Sir Paul McCartney: ‘There was something a little bit suspect about Jimmy Savile’

Sir Paul McCartney has become one of the first rock stars to speak about Jimmy Savile and the sexual climate of the sixties and seventies.

Few rock stars have said anything about their behaviour at the time, and the Savile revelations. Now the biggest worldwide pop icon has given his thoughts, and spoken about The Beatles’ friendship with Savile, in an exclusive interview with The Independent, to be published in full on Saturday.

Sir Paul told me that in their early days The Beatles were close to Savile, and travelled with him. Later at the height of Beatlemania, Savile compered their Christmas shows. Sir Paul also addressed the more general area of the prevailing sexual climate in those days.

Referring to Savile and the darker side of what was perceived as a time of relative innocence, Sir Paul said: “ It’s very difficult to talk about it. The thing is we knew Jimmy and we worked with him, he was a DJ, an MC on some of the shows. We were working in Yorkshire and we were still living in Liverpool. And we were coming back from a gig and he came in our van over the Pennines, we gave him a lift.”