2 drummers Paul McCartney said are among the best of all time

Although Paul McCartney is primarily known as a great songwriter, bassist and singer, he can also play many other instruments, including drums. In his solo career, he recorded the drum parts himself on many of his biggest hits.

As one of the most important musicians of all time since the 60s, he had the chance to see some of the best drummers ever perform and there are two he has mentioned among the greatest.

2 drummers Paul McCartney said are among the best of all time

John Bonham

“John Bonham was a good friend of mine and I was a great admirer of his. I really liked the power of John. I remember (someone) asking him once ‘How do you want your tom-toms to sound?’ He said: ‘Like cannons!’ That is true. If you listen to something like ‘Kashmir’. There’s a power and he was a very powerful guy,” Paul McCartney said in an interview (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). He also stated that it was fantastic to play with Bonzo, who was a great friend and a “ballsy drummer”.

“It was fantastic (to play with him)! He was always on my top 5 drummer list. (It was) a great friend and ballsy drummer!” he said during a Q&A session with fans on Twitter in 2014. They first had the chance to record together in 1975 in the demo of “Beware My Love” and in two tracks of the 1979 album “Back to the Egg”, called “Rockestra Theme” and “So Glad To See You Here”. When McCartney was asked by the Brazilian newspaper Estadão in 2019 to say which musicians would be part of his dream band, Bonham was his choice for drums.

They had the chance to play live one year before his death, in 1979, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. Were also part of that show names like Pete Townshend and John Paul Jones. However, when asked by Howard Stern the following year who the greatest drummers of all time were, he ranked Ringo first and Bonham second.

Paul McCartney said:

“I go Ringo Top, he is something else, second I’d go Bonzo and third Keith Moon. I mean, that’s mine, I’m going from that generation, those are pretty good drummers,” he said. Interestingly, Bonham had the chance to see The Beatles perform live when he was a teenager. When he was 14, his sister Deborah took him to see the Fab Four, but they couldn’t hear anything, even from the front row, because the girls in the crowd were screaming.

“John and Michael, as I was growing up, they went to see The Beatles. Mom took them to see The Beatles when I think John was 14. Michael was 12. They went to see The Beatles and she had somehow managed to get front row seats. But they couldn’t hear anything. It was just girls screaming like mad. I think that was when John had decided, ‘Yeah, I want to do that.’ And he did, he ended up playing with Paul McCartney many, many years later,” Deborah Bonham said in an interview with Rock Talk in 2022.

Keith Moon

The second one is Keith Moon, who, in his opinion, is the third-best drummer of all time. McCartney said that one of the best compliments he ever received was when Moon praised the drumming on “Band on the Run” without knowing that it was McCartney himself who had recorded the drums.

“People often say we want to hear YOU on a record. We don’t want to hear you and lots of other people. I thought, well, great, I’ll do that, I’ll drum then. As you say, I did it on those other albums (“McCartney” and “Ram”). One of my great compliments was from Keith Moon, when he and John and others were going through that manic lost weekend episode. I went out to see them. Keith Moon asked me who drummed on ‘Band on the Run’. I said it was me. Keith said ‘f*cking great!’. Coming from Keith, that was high praise for me,” Paul McCartney said in an interview with Record Collector Magazine in 1997.

Moon asked Paul to join The Beatles

Keith Moon was a big fan of The Beatles and a good friend of Ringo Starr. But that didn’t prevent him from asking McCartney to join the Fab Four. According to Mark Blake, The Who’s biographer and author of the book “Pretend You’re in a War”, Moon asked to join the band in 1966. At the time, his relationship with his bandmates in The Who was not good. Paul simply told him that they were not looking for a drummer. Thirty years later, Ringo’s son, Zak Starkey, would become The Who’s drummer.