“About F’ing Time”: Paul McCartney Recalls the Broken Promise Behind His Belated Rock Hall Honor

In a newly published 2015 interview, McCartney reveals Jann Wenner promised him a solo induction in 1995 — then left him waiting until 1999.

Paul McCartney has never been one to let a slight slide — especially one involving a broken promise from the man who helped build the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

In a 2015 interview with journalist Joe Hagan, published in full by Vanity Fair for the first time in late February 2026, McCartney detailed lingering frustration over the years-long delay in his solo induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — and the verbal agreement he says was never honored.

The Deal

The Beatles were inducted into the Rock Hall in 1988 as part of the institution’s third class. Six years later, in 1994, Rock Hall co-founder and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner called McCartney with a request: Would he induct his former songwriting partner John Lennon as a solo artist? It was Lennon’s first year of eligibility.

McCartney agreed — but quickly realized something was off.

“I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then I put the phone down. I thought, Well, what about me? I’m not inducted,” McCartney told Hagan. “Now John’s going to go in.”

He pushed back. “I got back to him and said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What about me? Maybe I’ll do John, and then maybe I should go in,'” McCartney recalled. “And it was like, ‘Oh no, we can’t do that.'”

What Wenner offered instead was a promise: McCartney would be inducted the following year, in 1995.

“I said, ‘Okay.’ And I bought the deal,” McCartney said.

Crickets

The 1995 class came and went. McCartney’s name wasn’t on the list.

“Next year came around… Crickets,” he recalled. “So it was like, ‘Can you ring Jann? What’s going on? I don’t appear to be in it.’ F—ing bastards.”

In all of his dealings with Wenner, McCartney said, accountability always seemed to live elsewhere. “It’s never up to Jann. It’s up to these other people down the corridor somewhere. He happens to have ‘owner-editor’ on his door, but they’re responsible for things?”

For his part, Wenner has said he does not remember making that promise, according to Vanity Fair.

‘About F—ing Time’

McCartney was finally inducted as a solo artist on March 15, 1999, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York — five years after Lennon and four years after Wenner’s alleged commitment. Neil Young delivered the induction speech.

By then, the McCartney family had a message ready. His daughter Stella, then an emerging fashion designer, showed up wearing a white T-shirt that read: “ABOUT FUCKING TIME!”

“Eventually I did creep in there, and my daughter Stella wore a T-shirt [that said], ‘About f—ing time,'” McCartney said. “A verbal contract was not worth the paper it was written on.”

The Bigger Picture

McCartney placed the snub within a broader pattern of what he described as post-assassination “revisionism” that diminished his role in the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

“The thing about John Lennon and McCartney was we were always equal,” he said. “But, of course, once John got murdered, he became the martyr — the Buddy Holly, the James Dean character — because of the atrocity. So a revisionism started to go on. And Yoko certainly helped it. Jann was a big part of that.”

McCartney pointed to comments from Yoko Ono that reduced his contributions to logistics. “Yoko would be saying things like, ‘Oh, Paul only booked the studio,'” he said. “People have said the greatest things about me. But luckily, there is this thing called history, and there are these things called record books, so I can say, ‘Well, no, I actually did more than that.'”

Wenner’s Fall

Wenner’s own relationship with the Rock Hall eventually soured. In September 2023, he was removed from the institution’s board of directors after making comments in a New York Times interview that were widely condemned as sexist and racist, in which he suggested that female and Black artists were not “articulate enough” to be featured in his book of musician interviews.

McCartney, meanwhile, remains one of rock’s most decorated artists. His recent projects include Man on the Run, the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about his post-Beatles career now streaming on Amazon Prime, the first-ever Wings anthology, and the companion book Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run. After extensive touring through 2025 on his Got Back tour, the 83-year-old has stepped back from the road — at least for now.