Paul McCartney has been discussing the different working styles between him and Kanye West.

The former Beatle, who announced his first new album in five years yesterday, has previously collaborated with Kanye and explained how the experience was an eye-opener in the different styles of writing music.

The duo teamed up with Rihanna for 2015 single ‘FourFiveSeconds’ and, according to Macca, the experience opened up a new style of working: “We ended up just talking a lot,” McCartney told DIY. “I played a few little things and one of them ended up as ‘FourFiveSeconds’ with Rihanna. It’s more a question of me feeling lucky that these people are interested [in working with me] and think that I can bring something to it. For me, I feel great. I like diversity.”

“We had a method in our early days of The Beatles and with Wings that I used all the way through for writing songs,” he said. “I would sit down with a guitar or at a piano and make it up and complete it. Then that’s it, you’ve done your song, and then you’re ready to roll and go in the studio.

“With [Kanye], it was much more made up as we went along – so much so that I didn’t even realise that I was making songs.

“We had two or three afternoons where we just hung out together in a Beverly Hills hotel in the bungalows out the back, and he had his engineer and was set up with a couple of microphones in case anything happened,” he continued. “I was tootling around on guitar, and Kanye spent a lot of time just looking at pictures of Kim [Kardashian] on his computer. I’m thinking, ‘are we ever gonna get around to writing?!’

“But it turns out he was writing. That’s his muse. He was listening to this riff I was doing and obviously he knew in his mind that he could use that, so he took it, sped it up and then somehow he got Rihanna to sing on it. She’s a big favourite of mine anyway, so that just came without me lifting a finger.”