Paul McCartney’s career is one of the most celebrated in music, but one of his earliest tour stories is far less polished: he once ended up arrested in Germany after a condom was burned on a wall.
The Beatles icon appeared on Chicken Shop Date with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Friday, May 29, and the chat eventually veered into unexpected territory.
McCartney, now 82, spoke about his latest album and what life was like in the band’s earliest touring years. Then he brought up an incident from their rough-and-ready Hamburg period that’s a long way from the usual Beatlemania narrative.
The moment dates back to the early 1960s, when McCartney and the band’s then-drummer Pete Best were staying in harsh conditions in Hamburg. They were sleeping in cramped, unventilated back rooms at a run-down cinema known as the Bambi Kino, a place described as filthy and long past its days as a functioning theatre.
According to McCartney, as they were leaving, Best decided to make a point about the miserable accommodation in a particularly bizarre way: he produced a condom, attached it to the wall with a nail, and they set it on fire.
“We were rooming together. It was really dingy, cement walls. It was terrible,” McCartney told Dimoldenberg. “So as we were leaving… there was a nail on this wall, so as an act of defiance at these terrible lodgings, Pete had a condom on him. And so we took it out and we lit it.”
He then turned to Dimoldenberg with full sincerity and said: “You haven’t burned a condom? Amelia, you haven’t lived ’til you’ve burned a condom.”
At the time, both the Bambi Kino and the Hamburg venue where the band was playing—Kaiserkeller—were owned by promoter Bruno Koschmider, who reportedly did not take kindly to the stunt.
As detailed in Barry Miles’ 1998 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, the condom didn’t burn for very long, but it lasted long enough for Koschmider to report McCartney and Best for attempted arson. The two were held in a local jail for around three hours before being deported back to England.
Best, now 84, was later dismissed from the Beatles in 1962 and replaced by Ringo Starr, making the chaotic Hamburg stretch one of the final parts of his time in the group.
McCartney’s Chicken Shop Date appearance follows the release of The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his first album in more than five years. The record draws heavily on his Liverpool upbringing, memories of his late parents, and the band’s earliest days with John Lennon and George Harrison—roughly the same era that included the Hamburg cinema episode.
“People say, ‘Well, why do you still write songs?’ And it’s just because I love it. I’m addicted,” he told the New York Times. “Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it’s so great, the feeling.”