“It was this idea of ‘What do I do now?’” His daughter Stella, the fashion designer, reflected that “we spent a lot of our childhood with dad recovering from the turmoil and the break-up”. “The job was gone, and it was more than the job, obviously – it was the Beatles, the music, my musical life, my collaborator,” he told the New Yorker last year. The Beatles became a global advertisement for youth and friendship – Paul and John wrote many of those early hits knee to knee, eyeball to eyeball – and their split was a generational trauma. And I thought, y’know what, I couldn’t give it all up.” He told himself, “You’ve gotta decide now: give it all up or be happy with it. On holiday in Greece in 1963, McCartney realised he would probably be famous everywhere, for ever.

After cutting their teeth in Hamburg, they released Love Me Do in October 1962, launching themselves on a rocket trip that didn’t touch down for seven years. In 1957 McCartney joined Lennon’s skiffle band the Quarrymen, who evolved into the Beatles three years later. He has said that he considers retiring a prelude to expiring.īorn in Liverpool in 1942, James Paul McCartney lost his mother, Mary, when he was 14 – an experience that strengthened his bond with the similarly bereaved John Lennon. Next weekend he will headline Glastonbury for the second time, seven days after his 80 th birthday. He recently released a quasi-memoir, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and embarked on yet another stadium tour. Five decades later, he is still forging ahead. He knew better than any of them what an irreplaceably precious thing they had together. Sometimes this made him a pain but, as Get Back illustrates, a necessary pain. More driven and more cautious than the others, he became a kind of parent and taskmaster. “He used to be the one to get things moving,” Starr said after the band’s break-up in 1970. The song they are merrily ignoring is Let It Be. In this particular scene he’s at the piano, guiding the band through a hymn-like new number while his fiancée Linda Eastman chats to Yoko Ono in the foreground. John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are at best semi-detached but McCartney is grafting away, writing from scratch songs good enough to make them believe in the band again. It’s another day in Twickenham studios, where McCartney is single-handedly wrestling the Beatles into recording a new album.

T here’s a lovely scene in Peter Jackson’s recent documentary The Beatles: Get Back that sums up the taken-for-granted brilliance of Paul McCartney.

Paul mccartney younger