Paul McCartney says one musician was a ‘guru, a messiah, what we had been waiting for”

One musician for Paul McCartney was described by the Wings frontman as a “messiah” that budding artists had been waiting for.

The Beatles member shared his thoughts on the veteran performer, who inspired everyone from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, in the Anthology documentary. A new episode of The Beatles’ series will be released on November 26, a week after the Anthology 4 issue. In the first episode of the documentary, which sees McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr recall their earliest music memories, the Let It Be hitmaker drops a few names of influence. But one stood out among them all, with McCartney saying Elvis Presley was “what we had been waiting for.” The songwriter would also dub The King a “guru” of music, whose influence was clear.

He would go on to share Presley was a “good looking” musician, though it was not the music he first noticed. McCartney said: “I remember being in school when I was a kid and somebody had a picture in one of the musical papers of Elvis Presley. I think it was an advert for Heartbreak Hotel. I just looked at it and thought ‘he’s so good looking, he looks perfect.'”

Heartbreak Hotel would release on January 27, 1956, and was a Billboard Top 100 chart topper. The two-minute track would leave a lasting impression on John Lennon, too, with the Imagine hitmaker considering Heartbreak Hotel a “great” alternative to American music of the times.

He told the NME: “We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They always sang like Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about … It took us a long time to work what was going on. To us, it just sounded as a noise that was great.”

It was not just Presley that McCartney was fond of, with the work of Buddy Holly also catching his and Lennon’s eye. McCartney explained briefly that the difference between Holly and the rest of the music scene at the time went beyond his sound and style. He said: “Suddenly here was a rock and roll hero who had glasses.”

The rock hero, like Presley, had a huge influence on McCartney, who says frequent home viewing of whatever was broadcast on BBC television formed part of his musical upbringing. Responding to fan questions on his website, McCartney shared: “Well, in the early days, my idea of what a real musician was came from radio or TV shows.

“As a band, we’d normally be playing in clubs and doing our own thing, not taking ourselves too seriously. Then if we arrived at something like the BBC for a radio show – or more often a TV show – there would be an orchestra that would do the theme tune, and these were the real musicians. These guys could even read music!

“I think once we were working with those kinds of people, and they were liking what we were doing, and I felt like we were playing well, that’s when I started to feel like a real musician myself.”