{"id":956780,"date":"2026-05-13T09:58:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/956780\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T09:58:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:58:26","slug":"mike-mccartney-the-first-thing-i-wasnt-going-to-do-was-be-like-my-brother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/956780\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike McCartney: ‘The first thing I wasn’t going to do was be like my brother’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike McCartney told the ECHO how letters in his cupboard document some of The Beatles most important years<\/p>\n

05:00, 13 May 2026Updated 08:49, 13 May 2026<\/p>\n

\"Mike<\/p>\n

Mike McCartney outside his childhood home, 20 Forthlin Road, in 2022(Image: Anthony Devlin\/PA Wire)<\/p>\n

“The first thing I wasn’t going to do was be like my brother,” says Mike McCartney. Mike, 82, is a celebrated photographer, member of satirical comedy-music trio The Scaffold, and the younger brother of The Beatles legend, Sir Paul McCartney. However, if things had gone differently, he could have been a hairdresser or a gardener.<\/p>\n

He told the ECHO<\/a>: “The first thing I wasn’t going to do was be singing in a group because there’s one member of the family doing rather well in that.<\/p>\n

“To try and follow him would have been ludicrous, would have been stupid. It’s not the Liverpool way of doing things. Scousers are classier. I had to go into an alternative business and I could have been a hairdresser, could have been a gardener. I could have been anything but I chose to go into comedy and then photography.<\/p>\n

“All these things are right at the time and you don’t know that they’re going to be successful. My brother didn’t know. None of us knew where our careers would take us, but they were the right thing at the right time.”<\/p>\n

Just as the brothers didn’t know how their lives would end up, they also had no idea that the letters they would write to each other in their younger years would one day end up on display at exhibitions. But letters, tucked away in Mike’s cupboard at home, document The Beatles formative years in Hamburg, a period that is still remembered as crucial to the band’s story more than six decades on.<\/p>\n

\"Mayor<\/p>\n

Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotheram looks at information panels during the opening of the exhibition “Hafenstaedte. Schaupaetze der Welt” at Hamburg City Hall(Image: Photo by Morris MacMatzen\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

“My wife Rowena says I’m a terrible hoarder,” he tells the ECHO. “I point out to her it’s not bad being a hoarder if you’re hoarding history.”<\/p>\n

The original lineup of The Beatles\u2014 Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best\u2014 performed over 250 gigs in the German city between 1960 and 1962. The years developed their skills, and led to their first recording which would be picked up by Brian Epstein.<\/p>\n

Some of these letters, including ones from older brother Paul and former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, are now on display at an exhibition at Hamburg\u2019s Hafengeburtstag port festival until May 25. The exhibition features a rare collection of Beatles photographs and personal letters, written during the band\u2019s years in Hamburg.<\/p>\n

Mike told the ECHO<\/a>: “My brother went to Hamburg a couple of times and started to send letters. I would send him Mersey Beat, NME and Melody Maker, and he would reciprocate by sending letters.<\/p>\n

“In retrospect, you look at it now in a historic light because now we’re part of history. As my brother once said to me, ‘Michael, don’t ever forget, you were there’.<\/p>\n

“He was very lucky to be in his group and I was very lucky to be part of the inner sanctum. We were all mates, we were all going nowhere. I was in one room in Forthlin, our two up and two down terraced house in Liverpool, learning photography.<\/p>\n

“My brother was in the other room learning music, learning guitar and on the piano etc.”<\/p>\n

\"Mike<\/p>\n

Mike in Forthlin Road with his dad, James McCartney(Image: Redferns)<\/p>\n

Asked whether he had an inkling of what would come to be, Mike said: “Being Liverpudlians, being Scousers, being brought up in the magic of Liverpool, the extraordinary living of Liverpool, the way Liverpool people are so resilient, they’re so taking a mickey, they’re so funny, naturally, it gives you a good basis for life.<\/p>\n

He added: “Everything is meant in the world. There’s no such thing as coincidence. Everything is meant and what you’ve got to do is go along with it. There’s no going back.”<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to now, and Mike thinks his collection of letters should be housed in a museum. He told the ECHO: “They’ve got so many secrets in them, so much knowledge, so much innocence, not realising how big you were going to be.<\/p>\n

“One of the letters is something about ‘Brian’s coming over with a contract for EMI’, you know, ‘we might sign with them, we’ve no idea’. Then you suddenly realise, ‘oh yeah, Stuart is leaving, I’m going on this thing called a bass now.<\/p>\n

“It’s all irrelevant until you see it in context and you suddenly realise, hold on, that’s when he became the bass player. And there it is in a letter to me innocently describing the future of, you know, the world. The future, his future.”<\/p>\n

The exhibition was devised by the Combined Authority in response to Hamburg inviting Liverpool City Region to be the official partner of its port anniversary – the Hafengeburtstag. Further information can be found here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike McCartney told the ECHO how letters in his cupboard document some of The Beatles most important years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8815],"tags":[748,393,4884,179,267116,11693,4162,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-956780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-liverpool","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-liverpool","12":"tag-mike-mccartney","13":"tag-paul-mccartney","14":"tag-the-beatles","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116566683301855003","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}