory lane with O’Brien.
During the hourlong entry in the Tribeca fest’s “Storytellers” series, O’Brien displayed various photos from McCartney’s new book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which the singer-songwriter described in detail.
“It’s so lovely for me to see these memories and just remind me of where we were, what we did in those days,” McCartney said.
The book features 275 largely unseen photographs shot by McCartney, taken between the end of 1963 through early 1964, when The Beatles became an international sensation. McCartney thought he had lost the photos until recently, when Sarah Brown, a photo archivist in London, found them.
“What I love about (the photos) is the innocence,” McCartney told the crowd at Tribeca’s Performing Arts Center. “We didn’t know we were going to (become) famous. We really wanted to be (famous), but we didn’t know.”
Candid photos of Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were displayed during the conversation, which was recorded for a future episode of O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
In one image, Lennon is sitting in the backseat of a car wearing thick-lensed glasses. When O’Brien suggested that Lennon looked anxious and vulnerable, McCartney said, “I don’t know about the anxiety, but the vulnerability is very true.”
“(John) had a really tragic life,” McCartney said. “As a kid, his mother was decreed to not be good enough to bring him up…His father had left the home when John was three. So that’s not too wonderful. John grew up with these sort of little minor tragedies through his life… It made me realize why he had that vulnerability. I always admired the way he dealt with it because I’m not sure I would deal with the stuff he went through that well.”
A picture of the band on a flight to New York City just prior to their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 was also featured during the talk.
“We were very excited just to be on the plane to New York,” McCartney said. “But what happened was the pilot’s radio ahead to Idlewild Airport, as it was called then, and they got word back to us that there was a big crowd (waiting for us). So we kind of half knew what to expect. But then it was a really big crowd and we were just bowled over. It was nice. Immediately after, we did a press conference at the airport, and we knew that whatever they laid on us, if there was any sort of insult, we knew we could come back with, ‘Well, we are number one in your country.’”
“That’s called a mic drop,” O’Brien quipped.
Photos of Harrison enjoying Miami, Starr getting ready for the Ed Sullivan appearance, and everyday people admiring the band were also discussed by McCartney.
On June 13, in an interview with the BBC, McCartney said that the Beatles will release their last record with the help of AI. The song – which he did not identify, but which many fans believe to be the 1978 Lennon song “Now and Then” – will be released this year.
McCartney is currently filming a documentary, Man on the Run, directed by Oscar and Grammy winner Morgan Neville, about his creative output in the decade after he left The Beatles.
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