Did you toss a coin at a bad Beatles impersonator outside Leicester Square station almost 30 years ago? It might've been Paul McCartney.
To be fair, when he performed his classic track Yesterday — as part of the 1984 film, Give My Regards To Broad Street, a fake 'day in the life' video in which the master tapes of an album goes missing — McCartney was doing a purposefully bad skiffle rendition.
Unsuspecting Londoners still chucked him a few coins, though, an experience which McCartney recalled to the New York Daily News fondly: "No one wants to look a busker in the eye of course, 'cus then they'd get his life story. So they'd toss coins and I'd be going, 'Yesterday, all my troubles — thank you, sir — seemed so far away.'"
"I started doing these little dances and some punks came by, studs and leather, and they were dancing, too. Not because this guy's a Beatle, but because this was something happening. "It was a great feeling. Just me and the music."
The busking bit of this story, though, is not the strangest part.
Give My Regards To Broad Street was widely panned by the critics, Roger Ebert slaying it as "about as close as you can get to a nonmovie", but this didn't stop the creation of a spin-off video game based on the film — also called Give My Regards to Broad Street — released by Argus Press on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum the following year.
As Cheeky Commodore Gamer explains in the video below, gamers in the role of McCartney had to drive around London, tracking down bandmates located at various Tube stations, in order to piece together a missing song. The top-down computerised London calls to mind 1997's Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 expansion pack although in the case of the Give My Regards to Broad Street game, the layout of London was (unnecessarily) accurate. "If you ever wanted to be a taxi driver in central London," says Cheeky Commodore Gamer, "this might be a decent place to start your research." Throw in a MIDI version of Band on the Run playing on loop, and it's not such an easy game to play — more like such a tedious game to play. Still, it was imaginative for the time — and clearly inspirational.
There are also a few moments of comic relief; fail to record the song before midnight, and McCartney ends up — just like in that (non)movie — busking outside a Tube station. The digi-Beatle also faces a deadly foe in roving traffic wardens —not-so-lovely-Ritas if you will — who slap a ticket on your motor if you dawdle on the kerb for too long.
The Give My Regards To Broad Street film wasn't to be the last time Macca would be caught surreptitiously filming on the Underground; two year later he used the Jubilee line to film the video for his single, Press. This time, he was most definitely recognised. He was too in 2013, when playing a surprise short set in Covent Garden, although seeing as a stage was set up especially, it's a stretch to call it busking.
Other musical luminaries who've busked in London include Jon Bon Jovi (Covent Garden again, in 1994) and Arcade Fire, who pitched up outside St John's Church in Westminster, post-gig in 2007. As far as we know, video game versions of these impromptu appearances are not touted for the PS5 anytime soon.
