Michael Parkinson: What was sad too was the way it drove a wedge between your relationship, you and John – was it always a spiky relationship? I mean, you said you loved him-
Paul: Yes
M: -and that love comes through in the book. Did he love you?
P: Yeah. I don’t think it was… Yeah, I think he did actually. *laughs* We’ll check. Just excuse me for a moment. ‘John, come on, baby, did, yes.’ Yeah, I think he did, yeah. It wasn’t actually a spiky relationship at all. It was, uh, very warm, very close and very loving, I think. All The Beatles. We used to say, I think we were amongst the first sort of men to come out openly – and you remember, it was quite sort of strange in those days, we’re talking about a long time ago now when homosexuality was still sort of largely illegal – we used to say ‘I love him’ on interviews and the interviewers would get slightly taken aback, a man saying he loved someone. But I think, quite genuinely, we really did and I still do. Um, but the business thing came right in the middle of it, the lawyers came along with the business thing and I talked to John many years. Because the great saving grace was we did put our relationship back together.
P: Thank god for that! Because I don’t know what I’d do now with him gone if we hadn’t. I think I would be, uh, wracked with all sorts of guilt. But we did.