To mark Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday (on 18 June), his childhood home in Liverpool will be opened up to young musicians who will perform special shows there.
His brother, Mike, is helping shortlist the acts who will get to play there and he says he hopes that “some of the magic rubs off on them”. Mike also took the photo of a young Paul playing guitar in the back garden of the house that subsequently graced the cover of Paul’s Chaos & Creation In The Backyard album in 2005.
The house, at 20 Forthlin Road, was acquired by the National Trust in 1995 and was where the McCartney family lived between 1955 and 1963, just as The Beatles were taking off. He and John Lennon wrote a number of their earliest songs there.
The National Trust also owns the house Lennon grew up in, at 251 Menlove Avenue, and offers combined tours to see both properties.
The National Trust says that it is opening the house to new musicians in the hope that being in the same place the nascent songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney cut their teeth will “spark creativity”.
Mike McCartney told the BBC that the humble house shows that “from nothing, you can create something special”.
He added, “If that can be shared with anybody, particularly young people, particularly if they have got nothing and they come there and see they can do something from nothing like we did, then I will be even prouder.”
Paul returned to the house as part of Carpool Karaoke on The Late Late Show With James Corden in 2018, saying he had not been back since he lived there.
The National Trust says that the planned Forthlin Sessions will see unsigned acts apply online and a number of them will be shortlisted to write a new song to commemorate McCartney’s birthday and then perform it in the house. Applications will close on 30 April. The original idea for the sessions came from musician and producer Alan Boyd.
“From a family home to the front room of music history, 20 Forthlin Road has left a unique legacy,” says the National Trust on its site. “60 years on from the release of the Beatles' first single, ‘Love Me Do’ and in the year of Sir Paul McCartney's 80th birthday, let's come together to celebrate the remarkable story of this ordinary, extraordinary house.”
The winning musicians will perform in the house on 17 June and it will be livestreamed on YouTube.
The homes of pop stars have a powerful draw for fans, where they can fix their intangible ideas about these creative people to a tangible location. They become shrines to careers and take on semi-religious resonance for many.
The McCartney/Lennon houses are part of a wide-reaching Beatles industry in and around Liverpool and, while they do draw significant numbers of tourists and fans each year, this is nowhere near the scale of Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.
Like Elvis, it is often when artists die that their homes take on a whole new symbolism and become, in a way, a proxy for the deceased artist. We can see that with Paisley Park as well as the Handel & Hendrix In London house.
People are drawn to where creative people lived and worked, but it is often after they are gone.
Opening up Paul McCartney’s house in this way – and while he is still alive to see it being used as a springboard for future creativity and art – may be the exception here, but that does not make it any less powerful or poignant.
