Paul McCartney toured his teenage house, reminisced near Penny Lane and surprised Liverpool pub-goers with a mini-concert during his Tuesday appearance on The Late Late Show‘s Carpool Karaoke.
Host James Corden picked up the singer and immediately launched into the Beatles’ “Drive My Car,” adding actual car honks in place of the song’s “beep beep”s. After noticing they’d arrived at Penny Lane, the mythical street that inspired the Beatles’ 1967 track of the same name, they walked into a small barber shop where photos of McCartney and John Lennon hung on the wall.
Back in the car, Corden teared up while singing “Let It Be,” recalling the first time he heard the 1970 ballad. “I can remember my granddad, who’s a musician, and my dad sitting me down and saying, ‘We’re going to play you the best song you’ve ever heard.’ And I remember them playing me that. If my granddad was here right now, he’d get an absolute kick out of this,” the host said, choking back tears. “He is,” McCartney replied.
The mood lightened when they visited the house where McCartney lived from roughly age 12 to 18. The musician remembered writing music with Lennon in one room while his dad would often watch television nearby. “We’d just written ‘She Loves You,’ which was to be a big Beatles hit,” he recalled. I said, ‘I’ll play it to my dad’ because he was a musician; he played piano … He listened to the whole song and said, ‘It’s very nice. But son, there’s enough of these American-isms around. Couldn’t you sing ‘She loves you/ Yes, yes, yes'”? We went, ‘No.’ We did not heed his advice. Had we have done, who knows what could have happened.”
Back in the car, after pointing out the bathroom (his “acoustic chamber,” where he’d “spend hours with [his] guitar”) and performing a piano rendition of “When I’m Sixty Four,” McCartney harmonized with Corden on “Blackbird” and his newly issued single “Come On to Me” from upcoming LP Egypt Station. For the grand finale, he recruited his longtime live band to perform a small live set at a local pub, surprising patrons with versions of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Love Me Do,” “Back in the U.S.S.R” and “Hey Jude,” with Corden singing on the latter.
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