“Everyone in Russia goes back to the Beatles period and remembers having to smuggle records”

The Beatles “loved the idea” that Russians secretly listened to their “forbidden” music, Paul McCartney has revealed.

The Beatles music, along with other Western artists, was banned from being imported or played in Russia from the 1960s until the 1980s.

Speaking on the McCartney: A Life In Lyrics podcast episode about the band’s famous ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ track, McCartney opened up about the ban.

He said: “Everyone in Russia goes back to the Beatles period and remembers having to smuggle records or it was all very you know, little rooms where you could play and you didn’t want people to know.

“You didn’t want the authorities to know that you were listening to this forbidden group, which really, we loved the idea of that – that we were getting smuggled along with Levi’s jeans. This was like true cultural arrival.”

When podcast host poet Paul Muldoon suggested to McCartney that “art is dangerous,” the musician replied: “To some people. We always thought that we were on the right side, that if we were dangerous, we were dangerous to the Russian authorities, and to us that said they’re not that good.

“That was how we felt, and I think it was true to a large extent that they were trying to suppress this Western influence and it goes on…I know there was a period really when you thought ‘oh, it’s all clearing’, but it’s actually the suppression is back big time…God knows what the politics and the realities are behind it at any rate. So for me, it’s kind of nice to just escape into a song like this.”

McCartney recently launched his ‘A Life In Lyrics‘ podcast with the first episode breaking down the creation of The Beatles‘ ‘Eleanor Rigby’.