During an interview in 2018, Paul was in Liverpool and spoke about returning to the city, his memories of growing up there, The Beatles‘ childhood homes, and The Cavern Club, among other things.
“It’s great for me going back to Liverpool, going back to my childhood places,” Paul says. “I always drive myself around, and I’ll drive people on a route which was my bus route from school, one from Speke and one from Allerton. Whoever’s in the car gets the tourist trip past my old house, which is now a National Trust thing, and I’ll go, ‘There’s my bedroom there, that was the alleyway round the back that we called The Jigger,’ and all these things come flooding back. So that’s what it was like at The Cavern. It makes you play better, I think, being back in a little club like that, inches from your audience. It reminds you of how it was.”
Regarding the original Cavern—the one that was destroyed in 1973 to make way for a railway line—Paul said:
“That’s the only trouble with The Cavern, that it isn’t the original Cavern,” says Paul. “We have to pretend it is, you know. To me, I hear that next door is buried in rubble and I want an archaeological dig. Come on, if you can dig the pyramids up, you’ve got to be able to dig The Cavern up. The bank above it might fall in, but you know! When we heard it had been filled in to make a parking lot, that was Joni Mitchell’s ‘Yellow Taxi’ song come true.”
Regarding the 1968 track ‘Helter Skelter’—a song that many claim is the first heavy metal song ever—Paul commented the following:
“No! I’ve never claimed it, you know. People said it, but, if you think about it, it was near the start of heavy metal, and it was us trying to be heavy. I’d heard [The Who’s] Pete Townshend saying they’d done the dirtiest, filthiest record ever, so we were trying to out-filth The Who. So if that communicated itself, there might have been some little guy living up in Rotherham thinking, Aye, we’ll have a group, we’ll just do that.”
Regarding the continuation of his career, Paul stated:
“That’s the bit that I never remember,” he says. “Putting yourself on the line. I always forget. It’s like women having babies. They go through this terrible, terrible pain, then they go, ‘Let’s have another one, love’. It’s like they’ve forgotten. And it’s a bit like that with me. I’ve had 17 solo babies (records) and I still want another one. I like what I do and I always did. It’s a process I enjoy and I kind of forget that there’s going to be an end product, because I’m too excited and wrapped up in something, playing a guitar riff, making up a nice little phrase on the guitar. I’m just involved in that, and you get blind to the thing that at the end of this road there’s going to be an exam. So you have to just push that aside and think sod it, it doesn’t matter. I’m really writing for the people who like what I do, and that includes me. So I think, OK, that’s pretty cool, you’re still pulling the rabbit out of the hat.”
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