Designer Stella McCartney has named her father’s unreleased jail time memoir her favorite read during an appearance on British radio show Desert Island Discs.
The fashion queen told the long-running BBC Radio 4 program she has always found Sir Paul McCartney’s Japanese Jailbird “very beautiful”, revealing only she and his other kids have read the manuscript, which chronicles the nine days he spent behind bars in Japan back in 1980 on drugs charges.
“I just think it makes me remember family and it would make me also remember freedom,” she said.
Stella also picked her father’s Beatles tune Blackbird among her favorite songs, insisting the 1968 track still feels “contemporary”.
“I’m really proud of dad that he wrote it at such a young age, he had this sort of incredible vision to understand politics, to understand poetry,” she added.
She also chose songs by Nirvana, Louis Armstrong, George Michael and her father’s Beatles bandmate George Harrison, as well as Starman by David Bowie, calling the late rock icon “an amazing talent” and “so individual”.
“What an incredible, individual voice he had,” she gushed.
Bowie lost his battle with cancer in January, 2016.
Stella also opened up about her arrival on the fashion scene, while studying at London’s Central Saint Martins college under the pseudonym Stella Martin to protect her identity.
Her final year show hit the headlines when famous family friends like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Yasmin Le Bon wore her designs on the catwalk.
“I look back on that moment and just feel a bit embarrassed that I was so naive,” she told Desert Island Discs.
