Sir Paul McCartney agonises over painful memory behind Yesterday lyric
Sir Paul McCartney has shared the painful memory behind a candid lyric in Beatles song Yesterday - revealing one of the lines refers to a moment when he embarrassed his mum and spent years regretting it
Sir Paul McCartney has shared the painful childhood memory behind the lyrics to Beatles song 'Yesterday'.
The 81-year-old music legend has opened up about how his past inspired his music by revealing a particular line in the band's 1965 classic hit- "I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday" - is actually a reference to a time when he was young when he "embarrassed" his mum Mary and he wishes he'd said sorry before she died.
McCartney explained on his 'A Life in Lyrics' podcast: "Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it. I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum.
"We were out in the backyard and she talked posh. She was of Irish origin and she was a nurse, so she was above street level. So she had something sort of going for her, and she would talk what we thought was a little bit posh.
"And it was a little bit Welshy as well – she had connections, her auntie Dilys was Welsh. I know that she said something like ‘Paul, will you ask him if he’s going' ... "
McCartney explains he then called his mum out over her "posh" accent and has regretted it ever since.
He added: "I went ‘Arsk! Arsk! It’s ask mum.’ And she got a little bit embarrassed. I remember later thinking ‘God, I wish I’d never said that’. And it stuck with me. After she died I thought ‘Oh, I really wish … "
The musician's mum died in 1956 when he was just 14 and he went on to writer 'Yesterday' with bandmate John Lennon a decade later when he was 24.
