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The best day Paul McCartney ever had with George Harrison: “We were kids”
Paulina Subia
Tue 9 December 2025
Before The Beatles became the Fab Four, revolutionising popular music forever, they were just school kids in Liverpool, absorbing all the rock music they could find and picking up their instruments for the first time.
Paul McCartney and George Harrison met, naturally, on the school bus. Both recognised a shared love of music: Harrison said that he played the guitar and learned that McCartney, a trumpet player, was going to pick up the guitar, too. They also found a mutual appreciation of the British ‘King of Skiffle’, singer-songwriter Lonnie Donegan, whom the two realised they’d both seen at Liverpool Empire, the same night, before they met.
McCartney invited Harrison to his house to learn the chords to ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy O’, and the two became bonded for life, solidified when McCartney brought along Harrison to audition for John Lennon’s group, The Quarrymen. McCartney vouched for his friend to a sceptical Lennon, who was unsure due to Harrison’s age, and Harrison’s guitar skills proved stronger. As they say, the rest is rock ‘n’ roll history.
While the bond between McCartney and Harrison would fray as the former’s with Lennon grew stronger, creative tensions posing a frustration to Harrison, the two would slowly reconcile, albeit not quite the same as before, when they were two kids, practising guitar chords in McCartney’s home.
But it is moments such as these that remain in McCartney’s mind all these years later, looking back on his memories with Harrison, who passed away from lung cancer in 2001. In the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World, McCartney reminisces on his “best times with George”, thinking back to a hitchhiking trip the pair took to Wales in the summer of 1959.
“We hitchhiked to a place in Wales called Harlech; we were kids, before The Beatles,” McCartney remembers. “We’d heard a song, ‘Men of Harlech’, and saw the signpost, and said, ‘Yeah!’ There was a big castle, and we just went there.”
The two young musicians, with little plan outside of sheer curiosity, roamed Harlech and met a cast of characters along the way. “We had our guitars [and] took them everywhere,” McCartney says. “We ended up in this cafe; we’d try and go to a central meeting place… they had a jukebox, so this was ‘home’. So we sat around there, we met a guy, and he started talking. He was into rock ‘n’ roll, and we went and stayed at his house, so it was great! Me and George, top-and-tailing it in a bed.”
The pair would stay at the man’s mother’s bed-and-breakfast, where, as McCartney remembers, they forgot to pay. Years later, they received a letter from the woman requesting payment, now that they were “famous and rich,” in McCartney’s words.
“We said, ‘Oh, sorry!’” McCartney says and, mimicking the writing of a letter, responded, “‘Here, with payment.’” McCartney continues to remember the kindness of everyone he and Harrison crossed paths with. “We just had so many laughs with these Welsh guys,” he recalls. “We sat in with their band, one drunken night in a Welsh pub.”
As McCartney reflects, the bed-and-breakfast was unlike anywhere they had been before. Going from their estate in Liverpool, Wales, was another world of surprises. “Now, we were in the country, Wales, and there were these spiders, daddy longlegs, in the room,” McCartney remembers with a mock-scared gasp.
Adding, “‘The menace, the spiders!’ So, me, George, or both of us, took a rolled-up newspaper and got them. Then we could sleep safely. We went down to breakfast the next morning, and the mum said, ‘How did you sleep? Alright?’ We said, ‘Yeah, fine, thanks, great.’ She said, ‘Did you see Jimmy and Jemima?’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘Two little spiders!’”
McCartney and Harrison, pretending not to know a thing, responded, “‘No! Jimmy and who?’ Oh my God, so we had many a laugh over that,” McCartney says with a laugh.
Harrison, too, reflected on his and McCartney’s hitchhiking adventures in The Beatles Anthology, remembering such trips as a time with little food or money, yet filled with kind strangers whom they would later immortalise in The Beatles’ songs.
“It’s something nobody would dream about these days,” Harrison said of their decision, but still, it is one that the two men would reflect on for the rest of their lives, transporting them back to boyhood.
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