When Negative White turned ten years old in 2020, I wrote about our biggest failures. The centre-piece was my interview with Paul McCartney 14 years ago—for more than one reason.
First, I was only 21, highly inexperienced in interviews and journalism, and had no idea how to properly record a phone call. My setup: Connect the phone to a speaker and place a recording device nearby. But back then, technology wasn’t as sophisticated, and it resulted in a terrible echo, which McCartney complained about. Only realising it midway through, I disconnected the speakers.
The second failure came a couple of years later when I formatted my computer’s hard drive. Confident I had saved all critical data, I went ahead only to realise the recordings were gone. Only a small snippet and the published article seemingly remained. And as tragically as it was, it was frankly also a good story to tell.
But then, yesterday, a series of events began to unfold.
On my lunch break, I watched a YouTube video about the comeback of iPods. And I thought: Hmm, my old iPod is still lying around somewhere. It would be fun to charge it up again and have a look around. But obviously, I’ve gotten rid of these horrible 30-pin cables years ago.
Later, I stopped by my brother’s on my way to a concert. Luckily, I just arrived in time as he was about to throw precisely such a cable out. What are the chances?!
Once back home, I plugged in my iPod and let it charge overnight. And this morning, when I satisfyingly scroll-wheeled through its library, I couldn’t believe it: There they were, the Paul McCartney recordings!
I managed to safely pull the files from the iPod (thanks, Reddit!) and have made copies to store in multiple cloud services.
But now, since I always made such a big fuss about this, it’s a good opportunity to publish these recordings in their original state.
A fair warning again: The interview, as well as the sound quality, is pretty bad. In my defence, I was extremely nervous. Yet, McCartney still gave insightful answers, no matter how slapdash the questions were.
Just take it as a fun little time capsule, recorded on March 23, 2012.
