Café On The Left Bank | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Café On The Left Bank’ is the second song on Wings’s penultimate album London Town. See more…

The song was partly inspired by a trip to Paris taken by John Lennon and Paul McCartney in October 1961.

Vin ordinaire was the only kind of vin we knew about in those days. I couldn’t understand why people liked wine; anytime I tasted it, it was terrible. When John and I hitchhiked to Paris in 1961, we went to a café on the Left Bank, and the waitress was older than us – easy, since John was turning twenty-one and I waws nearly twenty. She poured us two glasses of vin ordinaire, and we noticed she had hair under her arms, which was shocking: ‘Oh my God , look at that; she’s got hair under her arms!’ The French would do that, but no British – or, as we would later learn, American – girl would be seen dead with hair under her arms. You had to be a real beatnik. It’s such a clear memory for me, so it was in my head when I was setting this scene.