Paul McCartney Compares Kanye West To John Lennon

May 1, 2015

In a move which is sure to fire up Beatles fans and Kanye-haters everywhere, Sir Paul McCartney has said that his experiences working with West were similar to working with his legendary songwriting partner John Lennon.

In a recent interview with The Sun, McCartney discusses what it was like working with West on FourFive Seconds, a collaborative track which also featured Rihanna.

McCartney equates the back-and-forth he and West had to what he and the late Lennon once had.

“When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong until we had a song. It was like that [with Kanye],” McCartney said, before recalling more about his time with Yeezy.

“We sat around and talked an awful lot just to break the ice. One of the stories I told him was about how I happened to have written Let It Be.

“My mum came to me in a dream when she’d died years previously. I was in a bit of a state — it was the sixties and I was overdoing it. In the dream she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine. Just let it be.’ And I woke up and thought ‘Woah’, and wrote the song.

“I told Kanye this and he said, ‘I’m going to write a song with my mum,’ so then I sat down at the piano.”

The song the pair then worked on would turn into West’s Only One (below).

“This is about his mum, and his daughter North comes into the lyrics too,” McCartney said.

On getting involved with Kanye’s work, McCartney said he wasn’t sure what he was getting himself into at first. “My first thought was, ‘Whoa, what am I going to get into here?’

“He is amazingly talented but controversial and can make eccentric moves. I realised if it didn’t work out we’d just say so and shake hands and leave.”

McCartney said he and The Beatles were never afraid of a little outrage, though. “It was like when [The Beatles] got MBEs off the Queen — some people objected. They didn’t like the idea of four scruffs getting the same honour they got.

“They’d say, ‘Oh their hair’s too long.’ We got used to it, we just rode it out.”

McCartney said that when people on social media started either purposefully or mistakenly saying that West had discovered a cool new singer called “Paul McCartney” after the pair started collaborating, it spread his name even further.

“Kids who didn’t know me suddenly did because of Kanye and Rihanna,” McCartney said. After comparing Lennon to Yeezy, the number of McCartney-mad kids might just continue to grow.

Watch: Kanye West – Only One ft. Paul McCartney