Watch Paul McCartney talk setting fire to a condom on ‘Chicken Shop Date’
To coincide with his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Paul McCartney has appeared on the latest episode of Chicken Shop Date.
The long-running series from Amelia Dimoldenberg, which sees her awkwardly chat with famous faces over fried food in a chicken shop, has welcomed many A-listers over the years, but McCartney is on a different level.
While her guest list boasts names like Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, Jennifer Lawrence, Conan O’Brien, and even Cher, McCartney is a literal Beatle.
For the date, McCartney and Dimoldenberg met at the Temple of Seitan in Camden, with the duo immediately hitting it off as they reminisced about his Glastonbury headline performance in 2022. Unsurprisingly, no chicken was consumed by McCartney, who has been a vegetarian since 1975.
During the light-hearted chat, McCartney admitted that he has “certainly hundreds of guitars”, before adding, “The first one you get is so precious, y’know, that fell apart though. It was so cheap… but it looked kinda good.”
Elsewhere in the quickfire format, McCartney admitted to once setting fire to a condom, recalling, “We were in Hamburg, and it was me and our old drummer, Pete Best. We were rooming together, it was a really dingy, cement walls and everything. It was terrible. We used to cover ourselves with this Union Jack.”
After his mind wandered to his misspent youth in Hamburg, McCartney went “back to the condom”, humorously adding, “As we were leaving, there was really bare walls. But there was a nail on the wall. So, as an act of defiance at these terrible lodgings, Pete had a condom on him, and so, we took it out, and we lit it, pfft! They go up quite well.”
Following a brief chat about tattoos, McCartney reminisced about how he wrote ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles in a dream, which he nonchalantly described as “pretty amazing”.
Other fun-filled moments include the 83-year-old unleashing his best dance moves, including a personal favourite which Macca christened as “back off mate”, as well as attempting to explain his vitamin routine, which Dimoldenberg charactistically shut down for being “boring”.
On a serious note, McCartney gave his number-one gardening tip, “Don’t plant any marijuana seeds, that’s probably a good hint.”
Poignantly, he also answered the big question that everyone wants to know about who his favourite Beatle is/was, sharing, “Well, there’s only one left. Now, currently, it’s Ringo. During The Beatles, I think we all used to look up to John; he was like the leader, even though there wasn’t officially a leader of the group. He was very witty, and he was great to have in the group. I think all of us might have said John.”
McCartney’s appearance on Chicken Shop Date isn’t the only form of relatively new media that he threw himself into this week for promotional purposes; he even did a TikTok Live earlier this week in which he finally admitted The Beatles are the “greatest band ever“.
In a four-star review of McCartney’s new album, Far Out observed, “On one hand, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a good but not great collection of songs, but on the other, also perhaps the best album ever recorded by an 83-year-old?”
It adds, “I’ve always imagined that McCartney must find it odd to be asked every day about things he did 60 years ago, considering how much he’s done since. But as it turns out, what he really wants to talk about was stuff that he did 70 years ago.”
The full episode of Chicken Shop Date is available to watch below.
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