A favourite The Beatles origin theory
Paul McCartney is doing media interviews, promoting his new album that contains songs about his formative years. As yet, I've not heard him repeat a favourite theory about The Beatles' origins.
Arthur Donald, Paul McCartney’s eldest grandson, wrote the 2021 essay, “From Liverpool to Queens, New York: A Social History of a British Musical Journey, 1942-1965”.
It explains, according to McCartney, that the nationalisation of the bus system in the Transport Act 1947 created the conditions that made The Beatles possible.
Subsidised public infrastructure lowers the social and economic friction required for cultural innovation to emerge. The Beatles were one emergent outcome of that environment.
McCartney talking to Samira Ahmed, November 2021:
”… he was doing an essay for his final thesis at university and he wanted to look into the Cultural Revolution in Britain. So we sat down and I was talking to him about Liverpool.
“Yeah, well so we started talking and every story I told him… I met George on a bus, I first saw John on a bus, George auditioned on a bus, we went across town to find this guy who knew B7 (chord) on a bus. Penny Lane was the bus depot.
“So, yeah, there are millions of stories about buses and then he very cleverly, I thought, looked up why the bus system was so good and after the war, World War ll, there had been the Transport Act. So, he researched it, found, I can’t remember it but like (then Transport Minister) Herbert Morrison did the Transport Act so that gave us this great bus system so in Liverpool you could go anywhere.
“If I was visiting John I could go from my place in Forthlin Road to Penny Lane change and go up to his place in Menlove Avenue… and you know school and all of this there was this amazing system that I didn’t realise we were kind of the first generation to benefit from that and also there was The Education Act.
“That meant that kids like me from not very well off homes could go to very posh schools and I think the idea that he puts forward in his essay is that this gave everyone over Britain this opportunity to be more mobile and more educated and that was a big factor in the Cultural Revolution.”
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See also
Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney to talk about the 2026 album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. But there’s no mention of buses, as far as I can tell (I only skimmed it).
Samira Ahmed talking to Paul McCartney, November 2021, at The Royal Festival Hall
Margaret Thatcher’s government deregulated Liverpool/Merseyside buses in October 1986, paving the way for their later privatisation. Under privatisation, fares became more expensive and routes were removed, as profit was placed before passengers and the notion of public service for the benefit of all was eroded.
In the final years of the Thatcher government, Fatima Mansions’ Cathal Coughlan turned an apocryphal Thatcher quote denigrating public transport users into: “Only Losers Take The Bus” (1989). Some say (ok, I say) it’s probably a comment on a culture saturated in her anti-public ideology, where success is a car and lots of money; privatised and individualised.