Studio Two at Abbey Road was dressed with an armchair, a guitar and a bookcase of Paul McCartney memorabilia. Without the spotlights and cameras, it might have passed for his living room. Even so, the 50 competition-winning Beatles fans gathered to enjoy their prize – a preview listen to McCartney’s new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane – were surely not expecting the man himself to walk in.

Then the room hushed. One fan said keenly: “He must be here.” And he was.

When he entered from the control room on Tuesday afternoon, the crowd broke into cheers. “Hello, and welcome to Abbey Road studios,” McCartney said. “I’m going to play the album for you and try to think of stuff to say about it.”

Over 90 minutes, the world’s most successful living songwriter traced his way back to the beginning, sharing memories of his youth in Liverpool, anecdotes about his friendship with John Lennon and George Harrison, and glimpses into his songwriting process.

Studio Two is where most of the Beatles’ recordings between 1962 and 1970 were made, from Love Me Do and Please Please Me to She Loves You, the single that launched Beatlemania. It was here, too, that songs such as A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane took shape, and where much of Abbey Road – including Come Together – was assembled. Outside, tourists clustered on the zebra crossing immortalised on the album cover, presumably unaware of the proximity of McCartney himself.

Despite his protestations, it quickly materialised that McCartney had plenty to say about his first new solo album in more than five years, due for release on 29 May.

The album began, he explained, with a cup of tea five years ago and a meeting with producer Andrew Watt. Idly playing guitar, McCartney stumbled across a chord he didn’t recognise. One note shifted, then another, until a three-chord sequence emerged. Watt suggested they record it.

That sketch became the opening track, As You Lie There, which McCartney later built out himself, playing most of the instruments in the spirit of his 1970 solo debut. The song reaches back to his childhood in Liverpool and an unspoken crush on a neighbour, beginning as spoken word before evolving into a shifting melody.

“Up in one of the windows, there was a girl I fancied called Jasmine,” he recalled. “But I didn’t know how to approach her, I never spoke to her. The joke was, she did show up later that year and knocked on the door. I was indisposed – I was on the toilet – so I missed Jasmine!”

As each song played, McCartney mouthed the lyrics and mimed along to the instruments. The record, billed as his most personal to date, turns inward: to postwar Liverpool, his parents’ resilience, and early adventures with the Beatles. Across it, he plays a wide array of instruments, moving between Wings-style rock, Beatles harmonies and his own groovy instincts.

The album takes its title from Days We Left Behind, a wistful acoustic track that references Dungeon Lane, near the River Mersey, where McCartney roamed as a boy, as well as a “secret code” and promise made to Lennon at his childhood home on Forthlin Road: “I stand by what I said, the promise that I made will never be broken.”

“This was a lot of memories of Liverpool for me,” he said, “but also any days we’ve left behind. Everyone’s got them – school, old mates.” The song, he added, seemed to write itself. “It has memories of John in the middle, that’s lovely to go back to. Someone said: ‘What’s the secret code?’ I’m not telling,” he laughed, before adding: “You make a lot of stuff up when you write songs.”

He called it “a bit of a favourite”, about “John, and George, and Ringo too,” then glanced around the studio. “It’s a little bit emotional. This is where we worked, always in this studio. We used to come in through the tradesmen’s entrance.”

Other tracks moved between the personal and the imagined. Ripples in a Pond is a buoyant love song written for his wife, Nancy Shevell. Mountaintop adopts the perspective of a young woman at Glastonbury festival, which McCartney headlined in 2022. Home to Us marks his first duet with Ringo Starr, while Life Can Be Hard was written during lockdown.

On Salesman Saint, he turns to his parents. “I was born in 1942, in the war,” he said. “I was too young to appreciate that, but my parents weren’t. My dad was a fireman, putting out fires from the bombs. My mum was a nurse and midwife. But they carried on, because they had to. Like people in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere now.”

Meanwhile, Down South, one of the album’s most nostalgic tracks, prompted a story about hitchhiking with Lennon and Harrison. “It was a good way to get to know you before we learned Twist & Shout,” the lyrics go. On one trip, he and Harrison climbed into a milk float. “There was the driver’s seat, a battery and a passenger seat. George got the battery. He had jeans with a zip on the back and it connected with the battery. Later, at a B&B, he showed me the big zip burn,” McCartney said, laughing.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is McCartney’s 18th solo studio album, arriving after a run of retrospective projects, from The Beatles: Get Back to last year’s Wings documentary and the 2023 single Now and Then, built from a Lennon demo and taken to No 1. That song, too, lingered on memory and time.