2 Hard Rock bands that Paul McCartney is a fan of

Paul McCartney wrote many incredible songs that are among the most successful of all time, many of them ballads that are part of millions of people’s lives. The heaviest song by The Beatles was certainly “Helter Skelter”, which, for many, is one of the prototypes of what Heavy Metal and Hard Rock would become.

He always had a really broad musical taste and to the surprise of many, he is a fan of heavier Rock and has praised two famous bands over the decades.

2 Hard Rock bands that Paul McCartney is a fan of

Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen was one of the guitarists from more recent generations whom Paul McCartney admired the most. “I like Eddie Van Halen as a player. He gets it right quite often. I like a lot of heavy metal guys because they wind it up. What I usually like in a heavy metal band is the guitar player. But when it’s just miles of scales, I lose interest. I like some of the hot sounds,” Paul McCartney told Guitar Player magazine in the late 80s.

Although he did enjoy Van Halen’s music, Paul didn’t think that Eddie was a better guitar player than Hendrix. Since the early 60s, the Beatle had the chance to meet and see many incredible musicians play, but none of them compared to Hendrix, not even Eddie. “I have very fond memories of Jimi. I mean, Van Halen’s great, I love Eddie Van Halen. But I still think Jimi was the best,” Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone magazine in 1986.

Bands like The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five were extremely important for the Van Halen brothers as they were growing up. Their mother wanted them to become classical pianists and enrolled them in piano lessons so they could study properly. However, it was after hearing those British bands that they realized they actually wanted to be Rock and Roll musicians. Curiously, they were more into The Dave Clark Five, and Alex Van Halen recently said that if someone had asked him back then which band he thought would last longer, he would have said it was the DC5, not The Beatles.

George Harrison also was a big fan of Eddie Van Halen

McCartney wasn’t the only member of The Beatles who liked Eddie, George Harrison also praised him back in the 80s. “Well, there are a lot of guitar players I like. I like a guy called Eddie Lang, a guy called Django Reinhardt. These days I think, out of the contemporary players, I think Eddie Van Halen is pretty hot. I like, of course, Eric Clapton. I like a lot of the old Blues players, many of them, like Robert Johnson,” George Harrison said in a TV interview in the 1980s.

AC/DC

The second Hard Rock band which Paul McCartney also likes is AC/DC. “I like Rock and Roll basically and I know the AC/DC guys and they’re loud, have you seen them live? Oh baby… That’s one of the joys of being in a band, you get to plug an electric guitar and turn it up just as loud as you want and it’s such a sort of cool feeling that I could see why you would form a group based around that idea,” Paul McCartney told GQ in 2018.

Over the years, he had the chance to meet and hang out with members of AC/DC and Brian Johnson once revealed that he was so starstruck when he met Paul that he couldn’t speak. “I didn’t know what to say to him. I mean, for the first time I was absolutely tongue-tied. Then Ringo Starr walked in beside him. It was Paul that spoke to me, ’cause he heard me talking to somebody. And he said, ‘Hello, Geordie.’ You know, because they call us Geordies, with the accent. And I went, ‘Hello, Paul. Sir Paul. Your honor. Your majesty.’ I didn’t know what (to call him). (Laughs) I just came across like I was breaking a friend’s teeth in — I couldn’t speak.”

“So it was hard. And then we became friends, which is even harder to describe. If you’re in a hotel and somebody like McCartney says, ‘Fancy a spot of lunch, kid?’ And you go, ‘Yes,’” Brian Johnson said in an interview with QFM96 in 2022.

The incredible dinner AC/DC had with Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl

In 2015, during AC/DC’s performance of “Rock or Bust” at the Grammy Awards, Paul can be seen in the audience thoroughly enjoying their music. After the ceremony, he had the chance to spend a special evening with the members of the band, following a dinner arranged by Dave Grohl.

Initially, only Paul, along with Pat Smear, Taylor Hawkins, and their wives, were planning to attend the dinner. However, Paul’s wife asked Grohl’s wife what they were doing that night, and she invited them to join. Later, after Paul ran into the members of AC/DC at the hotel, they asked what his plans were and were invited to the dinner as well. Upon discovering he would have such special guests, Grohl prepared a truly memorable surprise.

“(…) My friend Ben Jaffe from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which is a New Orleans swing band, legendary (one). (He says) ‘What are you doing after the show?’ I’m like ‘Oh my God, Ben. Come have dinner with McCartney and AC/DC! You gotta come!’ He says ‘Well, can I bring the whole band with me?’ There’s like 10 of these guys, you know. They march like a marching band in the streets, like in a parade. It’s my favorite type of music, I love New Orleans Jazz so much. So I booked the back room and they said ‘If you want, we will march down the street and into the back room playing.’ I was going ‘this is gonna be the greatest night of my life’.”

He continued:

“So we kept it a secret, we didn’t tell anyone. We’re all hanging out in this backroom with AC/DC and Paul. We’re just sort of sitting there and then you could hear music coming down the street and it’s loud, dude. I mean, it’s tubas, trombones, trumpets, bass drums coming through the restaurant into the room. Everybody’s face is just like ‘what the f*ck is going on right now?’ I got to swing dance with AC/DC. It was insane.”