Paul McCartney doesn’t take selfies: “I’m not a monkey”

During the recent chat for the podcast “The Rest Is Entertainment”, on the sidelines of which he touched on various topics, also sharing his impressions of Bob Dylan concerts, Paul McCartney explained the “important” reason why refuses to take photos with fans.

Speaking to Richard Osman and Marina Hyde as part of promotional activities for his new solo album, “The boys of Dungeon Lane” coming out on May 29th, the former Beatle said that smartphones have completely changed his interactions with fans and said, “Now there are phones. If I meet someone, I immediately reach for the phoneand I say, ‘Sorry, I don’t take pictures.’ And today this is a radical thing. I even told Oprah Winfrey and she said, ‘You don’t take pictures?’ I said, ‘No.’ And she: ‘Why?’. And I said: ‘Because I don’t want to’. It’s as simple as that.” Talking about the because he always refuses selfie requeststhe singer-songwriter explained that he doesn’t want to experience the same sensation as the show monkey he sees on the beaches of Saint-Tropez. He stated:

“The moment I started to think that I was something above myself, I would stop liking myself. For me it’s very important to just be myself. So I tell people: I don’t want to take photos. And they ask: ‘Why?’. Then I answer: ‘I’ll explain…’. And I start with this long explanation about the fact that, on the southern coast of France, in Saint-Tropez, there is a man on the seafront with a monkey, and you pay to take a photo with the monkey. I really don’t want to feel like that monkey. And when I take a picture with someone, I feel like that: suddenly I become something else.”

During the interview, Paul McCartney also criticized modern influencer cultureadmitting that he “don’t really understand it” and underlined: “I’m not of that generation. But you can’t help but notice it. My wife might be looking at Instagram and showing me something, and then one of those contents appears. It makes me laugh. There are people who don’t seem to have any particular talent and who are incredibly famous. Billions of clicks and views. You have to be careful about talking about these things, because they make you sound very old-fashioned. And indeed they are.”