Inside Abbey Road: Paul McCartney plays new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane for a tiny audience of fans

You could hear Paul McCartney before you saw him. Voices from the control room echoed down the corridor and, once phones were locked away in a foosball‑table of small cubbies, about 50 people were shepherded into Studio Two to wait. When he finally descended the stairs he did not take a stage so much as a sofa: McCartney sat in a living‑room vignette of framed photos, records and a street sign that read the album title. It felt like eavesdropping on someone flipping through an old shoebox.

“Hello, welcome to Abbey Road,” he said, settling in. “I’m going to play the new album for you and try and think of stuff to say about it.” For the next 90 minutes he did exactly that — told stories, played snippets on acoustic guitar, mouthed along to parts, banged on an imaginary drum when Ringo’s kick came in. It was relaxed, chatty, and occasionally very funny, but also tilted toward the emotional: McCartney circling the past again and again, not as a gimmick but as the field of reference that supplies his songs.

He called many of the tracks “memory songs”. Onstage — or rather, in that studio that has felt like a cathedral for pop music — McCartney traced the origins of several pieces. “Down South” arrived as an acoustic tale about hitchhiking with George Harrison: McCartney imitated a Liverpudlian drawl, described a milk‑float ride where Harrison sat on the battery and singed his zip, and then laughed at the unreliability of recollection.

Memories are a weird thing.

There were sharper moments too. “Days We Left Behind”, the lead single, carries a reference to John Lennon and McCartney admitted he still gets emotional talking about him. “Home To Us” is a working‑class Liverpool hymn — the three of them raised in tough neighborhoods — and it’s the small domestic details that land. Ringo Starr plays drums and trades vocals with McCartney on that track; McCartney told the room about a brief mixup where Ringo recorded a drum part at producer Andrew Watt’s Los Angeles studio and thought it had gone unused. McCartney said he played the part back, found it “very Ringo”, finished the track and sent it to Ringo. At first Starr only returned chorus vocals; after a conversation the pair stitched together what McCartney called the first proper Paul‑Ringo duet.

There are surprises beyond the Beatles throughlines. “Salesman Saint” is reportedly the first song McCartney has written about his parents, a balm to the idea of persevering through hard times. “Mountaintop” leans into a hippy‑mood he says was inspired by Glastonbury. “Ripples In A Pond” is plainly for Nancy, tender without gloss. And on “Life Can Be Hard” he picked up a guitar in the middle of the room to play the main sequence — then admitted, grinning, “I haven’t been practising. You’d think if you knew you were doing this, then you’d have practised. But I don’t care!” — after hitting a bum note.

The atmosphere mattered as much as the songs. People craned forward when he leaned into a story, laughed at his self‑mocking, and applauded at the right moments, the small crowd keenly aware they were hearing pieces of a life arranged into music. There’s a deliberately domestic quality to the event: McCartney on a sofa, the record spinning in his head and, for a moment, in your ears.

The Boys Of Dungeon Lane arrives May 29, produced by Watt in sessions split between Los Angeles and East Sussex. Hours after the Abbey Road playback there was another headline: McCartney was announced as a guest on The Rolling Stones’ upcoming record Foreign Tongues, a follow‑up to his cameo on their last album Hackney Diamonds. For now, though, the focus was on the new songs and the small, odd joy of hearing an old songwriter dig through the past and find new ways to turn memory into melody.