ong before their mop-topped world domination, Paul McCartney and George Harrison went hitchhiking. Paul, being the sensible one, had packed a camping stove and a can of rice pudding. “Ambrosia,” confided McCartney to his interviewer, music producer and Beatles superfan Rick Rubin, who, being American, hid bewilderment at this dismal 63-year-old English tragical mystery tour behind a polite rictus. It was on this road trip that the pair wrote one of their first songs. I imagine George with a little quiff, Paul with the can opener, sitting on a verge outside Widnes whiling away the hours to the next ride by writing Thinking of Linking, a song inspired by a long-defunct firm, Link Furniture, that McCartney has admitted elsewhere, was terrible. Advertisement Rubin must have been wondering how these limey yokels with their canned slop would within a few years mount the most extraordinary reverse cultural takeover of his homeland. It reminded me of the time David Byrne, of Talking Heads, asked an English interviewer: “What are fish fingers? Are they some sort of secret weapon?” In a way they are. Armed with fish fingers, Ambrosia and bravura appropriations of American popular song, England came for your daughters, Uncle Sam, and to a lesser extent your sons. Only six years after Thinking of Linking, the Beatles had the first of 20 US number ones with Love Me Do. McCartney is 79 and Rubin 21 years younger, but the charm of these six amiable half-hour rambles through the Beatle’s songbook (Disney +) arose from the lavishly bearded producer and co-founder of Def Jam Recordings looking like an indulgent patriarch listening to his prodigal son’s improbable adventures. Dear Prudence, McCartney disclosed, was inspired by Mia Farrow’s sister who was in the next chalet at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation course in India. Sgt Pepper got his name because McCartney misheard a roadie on a plane asking him to pass the salt and pepper. There’s a piccolo trumpet on Penny Lane because the night before the Beatles recorded it, he watched a TV broadcast of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Who knew? Probably every Beatlemaniac. Not me. Every cough, spit and used Kleenex of McCartney’s career is now a monetisable part of the public domain. Rubin, at least, managed to look surprised. The conversations took place at a recording studio mixing desk, where Rubin, like God from Genesis who has really let himself go, has created many new sound worlds. Here, Rubin did something more amazing: he showed McCartney new aspects of the Beatles’ creations. Watch this trailer, with Rick Rubin and Paul McCartney. Rubin played back While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Then, by shifting a few levers, Harrison’s serenity was silenced and something unexpected came to prominence in all its glory – McCartney’s superbly grungy bass. It was as miraculous as finding another picture beneath an old master. “It’s almost as though two songs are happening simultaneously,” said Rubin. There was also the obligatory nod at the creative tension between Lennon and McCartney. “I always thought people had very loving families. Everybody was very nice to each other.” Lennon’s broken home was an eye opener for McCartney and, he argued, explained why Cassandra Lennon was always raining on Pollyanna McCartney’s parade. “It’s getting better all the time,” wrote McCartney. “It can’t get no worse,” retorted Lennon. McCartney was most endearing when he tipped the hat to black musicians. In Hamburg, the Fab Four sat at the feet of Little Richard, who told them: “If at first you don’t succeed, you get back up and you try … and you try … and you try it again … except ice-skating, I hate this crap, I quit!” The Beatles learned a lot from the self-styled queen of rock’n’roll, but not, to my mind, how to play with the necessary a wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom. When Paul, Linda and Denny Laine went to Lagos to record the Wings album Band on the Run, McCartney had one of the greatest musical experiences of his life, listening to Fela Kuti play live at the African Shrine club. “It was so incredible that I wept.” Rubin told McCartney he was so into the Beatles that he learned to meditate when he was 14 because they had. McCartney seems touched by that. “A lot of our influences were really good,” he said. “[The Beatles] had a good effect on the world.” True, no doubt, though genial Rubin, like God in the Old Testament, might have flipped at any moment, unleashing a plague of frogs as punishment for the Frog Chorus or Wonderful Christmastime. Thankfully, neither of these plum duffs, nor Mull of Kintyre, sullied this trip down memory lane. For which, Mr Rubin, thank you.