Paul McCartney names his favourite song by The Beatles: “It’s so insane”
With a catalogue of over 1,000 songs, asking Paul McCartney to pick a favourite is borderline cruel. It’s also impossible—each track is inseparably tied to the personal memories and context that shaped it, forever linked to the musician’s emotions and experiences. Sometimes, that makes his feelings toward a song tender or even devastating. But in the case of this track—one that always stands out as a favourite—it mostly just reminds him of a good laugh.
Being asked for his favourite Beatles track is, somewhat predictably, McCartney’s least favourite question. “I’m often asked what my favourite song I’ve ever written is, and I don’t ever really want to; I can’t answer it,” he said on Paul McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. But throughout his career, he has given some answers, revealing a kind of best-of-the-best playlist.
“If pushed, I would go to ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’,” he said as his most honest and sincere answer, regularly picking out the sweet little love song as one of his finest. However, his love for that track comes down to real merit and belief in its artistic value. One of his other favourites simply comes down to good memories, good laughs and good friends.
“John had arrived one night with this song, which was basically a mantra: ‘You know my name, look up the number’,” McCartney recalled. Sometime in the late 1960s, Lennon showed up at his bandmate’s house, high as a kite or, in McCartney’s words, “In space-cadet mode”. But through the haze, he was chanting that phrase over and over.
It’s a perfect example of the way friendship powered the band in those days. The story of the song that became ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’ is basically a classic case of a good old-fashioned inside joke. An intoxicated Lennon saw the phrase in a phone book and came steaming around to McCartney’s home. Suddenly, the silly yet suave phrase became a joke between them that just kept being taken further and further.
It was taken as far as the EMI studio. “That was a piece of unfinished music that I turned into a comedy record with Paul,” Lennon recalled, adding, “It was going to be a Four Tops kind of song – the chord changes are like that – but it never developed, and we made a joke of it.” But as the laughs kept going as they tried to figure out this silly song, they even called in more friends to get involved.
“Brian Jones is playing saxophone on it,” Lennon said. But in McCartney’s memory, that made it even funnier. “I naturally thought he’d bring a guitar along to a Beatles session and maybe chung along and do some nice rhythm guitar or a little bit of electric twelve-string or something, but to our surprise, he brought his saxophone,” he remembered. So suddenly, not only is this essentially an inside joke set to music, but they’ve just been pranked by a Rolling Stone now pivoting to woodwind.
As expected, with all that going on, the song next really got finished off or polished up. But as a reminder of all those laughs, it’s forever existed as one of McCartney’s favourite tracks. “It’s so insane. All the memories,” he said sentimentally, “I mean, what would you do if a guy like John Lennon turned up at the studio and said, ‘I’ve got a new song’. I said, ‘What’s the words?’ and he replied ‘You know my name look up the number’. I asked, ‘What’s the rest of it?’ ‘No, no other words, those are the words. And I want to do it like a mantra!’”
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