Paul McCartney says he remembers the moment The Beatles had ‘changed the world’

Paul McCartney says he remembers the exact moment The Beatles had “changed the world.”

In his Q&A session, You Gave Me the Answer, the Wings frontman would confirm he can still remember the feeling in the air when the Fab Four became the biggest band on the planet. McCartney shared the “first big success” of The Beatles and what it meant for its members. While he would note a specific stop-off on a tour of the United States, suggesting there was a change in the air, it was not until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that The Beatles could consider themselves a “worldwide” movement. McCartney claimed it was this album with the band that made him think he, along with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, were truly changing the world.

He said: “I suppose it was our first big success in America. I started to realise that the attention was not just local, and it was around the time of Sgt Pepper when we started seeing our clothes and the music we were making getting copied on an international level.

“Although this had happened before at home, with people getting the Beatle haircut and all dressing in a similar fashion, it was around about Sgt Pepper that you could feel the worldwide movement.

“You could feel that people in California were thinking about what you were thinking about. And that’s when people started saying to us, ‘Wow man, you know your music changed my life!’ So, I think around about that time I started to think it was changing the world.”

To show just how in-tune with the world around him McCartney was, the Let It Be hitmaker claims to have written one of the songs featured on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for legendary crooner Frank Sinatra.

He said: “Back then, I wasn’t necessarily looking to be a rock ‘n’ roller.” McCartney would go on to say the rock and roll songs of the time, while “important”, were never quite what he had wanted to do. A hit song by The Beatles was even written for Sinatra to use, or at least in the style McCartney believed he would have wanted.

The Wings frontman recalled: “When I wrote When I’m Sixty Four I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra. I wrote [that] when I was sixteen — it was rather tongue-in-cheek — and I never forgot it.” It’s a song that frequent writing partner John Lennon says he would simply have never written.

He said: “I would never dream of writing a song like that. There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.” The Beatles would not have the best relationship with Sinatra, not initially. The veteran crooner had once denounced the group, which led to one of the band’s biggest songs directly quoting the famed singer.