Paul McCartney Recalls Setting Fire to a Condom in an 'Act of Defiance' with Ex-Beatles Bandmate Pete Best
Paul McCartney Recalls Setting Fire to a Condom in an 'Act of Defiance' with Ex-Beatles Bandmate Pete Best
Rachel DeSantisFri, May 29, 2026 at 8:50 PM UTC
0
Paul McCartney recalled setting fire to a condom in a Hamburg lodging with former Beatles drummer Pete Best
The incident led to McCartney and Best being jailed for three hours and deported back to England
McCartney recently released his first album in over five years, inspired by his Liverpool childhood and early Beatles days
The hearts of female fans weren't the only things Paul McCartney was setting ablaze in his early Beatle days.
In an appearance on Chicken Shop Date, the legendary musician reflected on the time he and his former Beatles bandmate Pete Best set fire to a condom nailed to the wall of their dismal Hamburg, Germany accommodations in the early 1960s.
“We were rooming together. It was really dingy, cement walls. It was terrible,” he told host Amelia Dimoldenberg on Friday, May 29. “So as we were leaving… there was a nail on this wall, so as an act of defiance at these terrible lodgings, Pete had a condom on him. And so we took it out and we lit it.”
McCartney, who recently released his new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, joked that the contraceptives “go up quite well” when lit aflame.
(L-R) Paul McCartney, Pete Best, George Harrison and John Lennon ca. 1960
Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty
“You haven't burned a condom?” he asked Dimoldenberg. “Amelia, you haven't lived ‘til you've burned a condom.”
At the time, McCartney, Best, George Harrison, John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe were living in a run-down cinema called the Bambi Kino as the Beatles played shows at a Hamburg club called the Kaiserkeller, owned by Bruno Koschmider, according to the 1998 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles.
Koschmider also owned the cinema, and the book describes the band's lodgings as “three airless dressing rooms which had not been cleaned since the long-ago days when the Bambi functioned as a real theatre.”
Advertisement
“It was at the back of a cinema, and you used to get patrons coming in to where our toilet was, the cinema toilet,” McCartney said on Chicken Shop Date. “We'd be like, shaving and stuff. ‘Guten morgen.' They'd all be coming in.”
According to the book, the condom did not burn for long, but was on fire long enough to enrage Koschmider, who reported McCartney and Best for attempted arson.
Paul McCartney on Chicken Shop Date
Credit: Amelia Dimoldenberg/Youtube
They spent three hours in the local jail before being deported back to England.
Drummer Best, now 84, was ultimately dismissed by the Beatles in 1962 and Ringo Starr took his place.
McCartney's new album is his first in over five years, and is largely inspired by his Liverpool childhood, his late parents and early adventures with Harrison and Lennon.
“People say, ‘Well, why do you still write songs?' And it's just because I love it. I'm addicted,” he told The New York Times. “Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it's so great, the feeling.”
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
