Paul McCartney has compared writing songs with Kanye West to when he wrote with John Lennon, saying the pair shared a similar “ping-pong” system as he did with his former Beatles bandmate.

The unlikely duo have been working together on new music for West’s forthcoming album ‘So Help Me God’, including the recent single ‘Only One’.

Speaking to The Sun , McCartney explained the similarities between his work with Lennon and making music with West.

“When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar,” he said. “I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song. It was like that.”

McCartney went on to explain how the story behind The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ helped create West’s ‘Only One’. “We sat around and talked an awful lot just to break the ice,” he said. “One of the stories I told him was about how I happened to have written ‘Let It Be.’ My mum came to me in a dream when she’d died years previously. I was in a bit of a state — it was the Sixties and I was overdoing it. In the dream she said, ‘Don’t worry it’s all going to be fine, just let it be.’ And I woke up and thought, ‘Woah’ and wrote the song. I told Kanye this and he said, ‘I’m going to write a song with my mum.’ So then I sat down at the piano.”

McCartney and West created recent tracks ‘All Day’, ‘Only One’ and ‘FourFiveSeconds’ together, the latter of which features Rihanna. [NME]