I’VE WRITTEN A LOT OF SONGS, BUT CERTAIN ONES STAND out, and if I had to choose what I thought was my best work over the years, I would probably include ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. No, I would definitely include this one.

I first played this song to John when he and I got together to smoke tea in my dad’s pipe. (And when I say tea, I mean tea.) I said, ‘She was just seventeen. She’d never been a beauty queen.’ And John said, ‘I’m not sure about that.’ So our main task was to get rid of the beauty queen. We struggled with it, but then it came.

Singing it now – and this happens with all the Beatles songs I sing, particularly from the earlier period – I realise I’m reviewing the work of an eighteen-to-twenty-year-old boy. And I think this is very interesting because it’s got a naïveté – a kind of innocence – that you can’t invent.

Mind you, Jerry Seinfeld did a great sort of satirical thing with it. We went to the White House, and Jerry says, ‘Paul, you know, I’ve been looking at “She was just seventeen / You know what I mean”; I’m not sure we do know what you mean, Paul!’

With John Lennon writing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Forthlin Road, Liverpool, 1962

In any case, we’d heard all this stuff – I was around twenty, and we wrote this at my dad’s at Forthlin Road – and now we’re going, ‘She was just seventeen / You know what I mean / And the way she looked was way beyond compare’. That rhythm echoes Stanley Holloway’s version of ‘The Lion and Albert’. It’s a comic poem written by Marriott Edgar, and it has a similar metre.

I was loaded with all the tunes I’d heard. Hoagy Carmichael’s writing, Harold Arlen’s writing, George Gershwin’s writing, Johnny Mercer. I’d heard all this stuff growing up. I hadn’t written anything much myself, but it had all gone in. And then at school I’d heard my English teacher, Alan Durband, talking about the rhyming couplet at the end of a Shakespeare sonnet. I don’t know where ‘beyond compare’ came from, but it might have come out of Sonnet 18: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I may even have been conscious, as a child, of the Irish song tradition – of a woman being described as ‘beyond compare’.

In any case, it’s not what you would expect in rock and roll. And like I say, I don’t know where I dredged it from, but in the great trawling net of my youth, it just got caught up like a dolphin.