Paul McCartney has misplaced an extremely rare, valuable Beatles artifact, as he lost the notebook where he and John Lennon wrote their earliest songs.
He lost the notebook within the past decade or so. Speaking on the podcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics (which just launched its second season on iHeartPodcasts), he described how he would skip school to work on music with John Lennon. He would write down their compositions in an exercise book he had taken from school — "a nice little blue book, a hardback," he said.
"The school exercise book, I found it probably about 10, 15 years ago," McCartney explained. "I put it in my bookcase, and I've since lost it. I don't know where it is. I think it might show up somewhere, but it's the first-ever Lennon–McCartney manuscript."
The podcast's host, poet Paul Muldoon, said, "Oh dear." McCartney responded, "'Oh dear' is right, but you have to let these things go."
That book included the early hit “Love Me Do" (which is the subject of the episode of A Life in Lyrics) and "One After 909." It also included unreleased songs like the country number “Just Fun" and the doo-wop-inspired “Too Bad About Sorrows," each of which McCartney sang a cappella snippets.
Listen to the episode below. The discussion of the lost notebook begins just after the five-minute mark.