Mccartney: I’d have taught if Beatles flopped
Inspired at school, music great would have been ‘not too bad’ as a teacher if band hadn’t taken off
THERE would be no Eleanor Rigby, Yesterday or Hey Jude, but Sir Paul Mccartney has said he would have become an English teacher if The Beatles hadn’t taken off.
Sir Paul credited his own English teacher at school, Alan Durband, for sparking his interest in literature and the arts back in the 1950s.
And he said he wouldn’t have been “too bad” at the job himself. He was responding to a question from presenter John Wilson on the BBC Radio 4 programme This Cultural Life, which airs this evening. Wilson asked Sir Paul how his life would have panned out had he never left Liverpool. “The only thing I was really any good at, or had the qualifications for, was teaching. So I could have taught. And I think I might not have been too bad at it,” he said. “For me, it would have been English. Low level English literature. I’d have to swat up if I was going to get the high level stuff.”
The 79-year-old credited the “brilliant” Durband for introducing him to Chaucer at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Durband had been taught by F R Leavis, the scholar and literary critic, while at Cambridge, and his passion for literature rubbed off on the teenage Mccartney.
“He was great, a very good teacher. And he got me to get interested [in Chaucer] by telling me about The Miller’s Tale. When I read it I thought, ‘This is great, it’s really dirty’. It gave me a lot of respect for Chaucer and then it got me interested in other bits of literature. And I became really interested in going to the Royal Court in Liverpool and watching plays and reading plays, because he’d done the thing that great teachers do,” said Sir Paul.
Prior to being taught by Durband, the musician described himself as “a bit of a skiver” at school. “Teachers were pretty brutal in those days, and they were allowed to whack you, so they did. [But] there was a period where I was getting very near exams; those couple of years I paid attention a bit more,” he said.
Sir Paul left the Liverpool Institute – known by pupils as The Inny – in 1960, having sat A-levels in art and English.
He failed the former and passed the latter, according to biographer Philip Norman. While this would have been enough to get the future knight into teacher training college, his fledgling band decided to go and play music in Hamburg instead. The rest is history.
The musician also reveals that he was an aspiring playwright himself. As teens in Liverpool, he and John Lennon wrote four pages of a play called Pilchard, influenced by the kitchen sink plays of the day.
Ther was dwellynge at Liverpool a band of minstrelles. Wyth lute and moppe toppe, they did song sweete melodies and travell’d wyth biggen crowden all over y weoreld. We will sadly never know what Geoffrey Chaucer would really have made of the Beatles (he preferred the Rolling Stones) but we do know that Sir Paul Mccartney is a fan of his. In an interview, Sir Paul has revealed that if he weren’t a rock star he would have been an English teacher, after his own childhood hero, Mr Durband, instilled in him a life-changing love of Chaucer and other literature. He could easily have chosen another subject. History, perhaps telling youngsters about life Back in the USSR, or geography. Who wouldn’t want to go on a field trip to Strawberry Fields Forever? Music’s gain was pedagogy’s loss.