Paul McCartney: 'The Beatles used to plant false stories in NME'
Collecting his Songwriter's Songwriter award at the NME Awards 2014 with Austin, Texas yesterday (February 26), Sir Paul McCartney confessed on stage to sneaking false stories into NME – including that George Harrison was the cousin of British rocker Billy Fury.
The admission came during a speech in which McCartney shared his memories of reading NME. Sir Paul McCartney said: "Wow, yeah. Thank you. First of all, let's hear it for the NME. Gotta give it up for the NME, man. Well, the NME for me brings back so many memories. It's been going longer than I have. I saw the very first picture of Elvis in the NME. Back page, it was an advert for 'Heartbreak Hotel'. We'd never seen him. We'd heard him, but we'd never seen him. Buddy Holly, I saw all that, the news coming in that he was visiting England. And it was really inspirational for us all because he sang and he wrote the songs and did the solos as well, so it was very inspirational. And then finally we got down to London and got to meet the people on the NME and that was another NME. One of the things we used to like to try and do was to plant a false story in the NME. We actually got in with 'George was Billy Fury's cousin', which he wasn't. Living on the edge, man, you know what I'm saying? Oh yeah! But listen, the great thing about songwriting is we don't know how we do it, so you can't talk about it. Thank you!"
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