Paul McCartney’s Strange Explanation for Not Taking Selfies With Fans Involves a Monkey

Paul McCartney doesn’t take photos with fans and his reasoning is pretty understandable — even if he takes a long time to explain it to people.

The former Beatles singer, 83, appeared on the Thursday, May 14 episode of The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, where he told the hosts that he often stuns fans and colleagues in show business when he reveals that he does not like to take photos when eager fans approach him.

“I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t do pictures.’ And that is like, radical these days,” McCartney said. “I have a long explanation. Oh God, it goes on. I say, ‘No, I don’t like to do that, because it’s important to me…’ I feel [normalness] is very important to me. The minute I get like, above myself and start thinking I’m like something else, I won’t like me. So it’s very important for me to be sort of just me.”

That’s how he feels about taking photos, but McCartney revealed that he has a different way of explaining things to fans who ask him for a selfie.

“I go into this long-winded explanation of, down on the south coast of France, Saint-Tropez, there’s a guy on the beachfront who’s got a monkey, and you pay to have your photo taken with the monkey. So I say, ‘I really do not want to feel like that monkey. And when I take a picture with you, I do feel like him,’” the Wings frontman explained. “I’m not me. I’m suddenly something else.”

Cohost Richard Osman joked that fans eager to meet McCartney would end up telling him they have to leave amid his very long speech about why he won’t take a photo with them. The singer replied that they’d likely tell their friends that they met him and when they inevitably asked if they’d gotten a photo, they’d reply, “no, he just went on about some bloody monkey!”