Mr Bellamy | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Mr Bellamy’ is the sixth song on Paul McCartney’s 14th solo album Memory Almost Full. See more…

Who is Mr Bellamy? I never know who these people are. Who are Chuck and Dave from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’? Who is Eleanor Rigby? Who are Desmond and Molly from ‘Ob-La-Di’? I don’t know – I just make them up. I like giving characters names and trying to make them fit.

I had a little piano riff that’s behind the ‘Mr Bellamy’ verse. I wanted some lyrics that would poke in and out of the riff, so I began with, ‘I’m not coming down, no matter what you say, I like it up here.’ Sometimes I don’t actually know where I’m going, so then I look at just what that verse is, and in this case I got a picture of a guy sitting on top of a skyscraper and all the people in the street – the rescue team, the psychiatrist, the man with the megaphone shouting: ‘Don’t jump’ and the people shouting: ‘Jump’. So I fished around for a name and came up with Bellamy, which sounded like someone who might want to jump. And I just followed the story through.

The end is like a pull back with a camera – there he is, little Bellamy sitting on the ledge, enjoying it up in the clouds. And that’s how we recorded it, as a sort of film.