Long before their mop-topped world domination, Paul McCartney and George Harrison went hitchhiking. Paul, being the sensible one, had packed a camping stove and a can of rice pudding. “Ambrosia,” confided McCartney to his interviewer, music producer and Beatles superfan Rick Rubin, who, being American, hid bewilderment at this dismal 63-year-old English tragical mystery tour behind a polite rictus.
It was on this road trip that the pair wrote one of their first songs. I imagine George with a little quiff, Paul with the can opener, sitting on a verge outside Widnes whiling away the hours to the next ride by writing Thinking of Linking, a song inspired by a long-defunct firm, Link Furniture, that McCartney has admitted elsewhere, was terrible.