AM : Do you think you’ve started something of a trend ? Other musicians have turned their hand to classical music like Elvis Costello ; Sting is about to release an album of lute music and Chris Martin from Coldplay has said that when he’s 40 he wants to go college to study classical music.
PAUL : I can sympathise with Chris Martin because when I’d written Eleanor Rigby in the 1960s I was excited by the idea that this wasn’t a band it was actually just string players. For ’Yesterday’, I had a string quartet and George Martin helped me. I’d go round to his house and I’d show him the chords and he would re-voice them for a quartet. In rock’n’roll I would play within one octave, but classical composers in the past would voice it. George would give me little tips on those sorts of things and we’d have fun moments. On ’Yesterday’ George was taking chords down from me and looking at the voicing of them and there was one little bit where I wanted a seventh and George said ’a classical composer wouldn’t do that’ and I said ’all the more reason to do it, stick it in, come on.’ We had nice little experimental moments like that. About the time of Eleanor Rigby I did have this image of myself in a kind of tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and a pencil and some manuscript paper and I thought that’s what I’ll do. That’s what I’ll do when The Beatles runs out.’
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