‘DON’T GET INTO ANYONE’S CAR. DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS.’ This song was written when, as parents, Linda and I seemed to spend a lot of time doling out the kind of advice that parents are always giving children.

The protagonist of the song sounds very much like me talking to my kids, advising them to stay safe and not to get into any scrapes. You want them to grow up healthy and have their adventures, but you don’t want them doing dangerous stuff, because you don’t want to lose them. Heather would have been about seventeen when this was written, and that’s always an interesting time to be a parent. Mary would have been about ten, so not quite a teenager, but on the cusp and wanting more independence. Stella and James would still have been pretty young, about eight and two, so mostly doing as they were told. But then, like many of my songs, it just wanders where it fancies, and it becomes a bit more of a love song.

I think my favourite part is this:

Don’t go chasing polar bears

In the great unknown

Some big friendly polar bear

Might want to take you home

I think the waterfall idea came to me when I was on holiday in the US with my family. It was a song that I had started working on when I was still in Wings, but then it ended up on my solo record, McCartney II. In fact, it was the only song on that record that wasn’t made up during the recording sessions. I think I left it off the Wings album because I wasn’t happy with the lyrics; they had just spewed out, and I thought I would probably change them. But then, in time, I got to like them as they were. So I stripped it right down, kept it simple, and it became one of my favourite songs at the time. It could have been called ‘I Need Love’, but that’s too ordinary for me.

There was another version, a completely different song, that was a big hit for someone else. I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if they heard mine?’ I think it had nearly the exact same line in the chorus, but then I also thought, ‘Great. There must have been something right about it.’ Either that or ‘Sue the bastards.’ But then, like I always say, songwriters are always stealing a bit from here and a bit from there.

Somebody in LA once claimed to have written all our Beatles songs, and we said, ‘Well, they didn’t, clearly!’ But it was worth it to the guy making the false claim to bring a case because everyone would know about him. He’d say, ‘I wrote The Beatles’ songs,’ and people might believe him or not, but they’d certainly hear about the guy who said it. McCartney II came out in 1980 and, as we know from what happened in December of that year, The Beatles had more than our fair share of obsessive fans. This song was obviously written before John’s murder, but fame has its upsides and downsides, and some strange people do come out the woodwork. But the anxious parental advice at the start of the song is universal – all parents worry.

With Stella, Linda, James, Mary and Heather. Barbados, 1981

Around the time I put out McCartney II, I said that the album kind of happened by accident. I was getting a little tired of the formality of recording an album with a band and doing everything correctly. I just wanted to have some fun and experiment, so I borrowed some recording gear from Abbey Road for a couple of weeks and enjoyed it so much I kept it for six. I was just tinkering by myself like a mad professor locked up in his laboratory, and I accidentally finished about eighteen songs. I played them to a few people, who said, ‘Take off this one and take off that one. Then there’s your new record.’ I wasn’t so sure and was just thinking it would be some funky new music to play to friends in the car. So, the downside of doing that record so spontaneously was that a song like ‘Waterfalls’ didn’t get the arrangement that perhaps it deserved. In the early days of synthesizers, you got fooled into thinking the synth strings always sounded good, which they didn’t.