Sir Paul McCartney explains real reason behind The Beatles’ band name | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV

For more than six decades, The Beatles have served as a wellspring of inspiration for virtually every aspiring band chasing chart success. Their musical prowess, boundless creativity and remarkable knack for producing hit after hit raised the bar for pop excellence to extraordinary new heights.

Yet even the most groundbreaking artists draw influence from somewhere, and in a new interview with BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay, Sir Paul McCartney — the creative powerhouse behind some of the band’s most beloved classics, including Yesterday and Let It Be — has disclosed who first sparked his passion for the guitar, and the little-known origins of The Beatles’ iconic name.

Paul, who had initially learnt to play music-hall standards on his father’s upright piano, recalls how records such as Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula completely transformed his perception of what music could be: “Rock and roll had just arrived and we’d had years of quite ‘square’ music. You didn’t realise it was square till Rock and roll arrived.”

Yet Gene Vincent’s rebellious, leather-clad persona wasn’t the sole influence on the young Paul. He was equally captivated by the altogether more wholesome, pop-driven sound of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly’s group, The Crickets.

And it wasn’t merely The Crickets’ distinctive sound that left its mark on Paul and John Lennon as they set about forming The Beatles — the band’s name itself proved to be a significant source of inspiration.

Paul explained how the group’s name, alongside their straightforward guitar, bass and drums line-up, provided a blueprint for the Beatles: “We thought, ‘That is brilliant. Crickets is like a grasshopper, but the game cricket. So they’ve done this double meaning.’ So we really had a lot of time for them, they’re brilliant.”

Decades later, following Buddy Holly’s tragic death in 1959, Paul encountered the remaining members of The Crickets and revealed how their clever wordplay had sparked the name The Beatles.

To Paul’s considerable astonishment, the Texan musicians informed him the name hadn’t been conceived as wordplay, and they had never encountered a game called cricket.

Ironically, amongst the other insect-inspired names that The Crickets had been mulling over when they established themselves back in 1957, was The Beetles.

During their extensive conversation, Paul told Vernon of his appreciation for a diverse array of music, from Elvis to Prince, though he saved particular acclaim for his former writing-partner, John Lennon.

Paul and John had famously become estranged the start of the 1970s, dissolving the band that had epitomised the Swinging Sixties and exchanging barbs through songs such as How Do You Sleep? and Too Many People.

However, by the close of the Seventies, the duo had reconciled and John’s murder in 1980 affected Paul profoundly. A visibly shell-shocked Paul’s first reaction to the shooting was to say “it’s a drag,” but he later remarked on their reconciled relationship: “I’m so glad because it would have been the worst thing in the world to have this great relationship that then soured and he gets killed, so there was some solace in the fact that we got back together. We were good friends.”

Reflecting on John’s enormous hit Imagine, Paul said: “I just think that song of John’s is magical. and a lot of other people do… I just think it’s a beautiful vision of how the world could be.”