Collecting his Songwriter’s Songwriter award at the NME Awards 2014 with Austin, Texas yesterday (February 26), Sir Paul McCartney confessed on stage to sneaking false stories into NME – including that George Harrison was the cousin of British rocker Billy Fury.
The admission came during a speech in which McCartney shared his memories of reading NME. Click above to watch the full speech.
Sir Paul McCartney said: “Wow, yeah. Thank you. First of all, let’s hear it for the NME. Gotta give it up for the NME, man. Well, the NME for me brings back so many memories. It’s been going longer than I have. I saw the very first picture of Elvis in the NME. Back page, it was an advert for ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. We’d never seen him. We’d heard him, but we’d never seen him. Buddy Holly, I saw all that, the news coming in that he was visiting England. And it was really inspirational for us all because he sang and he wrote the songs and did the solos as well, so it was very inspirational. And then finally we got down to London and got to meet the people on the NME and that was another NME. One of the things we used to like to try and do was to plant a false story in the NME. We actually got in with ‘George was Billy Fury’s cousin’, which he wasn’t. Living on the edge, man, you know what I’m saying? Oh yeah! But listen, the great thing about songwriting is we don’t know how we do it, so you can’t talk about it. Thank you!”
Arctic Monkeys dominated the NME Awards 2014 with Austin, Texas, picking up five awards including Best British Band, Best Live Band and Best Album for ‘AM’.
Other big winners at last night’s ceremony included Damon Albarn, Lily Allen and Haim. Performances came from The Horrors, Drenge and Metronomy, who opened the show by performing ‘Love Letters’ accompanied by MKS. Belle & Sebastian played ‘I Want The World To Stop’ and ‘The Boy With The Arab Strap’ on collecting their Outstanding Contribution To Music award.