Paul McCartney: This epitomises the downfalls in life. Just when everything is going smoothly, "bang bang", down comes Maxwell's silver hammer and ruins everything.
Paul McCartney (in 1994) - "'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' is my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer. It was needed for scanning. We still use that expression now when something unexpected happens."
