McCartney and Guccini sing the same song

Even if they come from distant worlds – the global pop rock of Liverpool and the songwriting of Pàvana – Paul McCartney And Francesco Guccini today they are more alike than ever.

With “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” – the new album released on May 29, 2026 – the former Beatle returns to Speke, on the edge of Liverpool, on the banks of the Mersey River. The heart finds its origins before the spotlight, up to that physical place which is the altar of memory, as the Apennines are for Guccini. Most of Guccini’s songbook is a return to that small hamlet of Sambuca Pistoiese, where the Limentra is what the Mersey is for McCartney: a silent witness of the passing time.

The altar of memory

For both, the past is not an abstract concept: it is a book made of streets, factory smells, mills, faces and precise borders. Perhaps there is a difference in tone: in McCartney we can still recognize a wondering and dreamy gaze towards the past, with the soul of someone seeking magic in a mysterious chord or in a childhood memory. Guccini has a more concrete, realistic and less ecstatic approach: “He is not the type of man who gets lost in rich nostalgia, and goes his own way without effort”, like his Amerigo.

Paul previews the album with “Days We Left Behind”, a single in which he evokes i boys of Dungeon Lane, the boys with whom he shared dreams and cigarettes before the worldwide success of the Beatles arrived. An intimate and delicate ballad, only piano and acoustic guitar. There is the pain for those who are no longer here (John and George), but seen with the sweetness of those who have made peace with destiny.

For me this song is truly a memory. The album title comes from a verse of this song. I was just thinking about this, about the days I’ve left behind, and I often wonder if I’m just writing about the past, but then I think: how can you write about anything else?

Yes: how can you write about anything else? The Maestrone has always said it, from “Radici” to “Canzoni da intorto”, from “Incontro” to “Su in hill”.

From Speke to Pàvana

Dungeon Lane is a street in Speke, the neighborhood where Paul and George Harrison were born. On the banks of the Mersey, Paul went to do birdwatching with a book under his arm to recognize birds; one of his stylistic features that returns here with larks that cross the sky, flying above the sounds of war.

There’s a part in the middle that’s about John and Forthlin Road, the street I lived on. Dungeon Lane is nearby. I lived in a place called Speke, which was quite a working-class neighbourhood. We had almost nothing, but it didn’t matter because the people were amazing and you didn’t realize you didn’t have much.

Guccini has always sung about his friends from the village, his companions and fellow travelers who remain behind. While McCartney now begins to get closer to the past and come to terms with it, Guccini uses dialect and etymology as laboratories cultural resistance. Let’s take his latest album, “Canzoni da tavern”: nothing to do with sales and rankings, but an act of emotional philology. He doesn’t look for the perfect agreement: he looks for the right cadence of the sentence, the one that can contain a world that is disappearing.