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Paul McCartney: Kanye West is like John Lennon


Sir Paul McCartney found writing with Kanye West similar to working with John Lennon.

The ‘Hey Jude’ singer spent two afternoons penning tracks with the ‘All Day’ rapper and the pair adopted a similar process to that which the 72-year-old musician used when crafting songs with his late Beatles bandmate.

He said: "When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song. It was like that."

Paul was initially reluctant to work with the "controversial" star so made Kanye agree that their efforts would be scrapped if he wasn’t entirely happy with them.

He told The Sun newspaper: "My first thought was, ‘Woah, 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."

The two men got on well as they exchanged a number of stories, and one of Paul’s memories sparked a song, ‘Only One’, in Kanye.

He explained: "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."