Paul McCartney: Inside the Songs | BBC Radio 4
Paul reads from his new book, The Lyrics (2021).
PAUL: I read an article about a group of male models who were suing one or two photographers because they’d been abused and humiliated by them. Some of the photographers they were talking about I knew. Now, I don’t actually know what they got up to in those particular sessions, but because I’d been photographed by them, I did know that the modus operandi of these photographers was to say, “Come on, baby! Come on, give me all you got!” In other words, they tended to be extremely vulgar. It used to come with the territory. You’d say, “That’s just him.” This was the way some of those guys worked, to get you to not stand there looking boring.
Like people in so many professions — pop stars, cops — they become caricatures of themselves. That’s why I wonder whether some of these models just didn’t understand the murky territory they’d entered. It may also be that the photographers went further and touched the models inappropriately, that I don’t know. The song is fictional.
The song starts off with the photographers saying, “Look into my lens / Give me all you got”. That’s a mild representation of how these photographers worked back in the 60′s and 70′s. Only now, they’d be ten times more vulgar.
I was imagining a “line of bicycles for hire”, and “objects of desire”. But they’re “working for the squire”! In the magazine world, the photographers are a pretty big deal.
“There go the pretty boys / A row of cottages for rent”. I’m imagining little shed you can rent on sea fronts. I’ve come to understand that cottaging* refers to gay sex in a public toilet, but that meaning wasn’t in my mind at the time I wrote the song!
I’ve got this very simple little guitar line, just two fingers on the strings and the other notes are all open. That’s all it is.
“You can look, but you better not touch.” This song focuses on the experience of male models, but it’s the same with female models. Models are used for selling commodities, and I suspect that they’ve also commodified themselves.
It was interesting to put “Pretty Boys” together, as it’s a perspective I don’t often write from. But that’s one of the joys of being a writer: a lot of people might have a similar thought — in this instance about the treatment of models — but don’t have an outlet for it. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to crystallize these thoughts into a song.
The idea of a model being treated like a commodity raises interesting comparisons to The Beatles too. We were musicians, not models, but at the height of Beatlemania, people wanted to put our faces in all manner of things and it felt out of control sometimes. So that was part of the reasoning behind setting up Apple, and then later on in my case MPL. It was a liberation for us, from the men in the suits who’d been in charge before. We no longer had to “work for the squire”! Now we could take control of our own destinies.
[*Note: “Cottaging is a gay slang term, originating from the United Kingdom, referring to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a "cottage"), or cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere. [...] The word "cottage", usually meaning a small, cosy, countryside home, is documented as having been in use during the Victorian era to refer to a public toilet and by the 1960s its use in this sense had become an exclusively homosexual slang term.”]
