Katya’s Reviews > The Lyrics > Status Update

When John and I hitchhiked to Paris in 1961, we went to a café on the Left Bank, and the waitress was older than us - easy, since John was turning twenty-one and I was nearly twenty. She poured us two glasses of vin ordinaire, and we noticed she had hair under her arms, which was shocking: 'Oh my God, look at that; she's got hair under her arms!' (...)You had to be a real beatnik. It's such a clear memory for me.

There were a couple of kinds of machines I was thinking of. The computer was one. They said recording would be sped up massively with computers, but The Beatles would have done two songs by the time you got the computer up and running.

in [Lennon] he recognised a partner whose name might one day be paired with his as Gilbert was paired with Sullivan, and Rodgers with Hammerstein. He acknowledges that the interplay of Lennon and McCartney was 'nothing short of miraculous', describing how they 'wrote with two guitars'. 'The joy of that was that I was left-handed and he was right-handed, so I was looking in a mirror and he was looking in a mirror.'