PAUL MCCARTNEY: "IF THERE WAS ANY GROUP THAT WAS NOT RACIST, IT WAS THE BEATLES”

As well as writing the song ‘Blackbird’, a track which Paul said: “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird,” when writing it, adding: “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”
Paul wrote "Get Back". 

 

And he included the lyrics “don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs” in one of the first iterations of ‘Get Back’ it was written with the right intent in mind. A later version of the song also made a similar reference, with the lyrics: “Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis/ Living in a council flat/ Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is/ Won’t you tell us where you’re at?”. When the bootlegs of the ‘Get Back’ recordings were brought to light, Paul said: “When we were doing Let It Be,” “there were a couple of verses to ‘Get Back’ which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist.”  

He added: “There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever,” continued the singer, highlighting the sensationalist racist headlines that sadly still grace the front of many right-wing papers in 2020. “So in one of the verses of ‘Get Back’, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about ‘too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’ – that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis.”   

Paul McCartney said in 1986: “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles.”