Paul McCartney reveals why he set fire to a condom with ex-Beatles bandmate
Paul McCartney has had one of the most decorated careers in music history, but even legends have an origin story, and his involves getting arrested in Germany for burning a condom off a wall.
Sir Paul appeared on Chicken Shop Date with host Amelia Dimoldenberg on Friday, May 29, and inevitably, the conversation took an odd turn.
The 82-year-old was in typically good form, chatting about his new album and his early days on the road, before dropping a story that probably wasn't in the Beatles' official press pack.
The incident happened in the early 1960s, when McCartney and then-Beatles drummer Pete Best were living in genuinely grim conditions in Hamburg, a run-down cinema called the Bambi Kino, where the band were bunking in unventilated back rooms that hadn't been cleaned since the place actually functioned as a theatre.
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As an act of defiance on their way out, Best produced a condom, nailed it to the wall, and the two of them set it alight.
"We were rooming together. It was really dingy, cement walls. It was terrible," McCartney told Dimoldenberg. "So as we were leaving… there was a nail on this 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."
He then turned to Dimoldenberg with full sincerity and said: "You haven't burned a condom? Amelia, you haven't lived 'til you've burned a condom."
Why Paul McCartney went to jail in Hamburg
The cinema, and the Hamburg club the Beatles were playing at the time, the Kaiserkeller, were both owned by a promoter named Bruno Koschmider. He was not amused. According to the 1998 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles, the condom didn't burn for long, but it burned long enough for Koschmider to report McCartney and Best for attempted arson.
The pair spent three hours in a local jail before being deported back to England.
Best, now 84, went on to be dismissed by the Beatles in 1962, replaced by Ringo Starr, making the Hamburg era one of the last chapters of his time with the band.
The Chicken Shop Date appearance came off the back of McCartney releasing The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his first album in over five years. The record is largely inspired by his Liverpool childhood, his late parents, and those early adventures with John Lennon and George Harrison, the same era that produced the Hamburg condom incident.
"People say, 'Well, why do you still write songs?' And it's just because I love it. I'm addicted," he told the New York Times. "Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it's so great, the feeling."
Thomas Bamford