Nous vous livrons ci-après le communiqué officile de Paul relatif à l’affaire de l’inversion des crédits des chansons sur l’album « Back in the U.S. » :
« The truth is that this is much ado about nothing and there is no need for anybody to get their knickers in a twist. I’m quite happy with the situation and I’m not worried about what Yoko Ono is saying – as I am more excited about now, rather than then, having finished a great tour and winning No.1 tour of the year. The people whose opinion matters to me have had their say.
« But I think it’s time that I made it clear what the facts are over this long-running and rather silly dispute.
« John and I wrote many songs together but in an article in Playboy magazine John very accurately divided the credit for each of the Beatles songs between us – ‘I wrote this; this one was Paul’s’ etc. – and when I ran the exercise for myself a few years back for Barry Miles’s book ‘Many Years From Now’ I found that John and I were in complete agreement as to who had done what.
« At the very beginning, the first time this ever came up was at a meeting at Brian Epstein’s office in Albemarle Street in London between Brian, John and myself. I arrived at the meeting to find that Brian and John had already independently decided the the billing would be ‘songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’.
« I said ‘What about McCartney/Lennon?’ They said ‘We’ll do this for now and we can change it around to be fair at any point in the future’.
« Been reassured by this, I let the matter go and our songs became known as Lennon/McCartney songs, a fact I was perfectly happy about.
« Many years later, when we were involved in ‘The Beatles Anthology’ project, instead of using the term Lennon/McCartney, the songs were been creditted as ‘written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’. I made a request to Yoko Ono to have my name put first on the song ‘Yesterday’, which John had often admitted he had nothing whatsoever to do with.
« I felt that after 30 years this would be a nice gesture and something that might be easy for Yoko to agree with. At first she said yes, but then she rang back a couple of hours later and reversed her decision.
« The fact is that it was not a decision that was hers to make, but because of her objection I was not allowed to have my name in front of John’s. «
