Paul McCartney has spoken about the nearly week-long stay in a Japanese jail that followed his 1980 arrest. The Beatles icon was detained after Wings arrived in Japan for a planned tour. Officials found nearly half a pound of marijuana in his baggage.
McCartney first addressed how the marijuana ended up in his luggage.
“I still don’t know what that was about. I think somebody planted it. But maybe not,” McCartney said. “No, the thing was, I think most likely it was very good pot. I mean, it was really good. Someone had got some from Hawaii, and it was like, ‘We can’t put this down the toilet… we’ll just hide it,’ but we didn’t hide it very well.”
He then explained why he was afraid of going to jail in a foreign country.
“I was scared (about going to jail) because I thought it was gonna be like America, where you get r*ped in jail,” he said. “And I wasn’t looking forward to that.”
McCartney also described his experience of the jail’s shower routine.
“That’s the thing about me, you know: I will make something of things,” he continued. “I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do it. Why not? I mean, if they can do it.’ So yeah, I got naked and got in. You got in the shower first, and then they’re all kind of (looking at each other’s genitals, going) ‘Whoa, look at that.’ ‘Look at that.’ I’m going, ‘Yeah, but what about me?'”
The comments came during a conversation with Judd Apatow about the documentary Man on the Run. The discussion followed a Los Angeles screening on September 28. Director Morgan Neville also joined the conversation.
The episode is one of the best-known moments of McCartney’s post-Beatles years. It helps explain why he still talks about it more than four decades later.
McCartney was arrested on January 16, 1980, at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. He was taken to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center. He was questioned regularly there while his lawyers worked on his case. He spent nine days in custody. He was then released and ordered to leave the country. The arrest ended the Wings trip. The planned Japanese tour never took place.
McCartney has described conditions inside the detention center as tough. “It was pretty rough. Just a thin mattress on the floor,” he said of his time there.
Man on the Run covers the Japan arrest as part of its portrait of McCartney’s decade after The Beatles. Neville directed the film, which began streaming on Prime Video on February 27. It follows McCartney as he forms Wings with his wife Linda. It also shows his search for direction after the band’s breakup. In the film, he calls his behavior in the Japan episode idiotic.
At the same Los Angeles event, McCartney spoke about the uncertainty of that period. He said “being on my own was very scary” after The Beatles split. He also reflected on John Lennon, saying his late bandmate “could be a complete idiot, over some things.”
