Truly, it sounds like something from a dream. Beatles fans who were on the official Magical Mystery Tour bus around Liverpool on Monday got a whole lot more than they bargained for when, on one excursion, their bus pulled up at the traffic lights next to the one and only Paul McCartney.

Macca was in the back of a vehicle, chatting away on his phone to someone on FaceTime, and wouldn't you know it – it was Ringo Starr.

Don’t try working out the odds of that exact sequence of events happening – we'll just say that they're probably very high indeed.

Interviewed by the BBC, the driver of the Magical Mystery Tour bus, Neil Morton, described the moment as “surreal… I had pulled up at the traffic lights on Hope Street when who should I see - Sir Paul with Ringo on FaceTime.

"He waved to us and everybody took photos. The passengers could not believe it."

Needless to say, the encounter was as brief as the time the lights stayed on red. "Nobody really got chance to speak with him," said Morton, who has worked on the Magical Mystery Tour bus for two years. But those photos are proof enough for punters to explain to their family, friends and acquaintances that yes, this really did happen – they went to Liverpool and met the Beatles. (Kind of.)

That’s exactly what Breno Augusto, a Beatles fan from Portugal did. Posting on Twitter/ X afterwards, he wrote: “Imagine exploring Liverpool aboard the Magical Mystery Tour bus -(on Monday) – when, just when you least expect it, you glance at a car and see Paul McCartney inside, chatting with Ringo Starr!!!!”

McCartney was back in town to present an award to the actor Stephen Graham at the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts (LIPA), which he co-founded back in the 1990s.

The Magical Mystery Tour is, as you might expect from its name, a tour bus that takes tourists around all the main Beatles sites in the city – The Cavern, John and Paul’s childhood houses, Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, the whole shebang. Any sighting of an actual Beatle is an added, completely unexpected extra...

The Beach Boys were midway through their 1966 tour of Japan and Hawaii when their founder, leader and sonic visionary Brian Wilson began the writing sessions that would yield God Only Knows, a majestic and achingly beautiful paean to love that Paul McCartney has reportedly called the greatest song ever written.

It was January 1966 and Wilson’s growing fear of flying had prompted him to stay at home in Los Angeles and send Glen Campbell out on tour in his place. From January to April 1966, Wilson and guest lyricist Tony Asher worked on the album that would become Pet Sounds, the first pop album conceived as one coherent work of art.

God Only Knows would become a crowning creative achievement of the seminal album Pet Sounds, its plaintive loneliness elevated by Carl Wilson’s wonderfully emotive vocal. It is a song that exists entirely in its own space, a masterpiece that remains as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the day it was released.

By mid-1965, Brian Wilson had tired of writing songs about surfboards, hot rods and girls, and decided it was time to start writing songs for “geeks” such as himself. Freed up from touring commitments, he had time to pursue his creative visions.

Wilson and his wife Marilyn had moved into their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in Los Angeles and it was here that Wilson experienced a rush of creativity. In January, 1966, he painstakingly planned an album fuelled by the idea of “making of music for people on a spiritual level”, as he said in Keith Badman’s 2004 book The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary Of America’s Greatest Band, On Stage And In The Studio.

Wilson was a creative colossus; writing, arranging and producing the songs. But he needed help with lyrics. In late 1965 he was at a Hollywood party when he was introduced to Tony Asher, an advertising executive who had written jingles for companies such as Mattel and Max Factor. The two men hit it off and Asher visited Wilson to start work on the lyrics for Pet Sounds. They began by discussing Wilson’s interests in spiritual literature and the nature of love.

Wilson played Asher the pieces of music he had written for Pet Sounds and Asher wrote lyrics to fit the themes that Wilson had in mind. But when they got to God Only Knows, an argument began. Wilson was adamant that the opening line Asher had written “I may not always love you” was far too negative for a love song. Asher held his ground.

“I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way,” said Asher in Charles Granata’s 2003 book, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “Working with Brian, I didn't have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight to the end for that.”

Wilson’s second concern was the use of ‘God’ in the title. In the deeply religious America of the mid-'60s, using the ‘G’ word in a pop song was tantamount to blasphemy.

Asher convinced Wilson that it was spiritual and innovative, attributes that they were aiming for. But Wilson was proved right. When the song was released, God Only Knows was flipped with its B-side Wouldn’t It Be Nice after radio stations and record stores objected on the grounds it would cause widespread offence.

Given the complexity of God Only Knows, its actual creation was staggeringly quick. “I wrote God Only Knows in 45 minutes,” Wilson told Adrian Deevoy of The Guardian in 2015. “Me and Tony Asher”. But recording the song would take a great deal longer.

The Pet Sounds album was recorded between 18 January and 13 April 1966, with Wilson producing and Chuck Blitz engineering. God Only Knows was one of the last songs to be recorded and instrumental tracking began at 12:30am on 10 March, 1966. The location was Studio 3 at United Western Recorders, located at 6,000 Sunset Boulevard.

Twenty musicians were crammed into Studio 3 and many were members of the Wrecking Crew, the gifted and hip collective of LA session musicians who played on hundreds of Top 40 hits in the '60s and '70s.

Wrecking Crew regulars that day included drummer Hal Blaine, drummer Jim Gordon on percussion and renowned bassist Carol Kaye, who on this session played 12-string guitar. Carl Wilson also played 12-string that day. The bass part was played on upright bass by Lyle Ritz alongside a punchier-sounding electric bass guitar, played by Ray Pohlman.

Brian Wilson’s talent for achieving the exact sound he wanted shines through on the recording. The choice of French horn on the iconic opening motif, against Don Randi’s percussive piano chords, is inspired.

To his credit, Wilson was completely open to collaborative suggestions from the musicians on the studio floor, as is evident from audio clips of the session below from Behind The Sounds.

Distinguishing features of the arrangement include an echo-laden "clip-clop" percussion part, played by Jim Gordon on the bottom of two plastic orange cups, and Hal Blaine playing sleigh bells on every beat. The song’s iconic French horn part was played by Alan Robinson of the 20th Century Fox orchestra, who one year earlier played on the soundtrack of The Sound Of Music.

From the outset of the session, Brian Wilson was intensely focused. Three Dog Night singer Danny Hutton was at the session and marvelled at Wilson’s production skills. “[Brian] would hear something wrong, and bam 'One more time',” recalled Hutton in the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions booklet. “I just sat there and didn't say a word. I had been in sessions where I thought to myself, they should do this and that. Not this time. I just shut up. What could I add?”

Wilson and the musicians worked fast, but the real stumbling block was the instrumental section. This is where the open collaboration between producer and musicians really bore fruit, as the audio from the session on Behind The Sounds series illustrates.

The musicians struggled to play the section’s accents and pushes in the way that Wilson wanted. It was pianist Don Randi who found a solution: “Let’s try when we get to that part, instead of playing the quarter note full, make it like a staccato note ‘bop, bop…” he suggested. It was a spontaneous suggestion from Randi that in an instant, brought cohesion.

Wilson then focused on the drums in the middle section. “Try a tom-tom one…let me hear it right now,” Wilson told drummer Hal Blaine. But it’s not the sound Wilson hears in his head. "Do a snare one," he suggested. "That’s it. Okay, let’s go".

And so it goes on. Wilson and the musicians worked fast and hard. Much of the talkback from the studio floor was swamped in echo, a result of the huge Phil Spector Wall of Sound ambience that Wilson so admired.

"Alright, Take 20' Wilson said later in the session. “One good strong take and we’ve got it… let’s play it strong, let’s go, move in closer flutes for the fade out."

And that as it turned out, was the take. The session ended at 4:30 a.m. It had taken just four hours to create a masterpiece.

Then it was time for the vocals. The first vocal overdubs were recorded later that day at Columbia Studios, with Brian singing lead. On 11 April, the band returned to Columbia but by then, Brian had decided that brother Carl Wilson should sing the lead vocal. “I gave the song to Carl because I was looking for a tenderness and a sweetness which I knew Carl had in himself as well as in his voice. He brought dignity to the song.”

Carl Wilson recalled the instructions he received from his brother, in Charles L Granata’s 2003 book Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, “[He said] ‘Don't do anything with it. Just sing it real straight. No effort. Take a breath. Let it go easy’.”

It was an inspired decision. There is a real purity and beauty to Carl’s voice which elevates the song to real emotional heights.

It was then down to Brian and Bruce Johnston to lay down the harmonies. “At the end of the session, Carl was really fried,” recalled Johnston in Charles L Granata’s book. “And he went home... there were just [me and Brian]. So in the fade, he's singing two of the three parts. He sang the top and the bottom part and I sang in the middle.”

God Only Knows was the opening track on side two of Pet Sounds, which was released on 14 May, 1966. Two months later, on 18 July 1966, the song was released as a single with Wouldn’t It Be Nice, relegated to the B-side simply due to fears over using the word ‘God’.

Much has been written by musicologists and music theorists who have sought to define what makes God Only Knows so compelling. While it can be diverting reading, nothing strips away the majestic brilliance of a song faster than dry academic analysis of its structural merits.

But broadly, one of the song’s major melodic strengths is that it seems to be in two keys at the same time – E major and A major. “It’s not really in any one key,” Wilson is quoted as saying in Paul Zolla's 2016 book. “It’s a strange song. That’s just the way it was written. … It’s the only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written hundreds of songs.”

The moving percussive bass part plays a strong role in elevating the song’s emotional core. God Only Knows builds and ascends, and it keeps promising and delivering more. Hope, yearning, sadness, joy, love and longing are among the powerful emotions it evokes.

One person who was deeply affected by the song was Paul McCartney. In 2002, at a benefit concert in Los Angeles, McCartney was invited to perform the song live with Brian Wilson. “I’ve actually performed it with him, and I’m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down,” recalled McCartney of the night. “It was just too much to stand there singing this song that does my head in and to stand there singing it with Brian.”

In an interview with BBC Radio 1 in 2007 McCartney spoke again about his admiration for the song: “God Only Knows is one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian”.

• Interview: Brian Wilson on Beach Boys hits, The Beatles, bass playing and more

George Harrison is sitting in a vast soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios, explaining to Ringo Starr and film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg how a BBC2 sci-fi series called Out Of The Unknown, that he watched the previous evening, has inspired a new song. Harrison is sporting the same black fur coat he wears on the iconic rooftop concert and perched on his knee is John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone Casino.

It’s mid-morning on Tuesday 7 January, 1969 and the next Beatle to arrive is Paul McCartney. “Good morning,” says the bearded bassman chirpily as he strides across the floor. “Do you wanna hear a song I wrote last night?” Harrison asks him. “It’s just a very short one, called I Me Mine”.

What follows is a beautifully plaintive and sparse rendition with Harrison’s voice sounding particularly pure. “Lovely” exclaims Lyndsey Hogg. McCartney, with hands in pockets, stands beside Harrison and stares down at his fingers on the fretboard, but says nothing. Then John Lennon arrives. Harrison, now standing, runs through the song again but speeds it up. “Run along son, see you later,” jokes Lennon. “We’re a rock and roll band you know”.

If one incident highlights the tortuous position that George Harrison found himself in as part of The Beatles then this is it. It’s just one of a number of incidents captured in Peter Jackson’s three-part 2021 documentary Get Back, in which Harrison employs impressive levels of tenacity and tact to push his own songs forward to Lennon and McCartney. Their songwriting partnership was a source of both inspiration and frustration for George. They are ostensibly the gatekeepers, two strong personalities locked into an even stronger autonomous partnership.

Only in the months leading up to The Beatles’ break-up was Harrison’s contribution and his songwriting abilities finally acknowledged by its two principal songwriters. “Until this year our songs have been better than George’s,” said McCartney bluntly in the Get Back film. “Now, this year, his songs are at least as good as ours."

In the years and decades following the break-up of The Beatles, George Harrison’s contribution to the band would be completely reassessed and his songs, such as Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, would be recognised as some of The Beatles’ greatest works.

As Frank Sinatra said of Something in his introduction to the song during a performance in 1982: “It’s one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years… it really is one of the finest.”

Despite such accolades, Harrison possibly felt undervalued within The Beatles at times. Subsequent comments also suggest that he may have contributed to more Beatles songs than he is given credit for.

In a 1987 interview for the TV series W. 57th Street, the whole issue of songwriting credits came up when broadcaster Selina Scott asked Harrison for his reaction to a comment from John Lennon.

“In an interview before his death, John Lennon said he was really hurt by you, that you’d never mentioned in your autobiography any of the influences that he had on you,” said Scott.

“He was annoyed because I didn’t say that he had written one line of this song, Taxman,” replied Harrison. “Did you tell him that?” asked Scott. “Well I didn’t because he was already dead after that” replied Harrison, “but the point to that was that I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines to Come Together or three lines to Eleanor Rigby, you know, I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have with me.”

Scott then cited Lennon mentioning that Harrison had idolised him as a young boy. “Well that’s what he thought,” laughed Harrison. “I liked him very much, he was a groove, he was a good lad, but at the same time he misread me. He didn’t realise who I was and this was one of the main faults of John and Paul. They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realise who else was around at the time.”

In the same interview Harrison touched on the legacy of being a Beatle. “It just annoyed me that people got so into The Beatles. It’s not that I don’t like talking about them, I’ve never stopped talking about them… in the end it’s like ‘Oh sod off with The Beatles’ you know?’'”

By 1969, Harrison was feeling smothered by his existence as a Beatle. Things famously came to a head when Harrison said to McCartney: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

It took Harrison leaving the band on 10 January 1969, with the witty, parting riposte of “See you ‘round the clubs”, for McCartney and Lennon to really take stock of his contribution. Although as Paul McCartney says in Martin Scorcese’s documentary Living In The Material World, he and John were well aware of George’s talents.

“We didn’t underestimate George. We knew that he was peaking as we got to those records. He’d not been really interested in the beginning I don’t think. And because John and I did so much of the writing he could just leave it to us. But I think he realised you know that there was something in this, [that] artistically and financially it was a good thing to get into. At that time we realised that he was really coming up with the goods.”

Few issues will drive a wedge within a band faster than the subject of who wrote what on which song. And when that band is The Beatles, the creative and commercial stakes couldn’t be higher.

After the Beatles’ break-up, Lennon took a number of verbal swipes at his former band members, and uncredited songwriting contributions were a theme. In a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon talks about the writing of Eleanor Rigby but refers only to McCartney. George’s own alleged contribution to that song is not mentioned.

"It's his first verse,” said Lennon about McCartney, “and the rest of the verses are basically mine. But the way he did it was... he knew he'd got the song, so rather than ask me, 'John, do these lyrics' because, by that period, he didn't want to say that to me, okay..."

But this is not how Paul McCartney remembers it. “John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me,” McCartney said in Barry Miles’s 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “So what he said was, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics', while he was fiddling around with the tracks or arranging it, at the other part of the giant studio and EMI.”

A number of accounts cite Harrison coming up with the intro/bridge line for Eleanor Rigby. In David Scheff’s book All We Are Saying, Lennon is quoted as saying: “I do know that George Harrison was there when we came up with ‘Ah, look at all the lonely people’. [Paul] and George were settling on that as I left the studio to go to the toilet, and I heard the lyric and turned around and said, ‘That’s it!’”

There is no firm evidence that George came up with the line, only that he was there when it was written. But it’s one of the Beatles songs on which all the band had an input. All were present when McCartney presented the first verse and melody, as was Lennon’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who in Kenneth Womack’s 2014 book All We Are Saying, remembers Lennon’s contribution amounting to “virtually nil”.

In Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, George talks about writing credits for Lennon/McCartney songs and he uses Eleanor Rigby as an example of a track on which his name is not credited, despite having made the contribution.

Of course, ideas and suggestions often occur spontaneously and quickly. No-one is sitting there logging who has contributed exactly what and it’s often difficult to remember in retrospect who came up with a particular phrase, motif or chord. It’s clear from Peter Jackson’s film that The Beatles helped each other out with ideas, as is the case when George Harrison works with Ringo on Octopus’s Garden.

Similarly, it seems quite possible that Harrison could have contributed a line or two of lyrics to Come Together although there is no documented evidence to suggest that he did. When he mentioned in the 1987 interview that he contributed lines to Come Together, he may simply have been using a random song to demonstrate a broader point.

One song that George certainly did have a hand in though was She Said, She Said, the final track recorded for the Revolver album, inspired by an LSD-influenced conversation between John Lennon and actor Peter Fonda.

In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison recalled helping Lennon construct the song from "maybe three" separate segments that Lennon had. Harrison described the process as “a real weld”. In his 2017 book Who Wrote the Beatle Songs?, author Todd Compton credits Lennon and Harrison as being the song's true composers.

It’s been claimed that Harrison didn’t want a co-write credit. It’s also been claimed he became thoroughly disillusioned when he didn’t receive one. Whatever the truth, it demonstrates that on at least one occasion, George Harrison had a hand in co-writing a song for which he received no songwriting credit.

For George, the break-up of The Beatles signified creative emancipation. He was soon revelling in his post-Beatles life and the solo opportunities it brought him. He topped the UK and US charts with the hugely acclaimed All Things Must Pass triple album (1970) and his 1973 album Living In The Material World was a critical and commercial triumph.

Speaking on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Harrison said he was overcome with relief when The Beatles’ broke up and compared it to leaving the family home.

“Some people can’t understand that, you know, because The Beatles were such a big deal. They can’t understand why we should actually enjoy splitting up, but there’s a time. People grow up and leave home or whatever they do. They go for a change, and it was really time for a change.”

It was a view echoed by Harrison in an interview with Musician magazine in 1987. “I just got so fed up with the bad vibes,” he said. “I didn’t care if it was The Beatles. I was getting out.”

• The 5 George Harrison post-Beatles songs you need to hear

If you're Paul McCartney, picking favourites is a thankless task – the sheer breadth of his seven years of writing songs with the Beatles would be enough to dodge the question. But he does have a special place in his heart for one particular Revolver creation, and it showcases why his songwriting could be so different… and yet familiar.

As he admitted with the remarkable dream state account that conjured up the song Yesterday, the influence of the previous generation would often seep into McCartney's creative mind. This was the music of his parents and music-loving family that were embedded in his childhood memories.

"One of my favourite songs because of its structure is Cheek To Cheek," revealed McCartney of the 1930s influence of American songwriter Irving Berlin in the podcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. "As sung by Fred Astaire. And I liked it very much before it starts off, 'Heaven, I'm in heaven… then the middle eight, 'Will carry me through to… heaven…' It's just like, yes! The way it just resolves up its own tail I always found wonderful. And I think somebody said I do it in this.

This being Here, There And Everywhere. This is a cornerstone moment in McCartney's rapid evolution as a songwriter in the 1960s, and a frankly staggering piece of work for a musician who was just 24 years old when Revolver was released in 1966.

McCartney likens the song's structure to a journey with an unexpected destination. "I like the fact that we think that we're on a path on the Moors, and we think we're going for a walk and then suddenly we've arrived where we've started," he explains in the podcast. "And it's not like we've gone around in a circle, it's more magical than that – we've come to another beginning of the path."

"It's this trick where you're suddenly where you were but it's surprising – you're where you were, but you're not. Because you can see back where you came from and you're definitely not there. You're at a new place, but it's tricked you and it's got the same scenery again."

Nevertheless, the song has a defined introduction before its verse in eight measures that are never repeated. And again, it's the influence of the past that's very clearly being referenced by its writer.

"John and I were fascinated by this idea that in the old days they did this complete ramble that didn't appear to be like [the rest of] the song at all," explains McCartney of his and John Lennon's mindset. So while much is made of the Beatles' revolution in pop music in song and production approach, it was also partnered with clear nods to the past at times.

It was Lennon who indirectly facilitated Here, There And Everywhere in the first place. "I remember writing this song while waiting for John one day," recalled McCartney in the podcast. "I'd gone out to his house in Weybridge for a writing session and he wasn't always up so I would have 20 minutes, half an hour while someone told him I was here, and he would get up."

And that's seemingly all it took for McCartney to start the ball rolling, alone with an acoustic guitar. "I remember sitting out by his swimming pool at his house in Weybridge and I had my guitar because I was ready for the writing session. And so I sat out and started something… I just went nice and smoothly so by the time I came to write with John, by the time he deigned to get up and have his coffee, I would have something to go on. "

Lennon is also credited on the song, but it's a McCartney composition… as far as he remembers.

"It does sound like something I might have done by the poolside and just sort of delivered to him," he told Muldoon. "Because it doesn't sound like anyone else's work – it sounds like one head."

So why the credit for both musicians?

"Paul and I made a deal when we were 15, Lennon told Playboy magazine in an interview three months before his murder. "There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together that we put both our names on it, no matter what." Notably, Here There And Everywhere was a song Lennon also deeply admired. In 1 1972 interview with Hit Parader he confirmed the song was written by McCartney alone, and described it as "a great one of his." But unusually, he also told his bandmate similar in person.

"I was rooming with John… in the hotel we were staying at," McCartney told Howard Stern in 2018 about filming skiing scenes around Obertauern in Austrian Alps during March 1965 for the film Help! with the other Beatles. "And we had – it was a cassette I think, in those days – of the album [demos]! And we play Here There And Everywhere and he said: 'Wow! That’s a really great song!'"

That would place the song's writing to when McCartney was only 23 years-old, and it's surprising that the demo was in existence over a year before the song was recorded at Abbey Road for the Revolvr album in mid-June, 1966. By his own admittance, this kind of direct compliment was a rarity amongst the members of the band ("Because we're guys!"), but coming from McCartney's main songwriting partner/rival it was a huge moment.

"It was really nice! I remember it to this day, you know, exactly where I was when he said it! Uh, it was great, yeah! It really gave me a lot of confidence in that song, and in my writing."

McCartney spoke about the incident before in the Beatles Anthology book from 2000. "John and I shared a room and we were taking off our heavy ski boots after a day’s filming, ready to have a shower and get ready for the nice bit, the evening meal and the drinks," he recalled. "We were playing a cassette of our new recordings and my song Here, There And Everywhere’ was on. And I remember John saying, ‘You know, I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.’ Coming from John, that was high praise indeed."

Even McCartney himself is somewhat fascinated with his own work on this song in retrospect. "I like the line 'Changing my life with the wave of her hand. I look at those kinds of lyrics now and think, where did that come from? What was I thinking of – the queen, waving out of a royal carriage or just my love [who] can just do it by hardly doing anything… it says a lot in a line."

Here, There And Everywhere remains McCartney's favourite song he's written, when under pressure to answer, running Yesterday to a close second. "I'm often asked what my favourite song I've ever written is and I don't ever really want to answer it," McCartney told Muldoon. "But when pushed I'd go to Here, There And Everywhere."

• Rubber Soul: How The Beatles raised their game in 1965 to create a masterpiece that "broke everything open"

On the morning of 15 February 1970, Paul McCartney walked into Studio 2 at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road, to record Maybe I’m Amazed, a song written as a raw and honest declaration of love and gratitude to his wife Linda, for keeping him grounded during the painful and depressing implosion of The Beatles.

Maybe I’m Amazed was renowned for being a one-man solo effort, with McCartney playing all the instruments. The only other person on the track was Linda, who contributed backing vocals and handclaps.

The song is also notable for arguably being McCartney’s greatest post-Beatles composition. In an interview in 2009, he reportedly suggested that Maybe I’m Amazed is the song he would most like to be remembered for.

It’s easy to see why. Rarely has Paul McCartney sounded so raw, vulnerable and open, or demonstrated such unbridled emotional power.

Over half a century since it was conceived, Maybe I’m Amazed still stands as a masterpiece and one of Paul McCartney’s finest achievements.

The break-up of The Beatles shocked McCartney to his core. By the time he wrote Maybe I’m Amazed, he was allegedly in a deep depression. Holed up on his Scottish farm, he allegedly spent a lot of time sleeping late and pondering what to do with the rest of his life.

It was Linda who reportedly convinced him to start writing and recording again. He wrote Maybe I’m Amazed at his home at Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, London

“Actually, Linda and I were probably already married,” recalled McCartney in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To Present, “because I can now visualise sitting at the lovely black Steinway piano that we got after our wedding. I was playing on it one day, and this song came to me.”

Lyrically, the song is direct and heartfelt. “Baby, I'm amazed at the way you love me all the time/And maybe I'm afraid of the way I love you”, he sings at the start of the first verse.

“The elements of fear and loneliness are very much to the fore,” admitted McCartney in The Lyrics book.“‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ is itself a troubling idea.”

As the song picks up pace in the second verse, his voice takes on a much grittier and strident edge. “Maybe I’m a lonely man who’s in the middle of something/That he doesn’t really understand.”

This is a soulful, passionate love song, sung by a man who is scared and whose life is about to change dramatically. He is on the brink of a romance that will last for 29 years, until Linda’s untimely death in April 1998. At the same time the band he had tried so hard to keep together was slipping through his fingers.

At its core, Maybe I’m Amazed is a piano ballad with strong gospel, soul and R&B tinges and a spiritual and confessional feel. In many ways, it feels less inhibited and less tightly structured than much of his solo material.

There’s a raw quality to the song he laid down in a single day at Abbey Road’s Studio Two in February 1970. His piano playing in particular is soulful and fluid, with an ebb and flow that feels wholly instinctive.

There’s also a sense of urgency and immediacy, not simply due to the time constraints he has set himself, one suspects, but more from a compulsion to unburden himself from the turmoil he is experiencing.

The song begins with a fade-in and a ‘false’ introduction of slow, meandering piano and organ in the key of D major, before the whole thing unexpectedly drops down to B flat, 17 seconds in, and the song begins.

And then it’s just McCartney and the piano, beautifully plaintive and yearning. After the second line – ‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ –there is the first of numerous dramatically ascending piano arpeggios in A major that feature throughout the song.

30 seconds in, on the second half of the first verse, bass guitar and a smattering of cymbals enters the mix. At 0:45, the drums start up as the chorus kicks in, underpinned by a layer of backing vocals. It’s a soaring, strident sound with McCartney’s vocal sounding completely ravaged and intense on the line: “And maybe you're the only woman who could ever help me.”

Like many great songs, the strength of Maybe I’m Amazed lies in the power of the live performance in the studio. It’s the raw, ragged emotion and feeling that elevates this to a whole different level.

This is music from McCartney’s soul, and he has rarely sounded more emotionally bare and vulnerable.

As Alexis Petridis noted in a piece in The Guardian in 2021, Maybe I’m Amazed is “both a pledge of devotion to his new wife and a howl of bewilderment at The Beatles’ collapse”.

At 0:53 there’s some nifty blues piano vamping at the mid-point of the chorus before the whole rousing thing picks up again. At the close of the chorus, at 1:06, McCartney shifts seamlessly to falsetto on a beautifully melodic vocal motif.

And then it’s his guitar solo, with its biting, overdriven tone. It’s a wonderfully melodic solo, played with gritty, bluesy attack.

30 seconds on and the solo segues into another chorus. By now, McCartney’s vocals are getting ever more intense.

And then it’s into the last verse: “Maybe I'm amazed at the way you're with me all the time/And maybe I'm afraid of the way I leave you.”

At this point, percussive ‘dead-string’ guitar chops enter the mix, bolstering the rhythm. At 2:48, the whole thing picks up again and at 3:07 it’s into another emotive solo.

There’s a compelling looseness to the whole song, a spontaneity and feel that fuels its emotional impact.

A preliminary mix was made that day by the two engineers at Studio Two, Phil McDonald and Alan Parsons, and the song was mixed properly on 22 February 1970.

In a BBC Radio 2 programme called The Tracks Of My Years, broadcast in 2019, Alan Parsons recalled watching McCartney recording Maybe I’m Amazed.

“He did the whole thing, start to finish, every instrument, bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, everything, in a day, and I remember being so, so impressed with that.”

Despite being the standout track on his debut solo album McCartney (1970), Maybe I’m Amazed was not released as a single at the time, although the song was widely acclaimed.

George Harrison praised Maybe I’m Amazed, calling it “great” although he was disparaging about much of the album from which it came. His view was shared by a number of journalists, such as Richard Williams of the Melody Maker, who concluded that there was “sheer banality” in all the album’s tracks save for Maybe I'm Amazed.

In the months and years that followed, the song’s popularity grew, thanks largely to widespread radio play.

One band who recognised the potential of the song when it appeared on McCartney’s debut solo album were the Faces.

They recorded a studio version of the song in 1970 and released it as a US-only single, while a live version appeared on their 1971 album Long Player.

The Faces’ version was stirring and soulful, and Maybe I’m Amazed became a staple of the band’s high energy live set. Bassist Ronnie Lane took the lead vocal on the gentler, more plaintive first verse, before Rod Stewart took over with his more gravelly, powerful R&B delivery from the second verse on.

But it would take seven years for the song to be finally released as a single by Paul McCartney, and this was a live version, taken from the 1976 Wings Over America tour.

This is the version that became a massive hit, reaching No 10 in the US Billboard Hot 100, despite its slower tempo and longer running time.

It’s a powerful performance and McCartney’s vocal sounds raw and intense, but it’s more bombastic and arguably lacks the vulnerability of the version he recorded in a single day back in February 1970.

For McCartney, an anomaly of music publishing meant that Maybe I’m Amazed is still categorised as a Lennon-McCartney composition. It’s a point he addresses in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To Present.

“Though the song was written immediately after The Beatles’ breakup, it was somehow included under the Lennon-McCartney rubric, where it doesn’t belong,” he said. “It was one of my first solo songs, but because of the deal, it got caught in the publishing net. That was very annoying.”

56 years on from writing and recording the song at his Steinway piano, Maybe I’m Amazed stands as one of Paul McCartney’s finest moments. In a 2022 poll in The Guardian, of McCartney’s greatest post-Beatles songs, the song was ranked No 1.

Two years later, in a 2024 Rolling Stone magazine poll of The 100 Best Beatles Solo Songs, Maybe I’m Amazed also came in at No 1. As writer Rob Sheffield observed, this was McCartney’s most soulful, passionate and unforgettable love song for Linda.

“There are no other rock and roll love stories like this one,” concluded Sheffield. “Maybe I’m Amazed tells that story in gloriously vivid detail. You can hear it in Paul’s ragged voice – he already knows that life as he knows it has changed. He has no idea what to expect from his future with Linda. He’s scared out of his wits. But neither one of them is backing away.”

Paul McCartney releases his latest album – The Boys Of Dungeon Lane – today (May 29) and the ex-Beatle/greatest living songwriter has given a fascinating, and thoughtful new interview in the Guardian.

The album is steeped in childhood memories of 1940s/50s Liverpool and the interviewer asks Macca about early sounds he remembers from those days. “There are so many,” he says. He remembers infant school, running indoors with his classmates. He recalls living in Speke (a Liverpool suburb) “hanging out on the grass verge of the dual carriageway, with girls, and listening to them chatting, and one of them said, ‘You’ve got great eyelashes!’” There were also family singalongs of Carolina Moon, Red, Red Robin, Bread and Butterflies.

He also claims briefly that he can remember being born:. “Highly dubious, highly dubious, but I feel the white tiles and chrome instruments and the sounds … It’s probably total bullshit. In fact, it almost certainly is. An imagined memory! And I was a forceps delivery.”

Inevitably he touches on the major losses of his life – Lennon and Harrison. “So, yeah, you do miss them. I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.’ It’s not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it’s life, and it’s what we’ve got.’”

He also talks about the importance of radio and he find out that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was inspired by a BBC radio play he heard driving up to Liverpool in the late 60s: “I turned the radio on, and it was a play by Alfred Jarry, it was Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded). I loved it! It’s far out: ‘Hand me my shitter pump!’ I thought, yeah, I can identify with this person. And he’s just so outrageous.”

What do you ask Paul McCartney that he hasn’t already answered fifteen million times over a lifetime in music? Well, remarkably, we do find out some new things. He doesn’t like cookies for one thing. “There’s a lot of things I don’t do,”he reveals. “Everyone accepts cookies, and I go ‘No!’ I’m looking for ‘reject all’.”

He’s irritated, too, by one of the banes of modern life – the constant need for big tech to update everything. And being Paul McCartney, he was able to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook personally at the gig last year to celebrate the ‘other’ Apple’s 50^th anniversary: “I don’t want updates!” he told him. “I just learned this lot! My feeling is: Look, I bought this device, it’s mine. So it should kinda do what I want.”

And what’s his favourite emoji? Go on – have a guess. “Thumbs up is a big one,” he says. Well, how could it be anything else?

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert came to an end last night (21 May) with a very special surprise guest – literally - switching off the lights: Paul McCartney.

Macca’s presence was significant since the show is, well, was filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, famous, of course, for being the site of the Beatles record-breaking appearance on Sullivan’s TV show in February 1964, seen by a mind-boggling 73 million Americans.

The 83-year-old Beatle, who releases his The Boys Of Dungeon Lane album next week, spoke about his memories of that first US TV appearance: “We were a little bit nervous, but we’re young kids and we’re sort of full of ourselves. It was very exciting. America’s where all the music we loved came from - rock ‘n’ roll, the blues and the whole thing, even going back to Fred Astaire. The land of the free; the greatest democracy,” he recalled, before adding, perhaps pointedly: “That was what it was, and still is, hopefully.”

And it was McCartney who played the show out with The Beatles' Hello Goodbye, which featured another of the last show’s guests, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, Louis Cato and Colbert himself on backing vocals. At the song’s Hawaiian-style coda, other guests from the show came on stage, then crew members, before the scene cut to Colbert and McCartney in the theatre’s basement, debating who should be the one to cut the power on the show.

Earlier on, Colbert had got to fulfil a long-time wish by performing Jump Up, a somewhat obscure Elvis Costello song, with its composer.

Back in 2012, in an interview with NPR Live, he spoke about his admiration: “I love the song because it’s sort of a satirical song… I’ve always loved that line ‘it’s a two-horse race, and he changes bets like it was another brand of cigarettes.’ And back, long before I did political satire, I thought, yeah, isn’t that interesting.”

And so departs one of the mainstays of late night TV, for it’s not just Colbert that’s leaving but The Late Show itself – CBS announced it was cancelling it last year, with the network claiming the decision was financial and nothing at all to do with Colbert’s criticism of Trump.

Music has always been a key part of the show’s format and its termination means there’s one less nightly slot for live music on network TV. Whatever your shade of politics, that has to be a crying shame.

Paul McCartney’s new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is being acclaimed as his best work for 20 years or more – and McCartney himself says that some of the credit should go to his producer Andrew Watt.

Speaking to MOJO magazine, McCartney admits that when he and Watt first met in April 2021 at the producer’s home in Los Angeles, he had some minor reservations about working with him. But as the project developed, these reservations disappeared.

McCartney recalls: “I came away from the first session thinking, ‘Well, I like him, but he’s a bit pushy.’ But pushy’s not a bad thing in a producer. It’s just enthusiasm from someone who wants to keep making this record. It’s infectious.”

McCartney also makes a telling comparison between The Boys Of Dungeon Lane and the albums that Watt has made with the Rolling Stones.

“If you’re working with the Stones, they’ve got the Stones sound,” he says. “It’s kind of the opposite with me – we’re trying not to do that.”

It was McCartney who recommended Watt to the Stones via a dinner with Ronnie Wood. Watt subsequently worked on the Stones’ 2023 album Hackney Diamonds and recently completed the band’s forthcoming follow-up Foreign Tongues, due for release on 10 July 2026.

McCartney tells MOJO that The Boys Of Dungeon Lane was conceived with a forward-thinking mindset: “The way we approached this album was, ‘We’ve done that before. Let’s do it different.’”

That said, in the making of this new album McCartney also made use of various items of vintage gear previously used by The Beatles during sessions at Abbey Road Studios in the ’60s but since installed in McCartney’s home in Sussex. These include the harmonium he played on The Beatles’ 1965 single We Can Work It Out and a Studer 4-track tape machine utilised in the creation of the classic Sgt. Pepper finale A Day In The Life.

The latter was especially intriguing to Andrew Watt, who tells MOJO: “I wanted to hear Paul McCartney make a song on that machine with that sound. The idea of committing to a sound and playing the part perfectly was so exciting to me.”

Watt also explains how McCartney would give himself the challenge of beginning the process of writing a song by playing a random chord to see where it led him.

For his part, McCartney says he remains, at the age of 83, endlessly fascinated by the creative process.

“Music is more intriguing than we know,” he says. “When you break it down scientifically, it’s just frequencies, which sounds very boring. But it’s amazing how these frequencies can come together to make notes, chords, songs, anthems, ballads. It’s magical.”

Paul McCartney has revealed a few more details about his upcoming duet with Ringo Starr.

It’s called Home To Us and will be featured on Macca’s new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which arrives at the end of this month. Interestingly, it also features Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas on backing vocals. And it’s out as a single this coming Friday (May 8).

The track was played – along with others from the new album – at a special fan playback event last night (May 5) at Abbey Road. McCartney was there in person and said of Home To Us: “Ringo went round to the studio and drummed a bit. I said to Andrew (Watt, producer), we should make a track and send it to him. So this song is done totally with Ringo in mind.”

“In writing the song, I’m talking about where we came from. In common with a lot of people, you come from nothing and you build yourself up.

"Ringo was from the Dingle, and that was well hard. He said he used to get mugged coming home, because he worked. Even though it was crazy, it was home to us,” he added.

“I made the song around that idea and sent it to Ringo. He sent me back a version where he just added some lines to the chorus, so I thought, maybe he doesn’t like it. I rang him and he said he thought I only wanted him to sing one or two lines, and I said I’d love to hear him sing the whole thing. So we took my first line, Ringo’s second line, and then we had a duet.”

“We’d never done that before. Then we wanted some backing vocals and I had the idea it would be nice to hear girls. Chrissie Hynde said she’d do it, and Sharleen Spiteri, they’re mates. So they did it.”

However, despite what you may read, it is not the first time the two surviving Beatles have duetted on a track before. Hardcore fans will know that back in 2010 they sang together on Walk With You, a rather sweet song on Ringo’s Y Not album. Going further back, Ringo also provided some backing vocals on Beautiful Night, one of the singles from Paul’s 1997 album, Flaming Pie. He appeared in the video too.

Anyway, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which McCartney described at the event last night as his “most introspective album to date” is out on May 29.

You may have seen the BBC documentary about Paul McCartney’s original Hofner, how it was lost and - incredibly - found 51 years later. Now the sound engineer and driver who worked for the Beatle in the early 1970s has talked about the awful moment he realised it had gone missing.

The fellow in question is Ian Horne, a 79 year old who now lives in Gloucestershire. It was Horne who drove Wings during their first university tour in February 1972. In October that year, after a recording session he and another crew member parked the Wings van in Ladbroke Grove. Locked inside were two guitars, including the Hofner bass.

In an interview with the BBC, Horne recalled what happened when he returned to the van the following morning. "The first thing I saw was the padlock on the floor. My heart skipped a beat. Shock, horror, horrendous feelings. Yeah, it was traumatic, really. It was that bad it was like someone passing away."

Horne hot-footed it round to McCartney’s home in St John’s Wood, where he gave the ex-Beatle the bad news. "I must have looked like a beaten man when I knocked on the door, expecting the worst. But he just very calmly said 'It's okay, Ian, I've got another one', and didn't freak out at all, which was fantastic.”

A remarkably restrained reaction, given that it was his favourite bass, one that he had bought in Hamburg in 1961 and had been a constant companion all through his incredible creative journey with the Beatles.

Though its owner took the loss calmly, Horne was quietly devastated by what had happened: "I was looking for it all my life, for 50 years. If I saw a tribute band or if I saw a Hofner I'd immediately go and have a look at it".

As we know, there is a happy ending to this tale. In 2023, it was discovered by Cathy Guest in her attic in Hastings, East Sussex, coincidentally a short drive from one of McCartney’s homes. The Hofner was dusted down and restored, and Macca ended up playing it live once more – for the first time in more than half a century – at his London O2 shows in December 2024.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it already, McCartney: The Hunt For The Lost Bass is on BBC iplayer now.

Paul McCartney returned to the stage over the weekend with a two-night stint in the comparatively intimate surroundings of the Fonda Theatre, Los Angeles.

Usually, of course, McCartney – one of the few individuals for whom that hackneyed phrase ‘living legend’ is applicable – plays arenas and stadiums, something he acknowledged early on, saying: “It’s great to be at these little gigs - I mean, it’s not that little.”

“It’s very lovely,” the 83-year-old ex-Beatle said of the venue, which used to be known as the Hollywood Music Box Theatre before it was named after Henry Fonda. “It’s good to see the whites of your eyes.”

The 23-song set covered all the Beatles and Wings classics you’d expect, plus the recent ‘last’ Beatles single, Now And Then, as well as a scattering of lesser heard McCartney songs, including Flaming Pie, Every Night and My Valentine.

Interestingly, there wasn’t room for the just-released new track Days We Left Behind (nor anything from the upcoming album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane). Why? The band are “in the process of learning it,” McCartney told the crowd. “But I’m glad you love it, yeah.”

Stage patter was kept to a minimum, with Macca alternating between piano and his iconic Hofner bass. But he did slip into some misty-eyed reminiscences about the Beatles’ first trip to the US in early 1964.

“We hadn’t really seen much, and we certainly hadn’t seen America, so it was pretty amazing,” he said. “What we used to notice was that all the guys in the audience were looking at the chords you were playing, and they’d study it… and we kind of liked that. And all the girls weren’t.”

Cue Beatlemania-style screams from the audience. “Yeah, the girls were screaming. Give us a Beatles scream!” Which in turn prompted another outpouring of appreciative shrieks.

And there was a shout-out to the VIPs. “Hello, people upstairs! The posh seats!” he said, greeting Dustin Hoffman and the documentary maker Morgan Neville, who made the recent McCartney in the '70s/Wings doc Man On The Run. “What a story!” he added, tongue protruding heavily from his cheek. “Well done, Morgan. You've done a good film.”

It’s the sound of spring condensed into four minutes. Paul McCartney’s Coming Up has a zesty, eager bounce in its step, entirely fitting for an iconic artist stepping into a new decade.

Nearly half a century on it’s one of the most enduring singles of his post-Beatles career. Played to the right crowd on the right occasion, it can still fill floors in 2026.

But though in retrospect it – and the McCartney II album – has been viewed as a fresh start for Macca, that’s not exactly how it was intended at the time. Coming Up was recorded in mid 1979, just after the release of Wings’ Back To The Egg album. The group were still very much a going concern at the time – they had tour dates pencilled in for the autumn.

Indeed, as late as October 1980, McCartney was still insisting, in an interview with Club Sandwich, that the band had a future: “It doesn’t mean Wings are going to split up,” he said of the McCartney II album. “It just means that for the time being, we’re doing solo things rather than a group project.”

Back in the summer of 1979, McCartney had a gap in his schedule and he used it in the way he knew best: working on new music. Working from home in Sussex, he used a hired Studer 16-track, plugging one microphone directly into the back of the machine. Later on, he moved up to his Scottish farmhouse – where he’d written the bulk of the first McCartney album a decade previously – and finished what were initially just exploratory recordings.

It was in Scotland where inspiration hit for Coming Up. “I went into the studio each day and just started with a drum track,” McCartney told Club Sandwich. “It is very much like sitting down with a few lumps of clay and putting down one after another until it makes itself into a face or something. In this case, it just made itself into the song.”

“Then I built it up bit by bit without any idea of how the song was going to turn out. After laying down the drum track, I added guitars and bass, building up the backing track. I did a little version with just me as the nutty professor, doing everything and getting into my own world like a laboratory. The absent-minded professor is what I go like when I’m doing those; you get so into yourself it’s weird, crazy. But I liked it.”

“Then I thought, ‘Well, OK, what am I going to do for the voice?’ I was working with a vari-speed machine with which you can speed up your voice, or take it down a little bit. That’s how the voice sound came about.

"It’s been speeded up slightly and put through an echo machine I was playing around with. I got into all sorts of tricks, and I can’t remember how I did half of them, because I was just throwing them all in and anything that sounded good, I kept. And anything I didn’t like, I just wiped.”

Coming Up, he summarised, was “very much like sitting down with a few lumps of clay and putting down one after another until it makes itself into a face or something. In this case, it just made itself into the song.”

Though other tracks on the album, like Temporary Secretary, were clearly experiments, Coming Up had clear commercial appeal. So it was not surprising that when Wings started touring that autumn, it became part of their set - “we wanted to do something the audience hadn’t heard before.” McCartney reasoned.

Wings would have probably played it on the Japanese tour scheduled for January 1980, but those gigs never happened.

McCartney was caught attempting to smuggle 250 grams of marijuana in through Narita Airport and spent nine days in jail for his trouble. Whether the ex-Beatle was trying to subconsciously trying to sabotage the tour, or he arrogantly thought his stardom would insulate him remains unclear to this day. But the tour was cancelled, Wings never played live again and on his return to the UK McCartney appears to have had a rethink about the material he’d recorded the previous summer.

He decided to go ahead and release it, initially as a double album, before it was (quite rightly) whittled down to a single. Coming Up was an obvious choice as the lead single. A live version of the same track, recorded with Wings at the Glasgow Apollo in the December was placed on the B side.

Curiously, for the US market, the sides were flipped. Columbia Records reasoned that American record buyers would rather hear Paul’s “real” voice.

Whatever, the single was a success on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK it raced up to Number Two, but got stuck behind Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Geno. In the US it reached Number One, his seventh chart topper since the Beatles’ demise.

It was helped along its way greatly by its video, which by the standards of 1980 was cutting-edge. You may recall it featured an impossibly boyish-looking Macca (he was 37 at the time) fronting a ten-piece big band. But on closer inspection all the musicians are… Paul McCartney disguised as other pop stars.

“The drummer character in the video I based loosely on John Bonham, who’s a friend of mine” McCartney confirmed in a 2024 Youtube interview. “One of the guitar players I based on Hank Marvin. One of the guys in a group called the Sparks (Ron Mael) was the pianist. I based characters on some people I knew, some people I’d seen. And I made up the rest up.”

Elsewhere, there’s a Frank Zappa, an Andy Mackay of Roxy Music and a Beatlemania version of himself (complete with Hofner bass) who shakes his head cutely during the ‘wooo’ bits at the end of each chorus. Linda is in there too, both as herself and in drag (king) mode.

And to cap it all, according to ‘Bonham’s’ drum head, the band are called The Plastic Macs – not just making the obvious point that – literally - all the instruments are played by the song’s author, but surely a little nod to his old partner’s one-off supergroup. For twelve years previously, at the Rolling Stones’ Rock N’ Roll Circus, John Lennon fronted a group called The Dirty Mac that contained Eric Clapton, Keith Richards (on bass!) and Mitch Mitchell.

But then Lennon was never far from his thoughts. Though the two men had not spent time together since 1976, they were in contact and still on cordial terms. Prior to the Japanese tour, McCartney had rung the Dakota and offered his friend “some dynamite weed” (presumably the stash that Japanese customs seized) and when he had been held in jail, Lennon had sent him a supportive message.

Billboard Number Ones were all well and good, but they were not as valuable to McCartney as a word of praise from the one man in the world he (musically) looked up to. So one can imagine how he felt when word got back that his erstwhile partner had not only heard Coming Up but liked it.

The apocryphal story is that Lennon exclaimed ‘F**k a Pig! It’s Paul!” when he chanced across the vari-speeded version of Coming Up on the radio some time that summer. Whether those were his exact words matters not. He was certainly impressed, apparently saying that he couldn’t get the track out of his head: “It’s driving me crackers!”

“I thought that Coming Up was great,” he elaborated later in 1980 in a video interview. “And I like the freak version that he made in his barn better than that live Glasgow one. If I’d have been with him, I’d have said, ‘That’s the one to do.’”

The two men had a long shared history of friendly competition. During the second half of their Beatles career they had effectively acted as each other’s editors, improving and inspiring each other to new heights of creativity.

Even as solo artists, this dialogue through music had continued. During the early 1970s, there had been sniping – McCartney’s Too Many People provoked Lennon’s scathing How Do You Sleep? which begat his ex-partner’s hurt response, Dear Friend. Come 1973/74 there seemed to be a rapprochement and Let Me Roll It from Band On The Run can be seen as a song inspired by Lennon’s recent work or even written to elicit approval from his friend.

With Coming Up, he finally had that approval once more. What’s more, Coming Up might have played a part in Lennon’s own return to music later that year. In that video interview, Lennon said: “If I’m impressed by a record on the (radio), I immediately want to write (a song). Warren Beatty said it about movies. ‘A great movie is one that makes you want to make a movie.'”

And word got back to McCartney that Coming Up was the song that had inspired him. “I heard a story from a guy who recorded with John in New York, and he said that John would sometimes get lazy,” McCartney later said. “But then he’d hear a song of mine where he thought, ‘Oh, s**t, Paul’s putting it in, Paul’s working!’ Apparently Coming Up was the one song that got John recording again. I think John just thought, ‘Uh oh, I had better get working, too.’”

The result, as we know, was Double Fantasy. And whilst Coming Up will always be redolent of fresh starts, optimism and positivity in general, there’s a poignancy there too – for it’s one of the last lines in the Lennon – McCartney conversation, the musical friendship that changed the world.

Back in 2001, California-born guitarist Rusty Anderson got the gig of a lifetime when he became a member of Paul McCartney’s band. And as he tells MusicRadar, his deep connection with McCartney’s music goes all the way back to his early childhood – when he was first inspired to pick up a guitar.

“At five years old, I heard my 11-year-old sister playing Beatles records,” Anderson recalls. “I was in awe of their mind-blowing music and their joyful vibe.

“My older brother had just passed away, so for me, real life was horrifying, yet music was magical and infinitely inspiring. At that point, music and guitar playing were all I cared about.”

As far as life goals go, it was music or bust for Anderson. “I guess I’m one of those insane people who put all of my eggs in the music business basket,” he laughs.

There were various missteps in Anderson’s career – a number of failed bands – before he developed into a top session player.

“I was just always tunnel-visioned about it,” he says. “I had lots of encouraging experiences, but also tons of rejections and times when I thought I and/or the band could have done better.”

But he feels as if it was all meant to be.

“Looking back, getting asked to play on other people’s records was a huge break,” he says. “It became a way for me to create, always attempting to add guitar hooks to the music, as well as survive financially.

“And eventually, after playing with many artists in the studio and on stage, like Elton John, The New Radicals, Lana Del Rey, Ricky Martin, Dido, Animal Logic et cetera, it led to playing with Paul McCartney in the recording studio.”

He explains: “The events went like this. In 2001, David Kahne invited me to play on the upcoming Paul McCartney album he was producing. I was thoroughly excited as you could imagine.”

The album in question was Driving Rain.

“There wasn’t exactly an audition,” Anderson says. “We just started recording, and it felt good. Paul seemed happy.”

He adds: “In 2002, that morphed into the current touring lineup of Paul McCartney, Abe Laborial Jr., Brian Ray, Wix Wickens and myself. Wix has been with Paul since 1989.”

Anderson’s debut solo record, Undressing Underwater, was released in 2001 and featured a guest appearance from his new employer.

He recalls: “After months of touring, I had the balls to ask Paul if he’d like to play on a song of mine. He actually said, ‘Yes.' So, I booked Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood. Along with David Kahne producing, Paul and the band went into the studio to record Hurt Myself. It was a new song I’d just written.

“Paul played bass and sang backing vocals along with me. He even played a cool guitar line in the intro. It was a surreal process. Lots of fun. David came up with some hooks in the chorus. It all happened pretty quickly with so much talent.”

While on tour with McCartney, Anderson keeps things pretty simple gear-wise.

“I’ve been using mostly Divided By Thirteen 9/15 amps with custom 2x12 speaker cabinets,” he says. “My main guitars are my signature Gibson ES-335 and also a Wraptail version, a Fender Strat with P90s, a ’64 Gibson ES-330, and a Danocaster Singlecut. There are also guitars just for other tunings.

“With Paul, I have a rack of pedals and effects that haven’t changed that much over the years. It’s like a pedalboard, but it doesn’t tend to break as much from stomping on it – knock on wood.

“I only use effects like a Memory Man delay, a Leslie, or whatever when it makes it sound better. For the most part, I try to avoid mushy guitar sounds that effects can cause.”

Anderson has also played on several of McCartney's albums, and as he explains it, the recording process is fairly straightforward.

“Paul just shows us the songs, and we start playing,” he shrugs. “We write charts and go.

“Usually, there is some sort of direction, and the texture of the song gets fleshed out. Sometimes he digs what we’re playing right away, and other times he has some brilliant idea or sonic adjustment suggestion.

“As far as wisdom goes, I’d say I use my intuition and trust my muse. And if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Although sometimes I’ll try.”

As for what Anderson enjoys most about digging into McCartney’s solo and Beatles back catalogue, he says, “Maybe I’m Amazed is always a fun song to play and sing. It’s got everything in one incredible tune, plus two guitar solos!

“But they are all fun to play, actually. It’s such a joy to play live music, especially with this group.

“It’s a spiritual experience. And with Paul leading the way and arguably some of the best songs ever written and the best crew, how can you lose?”

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Picture this scenario: one day in the summer of 1968 you sit down and write an achingly heartfelt song inspired by the beauty of the Scottish Highlands and six months later you record a version whose stripped-down instrumentation only elevates the emotive sentiment of the song.

Four months after that, the song is released but what you hear when the stylus drops on the acetate is radically different from the version that you remember.

Layered across the 3:30 running time of your composition is a prominent array of orchestral and choral overdubs. To be precise: eight violins, four violas, four cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars, and a 14-strong female choir.

For the writer of the song, Paul McCartney, the addition of such lavish orchestration and choral arrangements on his song came as an utter and unwelcome shock.

The first thing McCartney did was to write a blunt letter to the band’s business manager Allen Klein.

In his letter to Klein, McCartney demanded that many of the orchestral arrangements be lowered in volume and that the harp at the end be removed entirely.

McCartney had another instruction for Klein: “Don’t ever do it again,” he wrote. Then he called in the lawyers.

The details of McCartney’s response came to light in December 2024, when 300 pages of legal documents relating to The Beatles’ break-up came up for auction.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Denise Kelly of Dawson auctioneers told the BBC when the documents came under the auctioneer’s hammer on 8 December, 2024 – the 44th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

McCartney’s letter to Klein set in motion a convoluted stream of legal wrangles that would finally result in the official end of The Beatles on 29 December 1974, four years after the band themselves had broken up on 10 April 1970.

But for all the depressing legal implications that it sparked, The Long And Winding Road remains one of Paul McCartney’s finest and most personal compositions.

55 years after the song was released as a single, the song occupies an illustrious place in McCartney’s peerless back catalogue.

It was mid-August 1968 when Paul McCartney and his new girlfriend and future wife Linda Eastman left his house in London’s St John’s Wood and drove 550 miles north to High Park Farm, near Campbelltown on the Kintyre peninsula in the southwest of Scotland.

McCartney had bought the farm two years earlier on 17 June 1966 after reportedly being advised to invest in property. Actress Jane Asher, his girlfriend at the time, helped him choose the property.

By 1968, it proved the ideal place for McCartney to find solace away from the arguments and dissolving relationships within The Beatles. The remoteness and beauty of High Park Farm also made it a perfect location to write.

McCartney wrote Blackbird during that time at the farm and it seems likely that he also wrote Her Majesty then. It was certainly there that he came up with The Long And Winding Road.

“I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles,” McCartney told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration.”

In his 2010 book Fab: An Intimate Life Of Paul McCartney, writer Howard Sounes notes that the title The Long And Winding Road had its literal roots in the narrow B842 road on the Kintyre peninsula, “stretching up into the hills” of the remote Highland setting towards Campbeltown.

But the title also became a metaphor for the tensions that were threatening to pull The Beatles apart as well as the impending bittersweet end of McCartney’s relationship with the band.

McCartney was also expressing anguish over the direction of his personal life. “It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “The door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of."

The Long And Winding Road is essentially a piano ballad. McCartney has described the song as “slightly jazzy” which would have certainly fitted the style of its imagined recipient Ray Charles.

Written in the key of E-flat major, the song incorporates elements of its relative minor, C minor. For all the syrupy lushness of the orchestration on the original Phil Spector mix, the ascending horns actually imbue the song with all the stately melancholy of a Northern brass band.

Interestingly, it has no chorus and, unusually for The Beatles, no harmonies. Loss and nostalgia resonate throughout the song, which is both heartfelt and heartwarming, yet there’s a directness to McCartney’s gentle vocal delivery and arrangement that veers clear of overt sentimentality.

Melodically it soars and falls with marked shifts of emotion, punctuated by dramatically accented stops, such as at 47 seconds in when McCartney sings “The wild and windy night…”

His vocals sound natural and unforced, almost vulnerable at times, and with graceful vibrato as he shifts effortlessly through his range.

McCartney never sent the song to Ray Charles, but he did envisage it as a song written for another artist.

When he returned to London from Scotland, he recorded a demo of the song, during one of the sessions for the ‘White Album’.

He then offered the song to Tom Jones on the condition that Jones release it as his next single. Jones reportedly later recalled that he turned it down as his record label was about to issue Without Love as a single.

McCartney then sent a demo to Cilla Black, who would eventually release it in 1972.

By the start of 1969, however, McCartney had decided to record the song with The Beatles.

On 7 January 1969, during the band’s filmed footage at Twickenham Studios for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary Let It Be, McCartney premiered the song to the band.

When The Beatles relocated to their own hastily-created Apple Studio in the basement of their Saville Row offices, they recorded several takes of the song, on 26 January and again on 31 January 1969. These sessions were captured in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed 2021 three-part documentary Get Back .

The line-up in the studio was McCartney on lead vocals and piano, George Harrison on guitar, John Lennon on a Fender Bass VI six-string bass guitar, Ringo Starr on drums and guest pianist Billy Preston on Fender Rhodes electric piano.

Instrumentally, there are some stellar performances in The Long And Winding Road: McCartney’s simple and emotive piano performance, Ringo’s effortlessly fluid ride and hi-hats, George Harrison’s wonderfully subtle Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar flourishes through a Leslie speaker.

But one performance that was allegedly far from impressive was John Lennon’s bass line, as pointed out by Ian MacDonald in his acclaimed 1994 book Revolution In The Head.

“It features some atrocious bass-playing by Lennon, prodding clumsily around as if uncertain of the harmonies and making many comical mistakes,” wrote MacDonald. “Lennon’s crude bass playing on The Long And Winding Road, though largely accidental, amounts to sabotage when presented as finished work.”

Despite such misgivings, MacDonald was awestruck by McCartney’s achievements on the song. “The Long and Winding Road is one of the most beautiful things McCartney ever wrote. Its words, too, are among his most poignant, particularly the reproachful lines of the brief four-bar middle section. A shame Lennon didn't listen more generously.”

Criticisms of Lennon’s playing on the song were highlighted by music critics and fans when the song was released as a single on 11 May 1970 and became The Beatles’ 20th and final No.1 single in the US Billboard Hot 100.

In reviews of the album Let It Be, released three days earlier than the single on 8 May 1970, many reviews criticised Spector’s use of orchestration. Rolling Stone’s critic John Mendelsohn was particularly damning of Spector, concluding: “He's rendered The Long And Winding Road ... virtually unlistenable with hideously cloying strings and a ridiculous choir”.

In the years and decades that followed Paul McCartney harboured a sense of disappointment over the mixing over some of the tracks on Let It Be and particularly The Long And Winding Road. A chance meeting in the early 2000s with the Let It Be director Michael Lindsey-Hogg sparked a discussion about releasing a remixed, stripped-down version of the original Let It Be album to accompany the film.

Before his death on 29 November 2001, George Harrison gave his approval for such a project and McCartney then received Ringo Starr’s and Yoko Ono’s agreement to release a remixed, stripped-down version of the album.

Apple’s Neil Aspinall then picked up the phone to call Abbey Road veteran engineer Allan Rouse, asking him to take a stab at remixing it.

On 17 November 2003, Let It Be… Naked was released. Of all the tracks on this remixed and reimagined album, The Long And Winding Road underwent the most profound transformation. Stripped of Spector’s schmaltzy strings, the raw purity of the song emerges as McCartney and the band always imagined it.

McCartney wasn’t the only one delighted with the remixed version of The Long And Winding Road. Ringo Starr too was elated.

“The Long And Winding Road blew me away without the strings,” Starr told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “There’s nothing wrong with Phil’s strings, this is just a different attitude to listening. But it’s been 30-odd years since I’ve heard it without all that and it just blew me away.”

In his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, McCartney delves into the background and impact of The Long And Winding Road.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of this song is that it seems to resonate in very powerful ways,” he wrote. “For those who were there at the time, there seems to be a double association of terrific sadness and also a sense of hope.”

He went on to add that the song’s distinctive sound was due to him attempting to imitate other artists to “keep things fresh.”

“Often when I write a song, I do a bit of a disappearing act myself,” said McCartney. “For example, I imagine it having been recorded by somebody else – in this case Ray Charles.

“There’s always someone else you can invoke,” he continued. “You can put on a mask and a cloak as you’re writing something, and it takes away a lot of the anxiety. You discover as you get through it that it wasn’t a Ray Charles song anyway; it was yours. The road leads not to Campbeltown, but to somewhere you never expected.”

One day in October 1972, Paul McCartney received a phone call from Ron Kass, head of Apple Records. McCartney liked Kass and they got on well. After chatting for a while, Kass casually asked McCartney, “You don’t have any interest in doing a Bond film, do you?”

It’s a moment recalled by McCartney in his 2023 book The Lyrics.

“Writing a Bond song is a bit of an accolade,” he wrote, “and I always had a sneaking ambition to do it.”

But in that moment he played it cool.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I’d probably be interested’,” he recalled, “trying not to seem too enthusiastic.”

Ron Kass knew someone in the Bond movie franchise and let them know that McCartney was interested. From that point on things moved quickly.

The screenplay for what would become the eighth film in the series wasn’t finished, but Kass told McCartney it was an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s second Bond novel, Live And Let Die.

The song that McCartney came up with was the first rock song to open a Bond film.

It was also a bold and audacious composition.

Live And Let Die would go on to become one of the greatest Bond theme songs, fuelling the success of the film and seriously upping McCartney’s standing as a solo artist.

The song reached No.2 in both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK singles chart, winning a Grammy and being nominated for Best Song at the 1973 Oscars.

For McCartney, it was a welcome commission and a song that is still a staple of his setlist over five decades on.

When Paul McCartney began work on Live And Let Die, he and his band Wings were nearing the end of recording their second album, Red Rose Speedway, the follow-up to the poorly received album Wild Life (1971).

The line-up of Wings at that stage featured McCartney and wife Linda alongside guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Denny Laine, lead guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell.

As soon as McCartney received a copy of Fleming’s book, he sat down and read the book in one day.

“It’s a real page-turner,” he recalled. “I just spent that afternoon immersing myself in the book, so when I sat down to write the song , I knew how to approach it.”

McCartney outlined the lyrical premise of the song in the 2013 biography Man On The Run. “I thought, ’Live and let die – okay, really what they mean is live and let live, and there’s the switch.’ So I just thought, ’When you were younger you used to say that, but now you say this.’”

He pushed on with this idea, playing on the phrase ‘live and let live’ in the evocative opening verse: “When you were young/And your heart was an open book/You used to say live and let live/But if this ever changin’ world/In which we live in/Makes you give in and cry/Say live and let die.”

Productive as ever, McCartney then wrote the song the following day.

“I think I read the book on a Saturday,” he recalled in the The Lyrics, “and I sat down at my piano in the living room and spent that Sunday putting it together.”

As chance would have it, producer George Martin had already been tasked with providing the orchestral score for Live And Let Die. This would be the first time since the recording of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album that McCartney and Martin had worked together.

“It was a joy,” wrote McCartney in The Lyrics. ”I showed him the chords and how the song was structured, and the central riff.”

McCartney already knew that he wanted explosions in the song but says he left the “Bondian” arrangements to Martin.

“His score was pure George,” McCartney recalled, “that perfect, stated balance of grandiose, without being over the top. I was very happy with that.”

In the 1982 book The Record Producers by Stuart Grundy and John Tobler, George Martin spoke about his collaboration with McCartney on this song. “It all started with Paul ringing me up and saying, ‘Look, I’ve got a song for a film. Would you produce it and arrange it for me?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and spent some time with him at his house going through the thing, and from my point of view, we were making a record, so I didn’t spare any expense and booked a large orchestra.”

Martin knew from the outset that he wanted McCartney and Wings to be on the recording.

“I said, ‘This is the way we’ll do it – we’ll do it with Wings, and work on the session with just the group, and then in the evening I’ll bring in the orchestra, but we’ll still keep Wings there, and try to do it live altogether, to try to get a live feeling to it.’ And that was what we did.”

It was an inspired decision. The live performances by the band and the orchestra are what gives the track real dynamism.

“It was at AIR Studio, with the orchestra live in the room with us,” Denny Laine told Bill DeMain of Guitar World in 2023. “We captured the excitement of a performance, which I think is why the record was so powerful.”

The Live And Let Die film ushered in a whole new era for the Bond franchise as it was the first to feature Roger Moore in the starring role. Fittingly, McCartney’s theme song also marked a significant change and featured dramatic shifts in style and pace.

The song opens with plaintive piano chords, and there’s a rich fullness to McCartney’s voice, which sounds double-tracked but isn’t.

It’s a simple ascending chord structure – G-Bm7-C-D7(b9) – with a soft, reflective mood, which shifts dramatically 33 seconds as the full-on bombast of the orchestra and Henry McCullough’s Les Paul kicks in.

At 0:47, the whole track breaks into a 150bpm instrumental gallop, with strings delivering the song’s iconic staccato motif, before trills of flute and Ray Cooper’s skilful percussion bolster the frenetic, driving pace.

At 1:21, the track drops suddenly to just Wings, playing a lilting reggae groove. This middle section of the song was written by Linda McCartney on the same Sunday in October 1972 that Paul created the song at the piano. The nod to reggae is apt, given the Jamaican locations in the film.

At 1:36, the full heft of the orchestra re-enters the mix, before the song returns to McCartney’s verse structure, as a beautifully emotive violin part emulates his top line vocal melody.

McCartney then delivers the second verse and at 2:21, on the word “die” the massive orchestral stabs strike up again.

Then, it’s more of the instrumental gallop right through to the end, with George Martin’s brilliant, sweeping string arrangements building in intensity up to the closing crescendo and fade.

The whole song lasts just over three minutes, but it packs in a whirling, giddy rush of styles and emotions, while exuding all the drama and action-packed fizz and excitement you would expect from a Bond theme song.

In his 1979 memoir, All You Need Is Ears, George Martin recalled playing an acetate of the recording to Harry Saltzman, who co-produced the Bond films with Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli. Martin was not expecting what came next.

“He sat me down and said, ‘Great. Like what you did, very nice record, like the score. Now tell me, who do you think we should get to sing it?’

“That took me completely aback. After all, he was holding the Paul McCartney recording we had made. And Paul McCartney was… Paul McCartney.

“But he was clearly treating it as a demo disc. ‘I don’t follow. You’ve got Paul McCartney,’ I said. ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s good. But who are we going to get to sing it for the film?’ ‘I’m sorry. I still don’t follow,’ I said, feeling that maybe there was something I hadn’t been told. ‘You know – we’ve got to have a girl, haven’t we?’”

The idea that the producers wanted a female voice such as Shirley Bassey or Thelma Houston rather than Paul McCartney is a view that has been widely reported and backed up by McCartney himself over the years.

But in their 2022 book The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-1973, writers Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair unearthed research that suggested the producers always wanted McCartney from the very start.

Sinclair noted that the archival material – internal communications between lawyers and others representing McCartney and the Bond producers, Eon Productions – “undermines the story and shows it in a very different light”.

One of the documents is from Ron Kass to Harry Saltzman at Bond producers, Eon Productions. This stated that “Paul McCartney has agreed to write the title song entitled Live and Let Die. He and his musical group Wings will perform the title song under the opening titles.”

“So we can pretty definitively say that they were not going to replace Paul,” said Kozinn. “One of the versions was going to be with Wings, which would play over the opening titles of the film and the closing credits. There would be a live version of the song performed during the club scene by BJ Arnau, a soul singer. When we saw those documents we couldn’t help but think it was just a misunderstanding.”

Live And Let Die would help revitalise Paul McCartney’s creative standing and would soon be incorporated into Wings’ live setlist.

Critics by and large lauded the song. A retrospective review in Billboard concluded that it was “the best 007 movie theme” and one of McCartney’s most satisfying singles. Cash Box, another music industry trade magazine, said the song was “absolutely magnificent in every respect”.

Ian MacDonald of NME was less enthused. “It's not intrinsically very interesting, but the film will help to sell it and vice versa," he wrote.

For McCartney, Live And Let Die plays a prominent role in his post-Beatles back catalogue and in his live set.

“It’s still a big show tune for us to this day,” he wrote in the conclusion of his entry on the song in his book Lyrics, adding that he still likes watching responses on the audiences’ faces when the pyrotechnics kick in.

18 years after its release, Live And Let Die re-emerged in the charts as a cover version, going on to reach top ten in nine countries.

“Guns N’ Roses did a version of it,” recalled McCartney, “ and the interesting thing was that my kids went to school and said, ’My dad wrote that’ and their friends said, ‘No, he didn’t. It’s Guns N’ Roses!’ Nobody would believe them.

“But I was very happy that they’d done it. It was a pretty good version actually… I always like people doing my songs. It’s a great compliment.”

Another day, another AI ‘controversy’.

This one sees the BBC under fire (plus ca change...) for featuring an artist who uses AI on one of its BBC Introducing shows.

The artist in question is Papi Lamour, who appeared on BBC Radio WM’s BBC Introducing show last Thursday and discussed how he makes tracks with the host Theo Johnson. Lamour uses AI prompts to create the music, in a similar way to Xania Monet’s creator, Tulisha ‘Nikki’ Jones.

This appeared to irk another Brummie songwriter, Mollyxo, who criticised the decision to feature Lamour onina TikTok video, which went viral as quick as you can say ‘BBC scandal’.

“It made me wonder what I’ve put in all this work for,” Mollyxo said in a subsequent interview with Rolling Stone UK. “I’ve spent time uploading song after song to BBC Introducing, doing gigs, working with songwriters and producers and spending 20 years of my life learning how to be good at music. To hear someone get rewarded so quickly for something made by AI is just so disappointing.”

She continued: “I’ve spoken to a lot of artists who have dealt with BBC Introducing West Midlands. We want to understand how a pre-recorded interview where AI music was the focus made it to air. They could have made a decision to say, actually no, we’re not going to add this.”

The BBC responded saying, in a statement: “Each track is considered based on its musical merit and whether it is right for our target audience, with decisions made on a case-by-case basis”.

“We would always make it clear to listeners if we were playing AI, as in this case where the broadcaster made it clear that AI was involved in the construction of the song.”

As for Lemour, he posted a succinct TikTok video in response that pointed out: “Jealousy shouts, kindness thinks, and courage keeps creating. Never let the noise of small minds drown the work of a big one.”

Meanwhile in more AI-related shenanigans, Paul McCartney has added his weight to the ongoing campaign to persuade the government not to allow AI firms to use copyrighted material to train their models.

You may recall that back in February a coalition of artists released Is This What We Want?, a silent album in protest of the government’s plans. Well, the vinyl version of the album is being released soon and it comes with the bonus of an added (silent) track by the ex-Beatle.

McCartney has said of AI: “We’ve got to be careful about it because it could just take over and we don’t want that to happen, particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who, it may be the only way they[’re] gonna make a career.”

It looks like the UK government is going to attempt to fudge a compromise on this issue. Responding to McCartney’s intervention, a government spokesperson said: “We’ve always been clear on the need to work with both the creative industries and AI sector to drive AI innovation and ensure robust protections for creators. We are bringing together both British and global companies, alongside voices beyond the AI and creative sectors, to ensure we can capture the broadest possible range of expert views as we consider next steps.”

Meanwhile, you can pre-order a vinyl copy of Is This What We Want? with the McCartney bonus track included now. Other artists ‘performing’ on the album include Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer and Damon Albarn.

Paul McCartney’s memoir of his immediate post-Beatles years, Wings: The Story Of a Band On the Run is out this week and over the weekend the Guardian ran an exclusive extract.

The portion they went with focuses on the earliest days of his solo career, from autumn 1969. That September, John Lennon had told the other Beatles that he was leaving the group, but all four had agreed to keep their demise a secret for the time being. McCartney was in limbo.

Exhausted by the business and legal wrangling that had driven a wedge between him and his friends, and still at the bargaining stage of his own grief at the Beatles split, he and his new wife Linda retreated to the Scottish farmhouse he had bought in 1966.

More than anything, he needed time and space to think. “When I think back on it, the isolation was just what we needed,” McCartney writes. “Despite the harsh conditions, the Scottish setting gave me the time to create.”

This entailed learning how to shear sheep and how to make a table, but also being Paul McCartney, he started recording. “So I got the four-track machine in the house and just started doing bits and pieces. I would sit around the house with a guitar. From that, I started writing; just making instrumental pieces.

"It’s something I still like to do to this day. That was how it started: just me in the living room at home, with the machine. I wasn’t trying to aim for popular success. I was just doing this because it was fun… It meant I hadn’t given up. It was some kind of continuum.”

These were the songs that would end up on McCartney, the solo album that would be released the following April. “I didn’t really think it was going to be an album. It was just me recording for the sake of it. I’d get up and think about breakfast and then wander into the living room to do a track.

"The spirit of the times was, do it yourself, keep it simple, don’t get overblown. You’ve done the Beatles, you’ve done A Day in the Life, you’ve done Sgt Pepper. Now come back to basics.”

The standout on the album is, of course, Maybe I’m Amazed; one of McCartney’s greatest love songs and one that highlights the role Linda played in helping her husband recover from his heartbreak at the Beatles’ split. “I was trying to put into words how it felt to be a young married person starting a life with this lovely girl, who I didn’t really know yet, but I was getting to know her. So there was a feeling of nervousness. Maybe I’m afraid of this thing? Which is true. The whole thing is scary when you fall in love with someone. There’s two sides. Yeah, it’s blissful. But then there’s also this scary side.”

“(I) played the piano, drums, and the guitar solo, bass. Then we did some harmonies, and Linda was very good. We used to do that for fun around the house… We’d split off into these two parts. We’d work out how to do it. So Maybe I’m Amazed was me being amazed and afraid at the same time of being a grownup in a marriage for the first time ever.”

Wings: The Story Of a Band On the Run is published this coming Thursday (November 6).

Paul Mescal, who as we set know is set to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ upcoming series of Beatles biopics, has been talking about his training for the role.

For a start - and as you might expect - he has been learning to play guitar and bass left-handed.

“It’s been pretty intense,” the actor said in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “It would just be crazy to not play it left-handed, you know? You’d be like, ‘Nah. I like [McCartney] a lot, but I don’t love him.’ That would be the messaging if I didn’t play left-handed. And he’s the fucking coolest man on planet Earth, I think.

“I’ve always been a massive admirer of his music generally, but the thing I’m in total admiration for is his work ethic, [which was] absolutely relentless. I think it’s just an objective fact that the work that he made has changed the world.”

As part of his preparation, Mescal met – and even played with - the man himself. “I will never forget it as long as I live,” he said. “That’s the coolest thing that my job has ever afforded me. I was kinda having an out of body experience, like [thinking] I was in drama school nine years ago and now I’m sitting here opposite Paul McCartney and we’re playing Blackbird. To be sat in front of somebody playing one of the most famous, most covered songs of all time. But then to be sat in front of the person who that came out of his mind, I was like, 'I love my job.'"

Then there’s the reading. Mescal has been busy absorbing Ian Leslie’s acclaimed book John & Paul: A Love Story In Song. “He reframes this whole relationship for me. We understand it as something that became incredibly antagonistic, which it was for a period, but also it was, to my mind, the greatest creative collaboration that we’ve maybe ever had as human beings - definitely in modern times.”

He is, he admits “obsessed” with the Beatles at the moment. “It’s part of my job, but it’s also the way that my brain is wired. I’m excited about listening to music, writing music, absorbing music, going to shows, all of these things - they start with an intensity with the job and then kind of become my personality for a bit.”

The search for Paul McCartney’s missing Höfner 500/1 bass guitar is to be told in a new documentary.

Titled, The Beatle And The Bass, the film unpacks all the drama behind the search for McCartney’s ‘Violin’ bass, which went missing in 1972, reportedly stolen out of the back of a van in London (some reports say Ladbroke Grove, others Notting Hill) and was subsequently the subject of a global hunt led by investigative journalists Scott and Naomi Jones.

Spoilers ahead: we know how this movie ends, or at least, how the search for the bass went.

The Lost Bass Project was successful. It located the stolen Höfner in September 2023. McCartney was reunited with it in February 2024. And in December 2024 it made a dramatic return to the stage for the climax of Macca’s triumphant Got Back 2024 Tour at London’s 02 Arena, with McCartney welcoming Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood to the stage to perform Get Back.

It was the first time in over 50 years that he had played it in anger.

McCartney completed a historic night by bringing fellow Beatle Ringo Starr onstage to sit in with him on drums for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.

As reported by Variety, The Beatle And The Bass has been commissioned by BBC Arts and will be produced by Passion Pictures, the company behind the award-winning Christopher Reeve documentary, Super/Man. McCartney will play a starring role.

“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back, especially if it has sentimental value,” he said. “It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, where did it go? There must be an answer…”

McCartney got his answer when the bass turned up in the attic of someone’s house in Suffolk, England. But some answers only invite more questions. How did it get there? What has it been doing all of this time?

We do know where this story started. McCartney got this bass right at the beginning of the Beatles, when they’d swapped Liverpool for Hamburg and were cutting their teeth playing clubs night after night. McCartney went gear shopping and it caught his eye.

“I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg, near a big department store called Karstadt,” said McCartney, speaking with Tony Bacon in 1994. “And I saw this bass in the window, this violin-shaped Höfner. It was a good price, because my dad had always said I shouldn’t do the never-never [buy on credit], but we were earning reasonable money. I liked the Höfner’s lightness, too. So I bought it, and I think it was only about 30 quid.”

Having found McCartney’s Höfner, The Lost Bass Project has turned its attention to another of guitar’s great mysteries, the whereabouts of the Gibson ES-345 that Michael J Fox as Marty McFly played during Back To The Future.

The Joneses have officially been put on the case as Gibson’s global hunt for one of the most iconic electric guitars in pop culture continues. It is still missing, but Gibson CEO and president Cesar Gueikian teased a Custom Shop replica release of the McFly ES-345, which appears to be anachronistically badged as a “1955” model. Cute. Accurate to the movie, not to the model’s history.

That hunt, too, will surely be a documentary in the making – if they can find it. But then the best mysteries are those we can't solve. Come to think of it: has anyone seen Eric Clapton's 'Beano' Les Paul?

Paul McCartney has been talking about how exposure to avant-garde music enhanced the Beatles in the late '60s and coloured some of their greatest work.

Macca has been interviewed by Radio 3 presenter Elizabeth Alker for her upcoming book Everything We Do Is Music, which explores the links between pop and classical music. In a piece in the Guardian, Alker describes meeting the ex-Beatle in his office as he remembers how he educated himself about experimental music.

McCartney saw experimental composer Cornelius Cardew in concert, attended a lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen about synthesised music and met Delia Derbyshire. By 1966 all this background work was flowing into the Beatles' music.

The first track to benefit from this new type of thinking was Tomorrow Never Knows, for which McCartney set up a couple of Brenell tape machines to create loops. “I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all mixed together.

"There could have been a guitar solo in it – straightforward or wacky – but when you put the tape loops in, they take it to another place because when they play, you get all these kind of happy accidents. They’re unpredictable and that suited that track. We used those tricks to get the effect we wanted.”

The following year brought I Am The Walrus, which in many ways went even further out. “(John) Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he says, “and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations.

"I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”

Interestingly, McCartney said he wanted to use this new technology “in a controlled way”, still working within the limits of a three-minute pop song.

When the less cautious Lennon got his hands on a pair of Brenell machines, the result was Revolution 9, the extraordinary cut-up piece that must have astonished (and terrified) the group’s audience when they heard it for the first time on the White Album in late 1968.

But by bringing these elements into pop music, both Beatles were gently pushing their audience – and thus popular culture – forward. “You think, ‘Oh well, our audience wants a pop song,’” McCartney says.

“And then you might read about William Burroughs using the cut-up technique and you think, ‘Well, he had an audience, and his audience liked what he did.’ And eventually we decided that our audiences would come along with us, rather than it being down to us to feed them a conventional diet.”

Anyway, Alker’s book Everything We Do Is Music sounds fascinating. It’s out via Faber & Faber on August 28.

On the morning of Thursday 19 January 1967, the four members of The Beatles arrived at Studio One of EMI Studios Abbey Road to record the song that is now regarded by many as the greatest composition they ever created.

The song was A Day In A Life, a magisterial and mind-blowing achievement that was unlike anything that had gone before.

It was chosen as the closing track on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – it had to be, nothing else could follow it – and when the final gargantuan E major piano chord crescendo is played simultaneously by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr and roadie Mal Evans (along with producer George Martin on harmonium), it marks an emotive and iconic closure to one of the most momentous songs in recording history.

In many ways, the creation of A Day In The Life is two wholly separate yet intertwined stories: the writing of the song and the arduous technical challenges that had to be overcome to realise it.

It was the morning of 18 December, 1966 when John Lennon reportedly sat down at the piano at his home Kenwood, in Surrey, after reading two articles in The Daily Mail that would inspire the lyrics for A Day In The Life.

The first was about Tara Browne, a 21-year-old millionaire playboy and a friend of Paul McCartney’s, who had been killed in a car crash after driving his Lotus Elan through a red light in South Kensington and crashing into a stationary van.

As Lennon began to construct a chord sequence, the lines began to form. “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared…”

The next story that caught Lennon’s attention was a piece about potholes.

“I was writing the song with the Daily Mail propped up in front of me on the piano,” recalled Lennon in 1967, ”There was a paragraph about 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered.”

By mid-January, the melody and most of the lyrics were written, and Lennon went to McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood to present the song to him.

In his book The Lyrics, McCartney recalls that the song’s opening lines were actually a joint effort. It was also McCartney who contributed the song’s pivotal line, “I’d love to turn you on”.

“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on A Day In The Life,” Lennon told Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, in 1970.

Lennon continued: “The way we wrote a lot of the time: you'd write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”

When Lennon first sang A Day In The Life to the band in the studio, they wanted to record the track immediately.

At that point, the song had the working title of ‘In The Life Of …’ and it featured Lennon on piano, McCartney on Hammond organ, George Harrison on acoustic guitar and Ringo Starr on congas.

They taped four takes of the rhythm track, at which point Lennon switched to acoustic guitar, while McCartney was on piano and Harrison was on maracas.

Despite swift progress, there was one obstacle – a 24-bar gap in the middle of the song that they didn’t know how to fill.

They decided to simply leave the 24 bars blank and then decide later what to put in that gap on the tape.

Mal Evans, the band’s longstanding tour manager and roadie, was allocated the task of counting off the bars during the recording and then setting an alarm clock off at the start of the 24th bar to let the band know it was almost time to resume playing.

The recording mics picked up this alarm and engineer Geoff Emerick was unable to eliminate it from the mix.

While Lennon had most of the song in place, he was unsure how to proceed. “For the first bit, [John] said to me, ‘I don’t know where to go from here,” recalled George Martin in the book All You Need Is Ears. “So, Paul said, ‘Well, I’ve got this other song I’ve been working on. What do you think of it?’. This ended up being the middle bit and so they joined the two bits together to make one song.”

In direct contrast to Lennon’s part, the middle eight section that McCartney came up with was bouncy and upbeat.

And in a remarkable stroke of luck, its lyrics related directly to the sound of Mal Evans’ alarm clock. “Woke up, got out of bed/Dragged the comb across my head”.

This section was designed to follow whatever they decided to put in the 24-bar gap.

Lennon suggested creating something that started out small and grew into something huge.

McCartney was drawn to this idea and suggested that they could achieve this with a full orchestra.

George Martin assured them that there was no way that EMI would pay for a full orchestra to record 24 bars of music. Then, in a suggestion so simple that it borders on near-genius, Ringo suggested they simply hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.

As it turned out, the orchestral segment was recorded multiple times, filling a separate four-track tape machine, and then four different recordings were overdubbed into one single massive crescendo.

The orchestral part was recorded on 10 February 1967 in the vast Studio One at EMI Studios, with Martin and McCartney conducting a 40-piece orchestra.

The total cost of hiring the musicians for the session was £367 (equivalent to £8,512 in 2025), which, even for a Beatles session, was deemed an extravagance.

Martin set about writing the framework of a score for the orchestral musicians as the part they were being asked to improvise was more akin to avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.

“What I did there was to write … the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra,” recalled Martin in All You Need Is Ears. “At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note … near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar … Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”

In the spirit of the time, The Beatles hosted the orchestral session as a ’60s-style happening, with guests such as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Pattie Boyd, Donovan and Michael Nesmith sashaying through the studio doors in their psychedelic finery.

The Beatles asked the orchestral musicians to wear costume pieces with their formal wear.

“When I went back into the studio the sight was unbelievable,” recalled George Martin. “The orchestra leader, David McCallum, who used to be the leader of the Royal Philharmonic, was sitting there [with] a bright red false nose. He looked up at me through paper glasses. Eric Gruenberg, now a soloist and once leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was playing happily away, his left hand perfectly normal on the strings of his violin, but his bow held in a giant gorilla’s paw.”

Recording separate run-throughs by the half-orchestra presented a challenge.

Three of the four tracks on the multi-track master tape were already filled and Martin and Emerick needed a minimum of two tracks to record the orchestra’s run-throughs of the crescendo.

Martin then sought the help of EMI Studios technical manager, Ken Townsend.

As Townsend recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recordings: “George Martin came up to me that morning and said to me ‘Oh Ken, I’ve got a poser for you. I want to run two four-track tape machines together this evening. I know it’s never been done before, can you do it?’

“So I went away and came up with a method whereby we fed a 50 cycle tone from the track of one machine then raised its voltage to drive the capstan motor of the second, thus running the two in sync.

"Like all these things, the ideas either work first time or not at all. This one worked first time.”

On 20 January and 3 February 1967, the track was refined with additional overdubs and remixing.

In the latter session, McCartney and Ringo Starr re-recorded their bass and drum parts respectively.

In The Beatles Anthology (2000), Ringo discussed his drum fills in A Day In The Life.

“I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song,” Ringo said. “For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' – boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood."

The final overdub was the huge, climactic piano and harmonium chord, recorded on 22 February 1967.

By then, most of the people who had been present at the recording of A Day In The Life were aware that what they were hearing marked a profound shift in popular music.

David Crosby of The Byrds was one of the first outsiders to hear A Day In The Life, when he visited The Beatles at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road on 24 February, 1967. He recalled his reaction when he heard the song.

"Man, I was a dish-rag,” Crosby told writer John Harris for a March 2007 feature in Mojo magazine. “I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that.”

Ron Richards, producer of The Hollies, was among the EMI staff attending the half-orchestra recording for the 24-bar section. In his book The Complete Beatles Recordings, Mark Lewisohn describes Richards as sitting "with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I just can't believe it ... I give up’.”

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on 26 May, 1967.

As the closing song on the album, A Day In The Life was the subject of intense scrutiny.

In a review in The New York Times, published on 18 June 1967, critic Richard Goldstein called the song “a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric” going on to write that A Day In The Life “stands as one of the most important Lennon–McCartney compositions … [and] an historic pop event”.

Almost 60 years on, A Day In The Life is widely regarded as The Beatles’ greatest song.

Both haunting and hummable, it is the most forward-looking song on Sgt. Pepper and one that contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with the extraordinary and the existential.

Its power rests on it being the true sum of its parts, a song that captures the combined brilliance of The Beatles.

Paul McCartney has named his three favourite albums and not surprisingly has named one he has long talked up as the greatest all of time.

The ex-Beatle was replying to a fan query on his own website. He said: “My favourite albums by other people tend to be: Music from Big Pink by The Band, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, and Harvest by Neil Young.”

“They are the three classics that I love to listen to, and they all remind me of certain times in my life. When I perform my own songs, the great thing is that they often bring back memories of recording them. That can often entail memories of John and George in the studio - sweet memories!”

Macca has often spoken about how much Pet Sounds has meant to him and God Only Knows in particular. When interviewed by BBC Radio in 2007 he described it as: “one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian”.

Back in 2002, the two giants of songwriting, born within a few days of each other in June 1942, performed the song in Los Angeles. “I’ve actually performed it with him, and I’m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down,” recalled McCartney of that night. “It was just too much to stand there singing this song that does my head in and to stand there singing it with Brian.”

McCartney was one of a horde of cultural figures to pay tribute to Wilson recently: "The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time,” he said when his death was announced earlier this month.“How we will continue without Brian Wilson, 'God Only Knows'. Thank you, Brian.”

He may be retiring from live performance in a couple of weeks’ time, but Ozzy Osbourne still has one musical ambition left – a duet with Paul McCartney.

This unlikely wish was revealed on Ozzy’s SiriusXM show Ozzy Speaks, which he co-hosts with Billy Morrison.

It came about when conversation turned to collaborations and Morrison asked Ozzy if there were any people he’d like to do a duet with.

“Paul McCartney,” Ozzy immediately shot back with, to which Morrison responded: “I think it’s good that we have this show so we can both say, ‘Paul, if you’re listening, it’s about time,’ with a sheepish Ozzy adding, “No, I would be honoured but I couldn’t…”

Morrison then asked why Ozzy of all people would be hesitant to do the duet, insisting, “Why not? … Put it out into the universe. You never know.”

Exactly. Although down the years Macca has been picky about who he collaborates with, when he has done one it’s usually been with a big name in a particular genre. We all remember those 1980s link ups with Stevie Wonder (Ebony And Ivory) and Michael Jackson (Say Say Say and – urgh! - The Girl Is Mine) but the ex-Beatle has also worked with artists as varied as Tony Bennett, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello and George Michael. Within the rock/metal world, Ozzy is easily as big a name as those figures..

Later on in the podcast, Ozzy mentioned that he has met McCartney before - “He’s a really nice man,” he said. He also rated his duet with Lita Ford on Close My Eyes Forever as the best he’s ever done.

Beyoncé has said goodbye to her London residency with some warm words for the man who wrote one of the songs she performed during each of her six performances at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

We’re talking, of course, about Paul McCartney’s Blackbird, a reworked version of which appeared on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and is being sung by the star at each stop on the corresponding tour.

And while the much-hoped-for London appearance from the former Beatle sadly didn’t happen - that’s got to be on the cards at some point, surely? - Beyoncé did offer a sartorial nod to his family by wearing some of his daughter Stella’s clothes, and she’s now paid tribute to McCartney senior in an Instagram post.

“Thank you, Sir Paul McCartney, for writing one of the best songs ever made,” she wrote. “Every time I sing it I feel so honored. And it is a full circle moment to wear your beautiful daughter’s design.”

Beyoncé’s thank you follows the appreciative post that McCartney delivered in the wake of Cowboy Carter’s release, in 2024.

"I am so happy with Beyoncé’s version of my song Blackbird,” he said on Instagram. “I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place. I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out. You are going to love it!”

Beyoncé’s new message, meanwhile, also included a shout out to the estimated 275,000 people who came to see her during the course of her six London shows.

“Thank you, London, for creating unforgettable memories for me and my family,” she said. “Holla at ‘ya when I come on tour again!”

The Cowboy Carter roadshow is now set to roll into Paris, where Beyoncé will play three shows at the Stade de France, beginning on 19 June. The star will then return to the US for dates in Houston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.

Paul McCartney made a surprise appearance with Bruce Springsteen at the second of the Boss’s two nights at Anfield Stadium on Saturday night.

The ex-Beatle stepped up at the start of the encore to play Can’t Buy Me Love and Kansas City, the latter being an old Leiber and Stoller number that Little Richard popularised and which, of course, ended up on the Beatles For Sale album. After the performance, McCartney reportedly addressed the crowd, saying, “Thank you, Scousers.”

As you can see from the footage below, McCartney was looking pretty damn sprightly for a man who celebrates his 83^rd birthday next week.

It’s not the first time that the two rock icons have shared a stage together. Macca brought on Bruce as a guest during his 2022 Glastonbury headlining set when the pair played Glory Days and I Wanna Be Your Man, so Saturday night’s appearance was very much McCartney returning a favour.

Earlier on in the day, McCartney and Springsteen made a surprise visit to the Liverpool Institute For the Performing Arts (LIPA), which McCartney himself founded in 1996.

LIPA later put out a statement saying it had been a "truly incredible day", with the two music legends taking time out to talk to students and share their experiences.

"Thanks to Bruce Springsteen for sharing such rich insights with our students. And thanks, as ever, to Paul McCartney for his generosity and passion as he introduced Bruce to LIPA."

The Anfield date wrapped up the UK leg of Springsteen’s Land Of Hopes And Dreams tour, which has seen him make headlines around the world for his vituperative comments about Donald Trump. He moves on to Berlin for a gig at the Olympiastadion on Wednesday night, and shows in Prague, Frankfurt, San Sebastian, Gelsenkirchen and Milan, before returning to the States (if, of course, he’s let back in...)

Kiss star Gene Simmons is one of the most famous musicians in the world — but when he names his favourite bass player of all time, he admits: “I couldn't shine his shoes.”

Speaking to MusicRadar about his own approach to bass and his key influences, Simmons hails Paul McCartney as the GOAT.

“I started off like McCartney started off,” he says. “I started by learning to play chords on guitar.

“As a 14 or 15 year-old kid, I just taught myself, looked at people's fingers and eventually started to write those early, stupid songs, some of which developed into tunes that were recorded [on Kiss albums].

“And then it occurred to me, much later — late teens or so — that maybe I should play bass, because I wanted to be in a band, and I'd have a better chance of being in a band by being a bass player, because everybody wanted to play guitar or drums.

“So I switched to bass, and I could write a few tunes and sing okay.

“And with bass, the very first guy that just blew me out of the water was McCartney. To this day when I'm listening to Dear Prudence or some of those other great Beatles songs, you remember the bass part. You’re aware of what the bass is doing.

“That doesn’t happen with The Rolling Stones," Simmons says. "And I love the Stones! But name me a bass part [in a Stones song] that you remember. You might go, ‘Oh yeah, during that song here's what the bass was doing.’ But you're unaware of it.

“Even in Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones was so great, but your ear doesn't go to what the bass is playing in those songs.

“With McCartney, it's like a string quartet. You have the high notes over there playing, but you can hear what the cello is doing.

“And maybe his approach to bass playing has to do with the fact that he was a guitar player first and foremost.”

Another bassist Simmons admires is the late James Jamerson, who performed uncredited on many of the greatest Motown hits including You Can’t Hurry love by The Supremes, Reach Out I’ll The There by the Four Tops, Dancing In The Street by Martha And The Vandellas, My Girl by The Temptations — and much of Marvin Gaye’s classic 1971 album What’s Going On.

Simmons says of Jamerson’s style: “Just the feel of it is incredible. It's a rumble and a feel.”

It was this kind of feel that Simmons attempted to recreate on Kiss tracks such as Cold Gin, from the band’s self-titled debut album.

“That’s exactly right,” he says, “because I had listened to a lot of Motown.

“The first music I ever heard in America was black music, and if you ever hear a James Brown record you're aware that drums and bass are playing completely differently.”

Simmons also loved the way Ronnie Wood played bass for The Jeff Beck Group before making his name as a guitar player with the Faces and The Rolling Stones.

“Ron Wood is a decent guitar player,” Simmons says, “but what he did on bass in the Jeff Beck Group is one of the pivotal moments where I started going, ‘Wait a minute — what’s going on here?’

"Those first two Beck records [Truth and Beck-Ola] I still play today, and what Ron Wood did on bass is phenomenal.”

He continues: “There’s another guy named Felix Pappalardi who was a producer — he produced Cream and the Youngbloods and stuff like that — and he also got together with [guitarist] Leslie West and formed Mountain. His bass playing in that band, you take note of it.”

Simmons acknowledges The Beatles’ influence in his own band’s early music.

“Kiss was a strange band,” he says, “in the sense that we had three part harmonies, classic song structure — ABA, like Beatles kind of stuff — but there were some heavy riffs in there.”

He cites the song Black Diamond — another, like Cold Gin, from the band’s debut album — as a perfect example of the creative process between himself, guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley and lead guitarist Ace Frehley.

He recalls: “Paul would be writing songs and I'd be writing songs and sometimes we’d write together.

“Paul played me the song Black Diamond. I'm going, ‘Okay, let me just try playing it with you, let me do the root. And I started playing along, which is not blues, it's more classical, but it's just what I heard here.

"We said to Ace, ‘Hey, double up on my bass part, and Paul can just strum the chord.’ And all of a sudden we said, ‘Wait a minute, that's kind of hooky. Let's all play that bass part, which sounds like a horn part or something.’”

Simmons concludes: “There are no rules in any kind of music. You can pick and choose your influences and try to apply it to your thing.

“It's like food. You know, Indian food and English food use the same things — meat and potatoes and salt and pepper — but Indian food tastes different to English food. It's how you put it together that gives it the unique flavour.”

Brian Ray has spent the last 23 years as a member of Paul McCartney’s band, playing bass and guitar — so who better to assess Macca’s musicianship?

In the new issue of Guitar World magazine, Ray discusses his approach to playing McCartney’s bass parts in concert, and how he and fellow guitarist Rusty Anderson share guitar solos.

As primarily a guitar player, Ray says he had to work hard in preparation when he joined McCartney’s band in his dual role.

“I raced home and prepared for five weeks straight so I could be ready for the first band rehearsal,” he recalls.

“Truth is, I never concentrated on bass-playing. I played bass on my own demos and other people’s demos, so getting ready to play in Paul’s band was challenging.

“Thankfully, Paul’s basslines, while they’re iconic and memorable and musical, they’re not really technically challenging. They’re just so good.

"Because they’re so listenable, they’re easy to understand. Let’s face it — they’re in our bloodstreams. Even if you’re not a bass player, you know these parts. They’re in your head.”

Ray also reveals how he and Rusty Anderson work out their guitar parts

“Rusty plays the lion’s share of the solos. He was the first guitar player hired, so that’s how that went.

“As time has gone on, Paul has asked me to do more and more solos.

“We just naturally fall into who plays what, though sometimes we talk about it: ‘Why don’t you play the lower part here?’ or ‘You want to play the higher part?’”

Ray describes how he and Anderson are joined by McCartney on third guitar for the Beatles’ classic The End.

“At the end of the show, we do the guitar shoot-out on The End with Paul, Rusty and me doing solos.

“I come in last, so I do the John Lennon parts.

“It just keeps going around and around as long as Paul feels like it. Sometimes it’s short, sometimes it’s long. For the first sequence, we start off kind of note-for-note, and then we do whatever we want.”

McCartney himself discussed his approach to bass in a 1994 interview, in which he admitted: “Because some of these parts were independent melodic parts, it became much more difficult to sing.”

In 2024, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea hailed McCartney as the “greatest rock bassist”. Speaking on Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Flea stated: “Paul’s bass playing is so lyrical and melodic, and it’s just so beautiful.”

On the morning of Thursday 19 January 1967, the four members of The Beatles arrived at Studio One of EMI Studios Abbey Road to record the song that is now regarded by many as the greatest composition they ever created.

The song was A Day In A Life, a magisterial and mind-blowing achievement that was unlike anything that had gone before.

It was chosen as the closing track on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – it had to be, nothing else could follow it – and when the final gargantuan E major piano chord crescendo is played simultaneously by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr and roadie Mal Evans (along with producer George Martin on harmonium), it marks an emotive and iconic closure to one of the most momentous songs in recording history.

In many ways, the creation of A Day In The Life is two wholly separate yet intertwined stories: the writing of the song and the arduous technical challenges that had to be overcome to realise it.

It was the morning of 18 December, 1966 when John Lennon reportedly sat down at the piano at his home Kenwood, in Surrey, after reading two articles in The Daily Mail that would inspire the lyrics for A Day In The Life.

The first was about Tara Browne, a 21-year-old millionaire playboy and a friend of Paul McCartney’s, who had been killed in a car crash after driving his Lotus Elan through a red light in South Kensington and crashing into a stationary van.

As Lennon began to construct a chord sequence, the lines began to form. “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared…”

The next story that caught Lennon’s attention was a piece about potholes.

“I was writing the song with the Daily Mail propped up in front of me on the piano,” recalled Lennon in 1967, ”There was a paragraph about 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered.”

By mid-January, the melody and most of the lyrics were written, and Lennon went to McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood to present the song to him.

In his book The Lyrics, McCartney recalls that the song’s opening lines were actually a joint effort. It was also McCartney who contributed the song’s pivotal line, “I’d love to turn you on”.

“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on A Day In The Life,” Lennon told Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, in 1970.

Lennon continued: “The way we wrote a lot of the time: you'd write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”

When Lennon first sang A Day In The Life to the band in the studio, they wanted to record the track immediately.

At that point, the song had the working title of ‘In The Life Of …’ and it featured Lennon on piano, McCartney on Hammond organ, George Harrison on acoustic guitar and Ringo Starr on congas.

They taped four takes of the rhythm track, at which point Lennon switched to acoustic guitar, while McCartney was on piano and Harrison was on maracas.

Despite swift progress, there was one obstacle – a 24-bar gap in the middle of the song that they didn’t know how to fill.

They decided to simply leave the 24 bars blank and then decide later what to put in that gap on the tape.

Mal Evans, the band’s longstanding tour manager and roadie, was allocated the task of counting off the bars during the recording and then setting an alarm clock off at the start of the 24th bar to let the band know it was almost time to resume playing.

The recording mics picked up this alarm and engineer Geoff Emerick was unable to eliminate it from the mix.

While Lennon had most of the song in place, he was unsure how to proceed. “For the first bit, [John] said to me, ‘I don’t know where to go from here,” recalled George Martin in the book All You Need Is Ears. “So, Paul said, ‘Well, I’ve got this other song I’ve been working on. What do you think of it?’. This ended up being the middle bit and so they joined the two bits together to make one song.”

In direct contrast to Lennon’s part, the middle eight section that McCartney came up with was bouncy and upbeat.

And in a remarkable stroke of luck, its lyrics related directly to the sound of Mal Evans’ alarm clock. “Woke up, got out of bed/Dragged the comb across my head”.

This section was designed to follow whatever they decided to put in the 24-bar gap.

Lennon suggested creating something that started out small and grew into something huge.

McCartney was drawn to this idea and suggested that they could achieve this with a full orchestra.

George Martin assured them that there was no way that EMI would pay for a full orchestra to record 24 bars of music. Then, in a suggestion so simple that it borders on near-genius, Ringo suggested they simply hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.

As it turned out, the orchestral segment was recorded multiple times, filling a separate four-track tape machine, and then four different recordings were overdubbed into one single massive crescendo.

The orchestral part was recorded on 10 February 1967 in the vast Studio One at EMI Studios, with Martin and McCartney conducting a 40-piece orchestra.

The total cost of hiring the musicians for the session was £367 (equivalent to £8,512 in 2025), which, even for a Beatles session, was deemed an extravagance.

Martin set about writing the framework of a score for the orchestral musicians as the part they were being asked to improvise was more akin to avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.

“What I did there was to write … the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra,” recalled Martin in All You Need Is Ears. “At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note … near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar … Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”

In the spirit of the time, The Beatles hosted the orchestral session as a ’60s-style happening, with guests such as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Pattie Boyd, Donovan and Michael Nesmith sashaying through the studio doors in their psychedelic finery.

The Beatles asked the orchestral musicians to wear costume pieces with their formal wear.

“When I went back into the studio the sight was unbelievable,” recalled George Martin. “The orchestra leader, David McCallum, who used to be the leader of the Royal Philharmonic, was sitting there [with] a bright red false nose. He looked up at me through paper glasses. Eric Gruenberg, now a soloist and once leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was playing happily away, his left hand perfectly normal on the strings of his violin, but his bow held in a giant gorilla’s paw.”

Recording separate run-throughs by the half-orchestra presented a challenge.

Three of the four tracks on the multi-track master tape were already filled and Martin and Emerick needed a minimum of two tracks to record the orchestra’s run-throughs of the crescendo.

Martin then sought the help of EMI Studios technical manager, Ken Townsend.

As Townsend recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recordings: “George Martin came up to me that morning and said to me ‘Oh Ken, I’ve got a poser for you. I want to run two four-track tape machines together this evening. I know it’s never been done before, can you do it?’

“So I went away and came up with a method whereby we fed a 50 cycle tone from the track of one machine then raised its voltage to drive the capstan motor of the second, thus running the two in sync.

"Like all these things, the ideas either work first time or not at all. This one worked first time.”

On 20 January and 3 February 1967, the track was refined with additional overdubs and remixing.

In the latter session, McCartney and Ringo Starr re-recorded their bass and drum parts respectively.

In The Beatles Anthology (2000), Ringo discussed his drum fills in A Day In The Life.

“I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song,” Ringo said. “For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' – boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood."

The final overdub was the huge, climactic piano and harmonium chord, recorded on 22 February 1967.

By then, most of the people who had been present at the recording of A Day In The Life were aware that what they were hearing marked a profound shift in popular music.

David Crosby of The Byrds was one of the first outsiders to hear A Day In The Life, when he visited The Beatles at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road on 24 February, 1967. He recalled his reaction when he heard the song.

"Man, I was a dish-rag,” Crosby told writer John Harris for a March 2007 feature in Mojo magazine. “I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that.”

Ron Richards, producer of The Hollies, was among the EMI staff attending the half-orchestra recording for the 24-bar section. In his book The Complete Beatles Recordings, Mark Lewisohn describes Richards as sitting "with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I just can't believe it ... I give up’.”

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on 26 May, 1967.

As the closing song on the album, A Day In The Life was the subject of intense scrutiny.

In a review in The New York Times, published on 18 June 1967, critic Richard Goldstein called the song “a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric” going on to write that A Day In The Life “stands as one of the most important Lennon–McCartney compositions … [and] an historic pop event”.

Almost 60 years on, A Day In The Life is widely regarded as The Beatles’ greatest song.

Both haunting and hummable, it is the most forward-looking song on Sgt. Pepper and one that contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with the extraordinary and the existential.

Its power rests on it being the true sum of its parts, a song that captures the combined brilliance of The Beatles.

Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Dolly Parton, Brian May, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton are among the many artists paying tribute to a genuine rock ’n’ roll innovator in the new book Buddy Holly: Words Of Love.

With cover art by another Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, the hardback edition of Words Of Love is out now.

The concept for the book originated from The Who singer Roger Daltrey, who says: “Words Of Love is a perfect title for this stunning and definitive history of Buddy Holly. As well as being one of the great rock ’n’ roll pioneers, Buddy wrote and sang some of the most beautiful and enduring ballads about love.”

In the foreword, Paul McCartney writes: “The first time I ever heard Buddy Holly was when the record That’ll Be The Day came out. It sounded energetic. I thought it was a black band and we couldn’t figure out how they did it.

“It was Buddy Holly and the Crickets . He was playing the lead guitar, which we loved, but he was also singing it, which we loved, and he’d written it, which we loved. So on a number of levels he was very inspirational . He became a hero for us and gave us the idea to go and do it ourselves.

McCartney concludes: “He was a great hero to all of us, and because he wore glasses this even allowed John Lennon to wear his in public and not have to whip them off if there was a girl passing by!”

Elsewhere there are tributes from many other famous artists from various generations — from Cliff Richard and Van Morrison to Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender.

Mick Jagger says: “To English people Buddy Holly was an enormous inspiration. He was a songwriter, which Elvis wasn’t. And he wrote very simple songs, sort of lesson one in songwriting. Great songs, which had simple changes and nice melodies and changes of tempo and all that. You could learn from Buddy Holly how to write songs. He was a beautiful writer.”

Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards adds: “Maybe it was the fact of doing Buddy’s song Not Fade Away that gave us that extra propagation to start writing our own stuff. I think Buddy’s inspiration was that he wrote his own songs, which influenced The Beatles incredibly, and it slowly dawned on us that it would be great if one of us could write some songs, and two of us would be fantastic.

“He had an influence on everybody. Everybody who is playing now and just coming up because of what they’ve listened to — it’s been handed on. Buddy passed it on via The Beatles, via us, everything he did.”

Brian May comments: “Buddy Holly was my absolute hero as a kid. Those first Crickets singles on 45 rpm discs with black labels, slipped into brown paper sleeves, were probably the most exciting acquisitions of my whole childhood . They’re still some of my most prized possessions.

"The moment when I learned of Buddy’s tragic death remains etched indelibly in my mind. In that movement of grief, I think something inside me decided that the world that Buddy Holly and the Crickets had carved out was where I wanted to be.”

And there is this testimony from Eric Clapton: “Buddy Holly made a very, very big impression on me. The first Fender I ever saw was the bass that the guy in Jerry Lee Lewis’ band was playing when they made the film clip for his song Great Balls Of Fire. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.

"The next thing you know, these guys in England were using it, and Buddy Holly was using a Sunburst. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was like seeing an instrument from outer space and I said to myself, ‘That’s the future — that’s what I want.'”

Words Of Love: Buddy Holly is available now via Amazon

Joe Cocker should be in the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. Who says so? None other than Paul McCartney, the man who co-wrote his biggest UK hit.

In fact, McCartney has written a letter to the organisation urging his inclusion. “Joe was a great man and a fine singer whose unique style made for some fantastic performances,” he says. “He sang one of our songs With A Little Help From My Friends, a version produced by Denny Cordell which was very imaginative. All the people on the panel will be aware of the great contribution Joe made to the history of Rock and Roll.

“And whilst he may not have ever lobbied to be in the Hall of Fame, I know he would be extremely happy and grateful to find himself where he deserves to be amongst such illustrious company. Thank you and all the best,” the ex-Beatle concluded.

It is indeed somewhat ridiculous that Cocker isn’t already in there. Quite apart from his incredible cover of With A Little Help, he played Woodstock and the Isle Of Wight festivals, sold over 30 million albums, won a Grammy for Up Where We Belong, his duet with Jennifer Warnes and, in 1970, released Mad Dogs And Englishmen, regarded as one of the best live albums of all time . He more than paid his dues.

Sadly, in one sense it’s already too late. Cocker died in December 2014 at the age of 70. He had been suffering from lung cancer.

The nominees for the Hall of Fame have already been released. Aside from Cocker, they include Oasis, Joy Division/New Order, Billy Idol, The White Stripes, Bad Company, the Black Crowes, Soundgarden, Chubby Checker, Outkast and Mariah Carey.

Much of that list, you’d assume, would be shoo-ins. But only about half of the nominees get inducted in any given year, meaning that some figures - like Cocker - tend to get overlooked year after year. The winners are chosen by a panel of over 1,200 musicians, industry professionals and music historians.

It remains to be seen whether Macca’s special pleading does the trick for Cocker. A list of the finalists for inclusion will be announced in April, with the actual ceremony taking place later this year.

Here’s something we weren’t expecting: Paul McCartney is to publish a memoir, of sorts. But one that focuses exclusively on his other band, Wings.

Wings: The Story Of A Band On The Run is written alongside the author Ted Widmer and tells the story of McCartney’s 1970s, from the Beatles break up to Wings’ final dissolution in 1981. And it’s not just McCartney telling the story – Widmer has apparently interviewed “other key players in the band’s orbit.”

“Wings was about love, family, friendship, and artistic growth, often in the face of tremendous adversity,” Widmer said. “It was a joy to relive the madcap adventures of a special band, by listening to their stories, and compiling this oral history.”

Meanwhile McCartney put out a statement, saying “I’m so very happy to be transported back to the time that was Wings and relive some of our madcap adventures through this book. Starting from scratch after The Beatles felt crazy at times.

"There were some very difficult moments and I often questioned my decision. But as we got better I thought, ‘OK this is really good.’ We proved Wings could be a really good band. To play to huge audiences in the same way The Beatles had and have an impact in a different way. It was a huge buzz.”

There has been a flurry of Wings archival activity in recent years. Last year saw the release of the band’s live in the studio performance film One Hand Clapping. There have been also been 50^th anniversary editions of Band On The Run and, coming next month, the Venus And Mars album. Also in the pipeline is a documentary about McCartney’s 1970s by the Oscar-winning film maker Morgan Neville.

And perceptions about the band have changed over time. In the past Wings had to put up with great many sneery putdowns. They were “the band the Beatles could have been” according to Steve Coogan’s hopelessly wrong-headed TV host Alan Partridge.

However, it’s now generally acknowledged that Wings hit the target more often than they missed. Most of their albums have something to recommend them and in Band On The Run they produced an all-time classic.

They were accessible too. Unlike the other ex-Beatles, you could actually see McCartney and his band play live – Wings were a touring presence for most of the 1970s.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is out on November 4.

Getting up close with a genuine Beatle is a dream that, for most music lovers, will have to remain just that. But last night less than 600 lucky gig-goers got to experience some fab Macca magic right before their very eyes as the music legend played an unexpected gig at the 575-seater Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan.

And if you were in the neighbourhood and your forehead is hitting the desk round about now, don’t fret (and do start paying attention) because the great man COULD be about to do it all again tonight…

The clues come via Variety which, as part of its review of last nights gig observed that: “As much as it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime moment, we couldn’t help but notice that both of the Max McNown concerts originally scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday at the Bowery have been moved uptown to the Irving Plaza. Hmmmmm….."

The key word here being ‘both’… So that’s two nights? Right?

Also Setlist.FM DID have a gig listed on their site for tonight, Wednesday 12 February… But the listing has since disappeared…

A change of plan? Perhaps. Or a desire to play the same trick twice?…

Rumours on Reddit (from those lucky enough to attend last night's 11 Feb gig) seem to point to the possibility of more shows being upcoming too.

"I did hear some people say that there may be other shows this week, as he’s doing this because he’s in town for SNL,” writes CouscousLoverSUPREME. “I also saw that the Bowery Ballroom page rescheduled two shows this week, so fingers crossed!! I hope more people get to experience this! Feeling hopeful because there was a lot of merch and it only said “FEBRUARY 2025”, not one specific date.”

And getting merch made for just one gig?… Hmm…

Band on the run

McCartney surprised everyone with last night’s Bowery gig with a simple drop on Instagram at 6pm UK, 11am New York… So all is not lost just yet.

As to whether the mythical gig will materialise, keep an eye on Macca's Instagram… At the time of writing it’s just turned 9am in New York…

And if you’re hoping to drop by and catch the gig tonight (or simply want to reminisce on what you missed should the gig not come to pass) here’s last night’s blinding setlist:

Paul McCartney's setlist: Bowery Ballroom, New York, 11 February 2025:

A Hard Day’s Night
Letting Go
Got to Get You Into My Life
Let Me Roll It
My Valentine
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five
Maybe I’m Amazed
I’ve Just Seen a Face
From Me to You
Mrs. Vandebilt
Blackbird
Come on to Me
Jet
Ob-la-di Ob-la-da
Get Back
Now and Then
Lady Madonna
Let It Be
Hey Jude

Encore:
Golden Slumbers - The End

Two of the most respected figures in the music industry have spoken out about the dangers posed to musicians (and indeed all creative people) by possible changes to the copyright law that the UK government is considering that will allow AI firms to use existing content for free.

Paul McCartney appeared on BBC1’s Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday morning, warning about the proposals which as yet are still at a consultative stage. The default would be that AI developers would have free rein over all existing music and content on the Internet, unless artists purposely opted out.

McCartney told Kuenssberg he believed this would lead to a “loss of creativity”. He explained: “You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it,” he said. “They don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.”

The songwriting legend pleaded with the government to change course: “We’re the people, you’re the Government. You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job. if you’re putting through a Bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.”

Meanwhile Elton John backed him up. In a new interview with the Sunday Times, the veteran performer said: “The wheels are in motion to allow AI companies to ride roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods.”

“This will allow global big tech companies to gain free and easy access to artists’ work in order to train their artificial intelligence and create competing music. This will dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings even further. The musician community rejects it wholeheartedly.”

Elton pointed out that at present it’s harder than ever to make a living out of music, due to the minuscule amounts that the streaming companies pay to artists, and the increased cost of touring to the cost of living crisis and, lest we forget, Brexit.

He claimed that the government’s proposal could make things even harder: “Without thorough and robust copyright protection that allows artists to earn hard-fought earnings from their music, the UK’s future place on the world stage as a leader in arts and popular culture is under serious jeopardy.”

Earlier this month the government announced an AI action plan that they hope will “turbocharge growth”. It remains to be seen whether changes to the copyright law are going to be part of this – a white paper has yet to be produced. UK artists will be hoping that one of the few remaining ways to make money from music – their copyright - won’t end up as collateral damage in this latest dash for growth.

Even at the age of 82, Sir Paul McCartney has a work rate that would put many men half his age to shame.

The ex-Beatle has only just wrapped up his mammoth two year Got Back tour, which finished up with two nights a piece in Manchester and London’s O2. After such a physically demanding undertaking, the thoughts of most octogenarians would be turning towards pottering about in the garden or spending more time with the grandkids. Not Paul, whose mind is already on a new album.

The news came via a Q&A with fans on his official website over the weekend. One fan asked if he had any resolutions for 2025, to which Macca replied: "Here's one: finish an album! I've been working on a lot of songs and have had to put it to the side because of the tour. So, I'm hoping to get back into that and finish up a lot of these songs. So, how's about that? 'My New Year's resolution is to finish a new album!' How about that for a teaser? You can do it, Paul!"

He hasn’t made a new record since 2020’s McCartney III, although there was an ‘Imagined’ version of the same record that came out the following year, which included remixes, covers and features from an array of other artists including Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, Beck and Phoebe Bridgers.

McCartney’s date at the O2 last Thursday was notable for an onstage reunion with his old bandmate Ringo Starr – the first time the two surviving Beatles have performed together in five years. They played the reprise version of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter, and predictably brought the house down.

Ronnie Wood turned up to play on Get Back, with Macca wheeling out a Hofner 500/1 bass he hasn’t played for 50 years since it was stolen. The instrument – which went missing from a van in Ladbroke Grove in 1972 - turned up last year in a loft in Hastings, with McCartney reputedly paying a six figure sum for its return.

Paul McCartney brought the curtain down on his epic Got Back 2024 Tour in style, welcoming fellow Beatle Ringo Starr to the stage, and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, and finally fulfilling the dream of the Lost Bass Project by playing his original Höfner 500/1 bass guitar onstage for the first time in 50 years.

“We’ve been looking for it for 50 years, well, I got it back!” said McCartney, addressing the crowd at London’s O2 Arena. “And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years... is my original bass! I haven’t played it in 50 years.”

Why so long? The bass, the one that started it all, was stolen out of the back of a van in west London, 1972.

McCartney has had many other Höfner basses in that time, but there is nothing quite like the original, the violin-style four-string that he used to change the face of popular music, recording tracks such as Love Me Do, She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

Decades on, and with the help of the internet, a campaign was launched to reunite Macca with his instrument. The Lost Bass Project took the search global, and it paid off. In September last year, it was found in a house in Sussex.

It had been in the attic all along. The BBC reported that the bass was originally stolen in Ladbroke Grove, before being sold to a pub landlord. After it was found it was authenticated by Höfner and McCartney, he was reunited with the bass in February.

McCartney’s OG Höfner is one of the greatest value purchases in the history of popular music – maybe only Nile Rodgers and his Hit-Maker Stratocaster could rival it. McCartney picked it up in Germany for just £30 while the Beatles were making their bones in their Hamburg era.

“I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg, near a big department store called Karstadt,” said McCartney, speaking with Tony Bacon in 1994. “And I saw this bass in the window, this violin-shaped Höfner. It was a good price, because my dad had always said I shouldn’t do the never-never [buy on credit], but we were earning reasonable money. I liked the Höfner’s lightness, too. So I bought it, and I think it was only about 30 quid.”

Last night it was paying off some more of that £30. McCartney looks a little surprised that it worked when he plugged it in (a bit of theatre; he knows it’s going to be okay), and it had lost known of its power during a hectic performance of Get Back, with Ronnie Wood on guitar.

For Beatles fans, however, the best was saved for last, with McCartney welcoming Starr to the stage for an encore of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and White Album classic Helter Skelter.

He closed the set out with three Beatles classics: Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End.

It was always going to be an emotional night, but Paul McCartney's Got Back tour finale at London's O2 Arena packed more surprises in than most. Not least the astonishing arrival of ANOTHER Beatle - with Ringo Starr stepping on stage to join Paul to perform an encore for the ages.

Paul's final night at The O2 had already been a rollercoaster, from a stunning assortment of Macca's solo, Wings and The Beatles' most beloved tracks, alongside some unexpected shocks. Prior to a bravura performance of Get Back, Paul welcomed The Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood to the stage, to let forth some scintillating licks amid the Beatles' blues-rock classic.

Then there was the moment a pyrotechnic went off slightly early during the incendiary Live and Let Die, capturing everyone by surprise - not least Sir Paul. "It's too loud!" he complained to the crowd afterwards. Or the heartwarming children's choir Paul had assembled to help him belt out Christmas classic, Wonderful Christmastime

But, it was following a magisterial, life-affirming performance of crowd-galvaniser Hey Jude that Paul returned for an encore. The 20,000-capacity venue's collective jaws dropped as McCartney let the cat out of the bag; “We’ve got another surprise for you. Bring to the stage the mighty, the one and only Mr Ringo Starr.”

And, then Ringo arrived - alongside his own drum kit - wheeled into position at the right of Paul. "I've had a great night tonight!" Ringo announced to the crowd, before asking "How about you?"

Paul asked his former bandmate the question that everyone was eagerly anticipating “Should we rock?" Macca then lapsed into his native Scouse, ordering Starr to "Get on your kit lah!"

And boom, the pair dove headlong into a kinetic performance of 1967's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (Reprise), before gear-switching into a savage take on proto-metal monolith, Helter Skelter.

The astonishing reunion was captured by numerous fans, including the video we've shared above from user 71lox (we were in attendance, but our own videos/pics are somewhat further back!)

Following this finger-blistering performance, Ringo waved farewell to the crowd - still blown away at the sight of the surviving Beatles on stage together.

"I'm off now but I've had a great night, love you all - especially this man" Starr said, gesturing to his fellow Beatle. As Ringo left the stage, Paul said to the crowd, "It’s fantastic, playing with me old mate, but there comes a time when we’ve got to go home."

But, while some might be anticipating that the end of this huge 59-date tour, which officially started way back in 2022 might be the 82-year-old's last, Sir Paul was keen to allay any fears, "All that remains to be said is - see you next time!”

Magic.

High drama and dogged determination were defining factors in the creation of Band On The Run, the 1973 album by Paul McCartney and Wings which remains the most celebrated of his post-Beatles works.

By 1973 he had released two solo albums, McCartney (1970) and Ram (1971) as well as two with Wings: Wild Life (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973). But none of these attracted the kind of critical acclaim received by his former bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison.

All that changed with the Band On The Run album. It is McCartney’s solo masterpiece and the jewel in its crown is the title track, with its majestic breadth and vision.

On this album, McCartney wanted to shake things up. “I was looking for something different and adventurous,” he told Dermot O’Leary in the 2010 documentary McCartney & Wings: Band On The Run. “I found a list of EMI studios. They had studios everywhere… in China, Brazil… but then they had one in Lagos and I thought, ‘That is so off the beaten track – something’s got to happen if we go to Lagos’.”

What did happen was a series of calamities. The first occurred the night before their departure for Lagos, when McCartney received a call to say that Wings’ lead guitarist Henry McCullough and their drummer Denny Seiwell wouldn't be coming.

"I wasn't cool about it, I was livid," McCartney told O’Leary. “The good thing about that was then it made me [think]... ‘Right, screw you! I am going to make an album that you wish you were on!.”

When the plane took off that morning in August 1973 there were only three remaining members of Wings on it: Paul, his wife Linda, and trusted right-hand man Denny Laine.

One significant asset was Geoff Emerick, the young engineer from Abbey Road Studios who McCartney invited to Lagos to engineer the album. Emerick’s groundbreaking recording techniques had played a pivotal role on The Beatles’ albums Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Abbey Road (1969), and his input on Band On The Run was invaluable.

But when he and Wings arrived in Lagos, they discovered that EMI’s studio was still being built and was ramshackle and ill-equipped. To compound problems, there were no recording booths in it.

There were further setbacks. Nigerian musician Fela Kuti visited the studio twice, reportedly convinced that McCartney was going to appropriate his music. Former Cream drummer Ginger Baker was also troubled. Baker had made the city his home and was reportedly irked that they weren’t using his studio ARC. Paul placated Baker by recording the song Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me) at ARC.

The drama continued when Paul collapsed one day. Linda suspected a heart attack but it was a smoking-induced bronchial spasm.

Then, in a darker turn, Paul and Linda were mugged at knifepoint while walking home from a friend’s house one night.

“A car just pulls up,” McCartney told Dermot O’Leary. “Suddenly all the doors open and five young chaps get out and there’s a little squat one who’s got a knife… So we said, ‘What do you want?’ Because the guy’s got a knife, he’s fairly persuasive.”

The McCartneys had been warned not to walk about after dark. On their return to the studio, the manager told them they were lucky to be alive.

Among the items stolen from them were demo tapes from the album, prompting McCartney to immediately record new demos from memory. This effectively gave the songs a second draft, which resulted in a leaner and tighter album.

The McCartneys, Laine and Emerick helped the studio engineers to build recording booths out of perspex and wood.

Reduced to a trio, they were forced to multi-task. McCartney took over duties behind the kit. “I’m an okay drummer,” he told Dermot O’Leary. “I’ve got a kind of style, I’ve got a feel and I like playing drums. So I knew if I kept it simple I would be able to cover it. So you’ll notice the drums on Band On The Run are pretty simple.”

Once the studio was up and running, Paul, Linda and Denny were an effective team. “Me and Paul, we had the same influences musically and had known each other since the ’60s,” Laine told Billboard in February 2023. “It was just easy. It was easy to get a good groove… We did it almost as though it was a home recording… and we kept it basic. No frills.”

They worked quickly, laying down the basic tracks for seven songs within three weeks. Laine played electric and acoustic guitar, Linda played keyboards and Paul covered everything else – drums, bass, percussion and lead guitars and additional keyboards. He also used his Fender Jazz Bass, a right-handed model strung left-handed.

The title track was inspired by a comment from George Harrison. “It started off with ‘If I ever get out of here’,” recalled McCartney in Paul Gambacinni’s 1976 book Paul McCartney In His Own Words. “That came from a remark George made at one of the Apple meetings. He was saying that we were all prisoners in some way, some kind of remark like that. I thought that would be a nice way to start an album.”

The idea of musicians portraying themselves as outlaws was gaining pace at that time. The Eagles had just released the Desperado album, with the band dressing up as outlaws for the sepia-tinged cover shoot.

“I think around that time there was a spirit among the young people of getting away, vigilantes, desperados,” McCartney told Dermot O’Leary. “There were records coming out a bit like that. And I think that was me doing a nod to that kind of thing. It was a nice idea, breaking out… we’re stuck inside somewhere… these four walls and then the song could break out.”

The song is essentially a three-part medley. The first section is a slow poignant ballad, the second has tension, anchored in a funk-rock groove, while the final section opens up into widescreen country-rock.

The distinctive lead guitar riff that opens the first section is a soulful entrance to the song, and is followed by a memorable synth motif from Linda on a Moog. Paul played acoustic and electric pianos on the track in addition to guitar, bass, drums, lead and backing vocals.

Like all great bass players, one of McCartney’s strengths is knowing what to leave out and his tasteful, restrained playing elevates the spaciousness within the arrangement.

38 seconds in and McCartney’s vocal enters the mix: “Stuck inside these four walls/Sent inside forever/Never seeing no one/Nice again like you, mama…”

By the third line there are rich, lush harmonies from Paul, Linda and Denny.

At 1:18 the whole thing steps up into the second section, with its lean, simple groove, punctuated by handclaps.

At 1:33 a squelchy refrain on the Moog can be heard over one of the key guitar patterns, anticipating the vocal melody at 1:48. “If I ever get out of here/Thought of giving it all away/To a registered charity/All I need is a pint a day.”

At 2:05, the whole thing shifts for the dramatic guitar, strings and brass on the stops and pushes of the instrumental break.

As the orchestration recedes, the strumming of a 12-string acoustic heralds the beginning of the third section, a pacy, uplifting country rock sound with a driving 4/4 beat. It’s a big, lush sound with nifty slide guitar flourishes and the 12-string acoustic at the fore.

While the first two sections of the song were recorded in Lagos, the third section was recorded on their return, in October 1973, at George Martin’s AIR Studios in London.

McCartney laid down the third and final section with a 60-piece orchestra and the person he asked to write the orchestral arrangements on the album was Tony Visconti, whose string arrangements on T. Rex records had impressed McCartney.

In his autobiography Bowie, Bolan And The Brooklyn Boy, Visconti recalled receiving a call one Saturday from McCartney, who asked him to come over to his St. John’s Wood home the following day.

“Paul sat at the piano with me sitting next to him and played me snippets of songs on a portable cassette player, while on a second one he recorded his comments and his piano doodlings for string ideas. I was thrilled to be doing this for one of my idols but not so thrilled when he told me he needed all seven arrangements by Wednesday.”

For two days, Visconti barely slept. He arrived at Air Studios on the Wednesday to be greeted by Paul, Linda, Denny, Geoff Emerick and a 60-strong orchestra.

“I’m sure I looked bedraggled, I definitely felt it,” he recalled.

Visconti was conducting the orchestra on all seven songs.

The strings and brass bring real grandeur and dynamism to the Band On The Run track, particularly on the interlude between the second and third sections. This was the first part they worked on that day.

“We just kept doing take after take until we got the transition to work smoothly,” recalled Visconti. “Only some of the sixty musicians were wearing headphones, so it was a genuine job of conducting to bring them in and to keep them together. The rest of the day went a lot smoother. For the most part Paul acted the jovial perfectionist, which made it all seem like fun.”

Band On The Run was released in the US on 8 April 1974 and was a massive hit, becoming McCartney’s third solo American chart-topping single and the second for Wings.

The US radio edit of the song was 3:50 long as opposed to the 5:12 length of the original. Later that year, the single was released in Britain and reached No. 3 on the UK charts.

In many ways, the challenges they overcame making the album were the very elements that helped them rise to the occasion and elevate this to a great work.

“I think if we’d have stayed in London and gone to our normal studio, it might have been an okay album, a good album,” McCartney told O’Leary. “But the fact that we were in a strange place, with strange things happening, there were now only three of us instead of five, we had to work round all these circumstances and incorporate all this into the album. Suddenly we were forced to. We had no choice.”

Movie auteur Ridley Scott – while having zero to do with the project – may have just given away the ending of one of the movie industry’s current favourite plotlines: Which four hot young rising stars are being lined up to play The Beatles in Sam Mendes’ upcoming new series of biopics?

The Gladiator II director was attending a screening of the movie at a Director’s Guild of America event and taking part in a Q&A with fellow movie master Christopher Nolan. During the conversation, Scott confirmed to Nolan that his next movie would be the thriller The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic tale which – it’s rumoured – will see Scott once more teaming up with Gladiator II star Mescal.

When pressed by Nolan as to the presence of Mescal in The Dog Stars, Scott not only confirmed his presence but also let slip the Beatles news that’s so far only been rumoured: “Yes,” Scott replied regarding his re-teaming with Mescal, before only digging himself into a Beatles hole by changing his reply to: “Maybe… Paul is actually stacked up, doing The Beatles next. So I may have to let him go.”

With rumours already abounding of Mescal on board Sam Mendes' movies in the role of Paul McCartney, that’s pretty much all the proof we needed.

Mendes’ dramatised version of the band’s sprawling story aims to set right the record for previous The Beatles non-documentary myth-making by going in hard on the details by giving each of the fab four their own separate movie, each complete with origin story, journey to fame and fortune, battles, bust-ups and beyond.

Yup. The Beatles are the new Iron Man, Captain America, Spiderman and Hulk, it seems and the project looks like the heavyweight Beatles movie that fans – buoyed up by factual fare such as the band’s own Anthology documentary, Martin Scorsese’s Living In The Material World, and Peter Jackson’s Get Back – have been crying out for.

After all, anything’s got to be better than 1979’s mop-topped Birth of The Beatles…

While Mendes is confirmed as being on the job: “I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement back in February, Mescal isn’t as yet so forthcoming.

When grilled on the project, Mescal told Entertainment Tonight that: “It would be an incredible story to be attached to. The fact that Sam Mendes is attached to direct, like truly, it would be a dream come true.” But when asked more directly if the role was in the bag, Mescal replied, “No, no, no – we’re not going there.”

And there’s more hot Beatles unmasking afoot.

News of Mescal’s anointment comes hot on the heels of Ringo Starr himself accidentally (apparently) revealing that Saltburn heartthrob (and ex-Sabrina Carpenter beau) Barry Keoghan will be playing him as part of the movie series.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, drummer Starr gave Keoghan his endorsement when pressed. “Well, I think it’s great, and I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons,” Starr confirmed, before joking. “I hope not too many.”

Prime Beatle Paul McCartney has spoken out against the slowly creeping advance of AI in music and his fears that – if left unchecked by new legislation – it’s going to take over.

McCartney’s comments come amidst rising concern about the use of existing content to train AI models. Doing so is not only a questionable use of intellectual property owned by its creators, but something which also ultimately – by facilitating copies and clones to be automatically created – makes the process of humans making music (or writing words or making pictures) a pointless waste of time.

And while notable hold-outs include The New York Times, who have already taken legal action against AI heavyweights such as Open AI – the creators of Chat GPT – and Microsoft, their deep-pocketed backers, other vast repositories of human knowledge and creativity, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have already signed away the rights to use all their content to power up Open AI’s fake brains.

McCartney is backing the campaign to ensure that artists get paid a fair amount for use of their work.

Be under no illusion, there’s a war taking place with the ultimate prize being music itself, and who will own and create it all going forwards.

All eyes on the prize

AI-powered music generation platforms Suno and Udio are already under fire from the RIAA, which has filed lawsuits against both, alleging "copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale".

Meanwhile, a group of 13,500 signatories that includes Thom Yorke and Björn Ulvaeus issued a joint statement demanding that AI companies cease training their models on copyrighted work.

In his statement, Macca said: “We[’ve] got to be careful about it because it could just take over and we don’t want that to happen particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who, it may be the only way they[’re] gonna make a career. If AI wipes that out, that would be a very sad thing indeed.”

That may sound like a contradiction given that Macca and team used AI to separate the vocal stems for last year’s Now and Then, but McCartney is clearly going after the practice of using AI to create original music, rather than audio processing or trickery.

Now and Then was rebuilt with audio software called Mal, which was able to lift John Lennon’s vocal cleanly from a piano part in order to be used alongside new performances from living Beatles McCartney and Ringo Star, alongside existing guitar parts on the demo, recorded by the departed George Harrison.

We therefore sit on the edge of a precipice. If music publishers and record companies allow ‘big AI’ to have all-it-can-eat from their copyrighted work (and if there’s any money coming their way in return, the chances are that they will) then we could be just months away from the AI’s owners (and doubtless the tens of thousands of fee-paying users they want on board) from spamming every media channel you can imagine with the catchiest most ear-wormy hits (in every musical genre) than you can ever imagine. All without any existing A&R, musician, engineer or producer lifting a finger.

There is, of course, the more pragmatic, pro-AI point of view, that this is all just ‘enabling’ and if the result is more brilliant new music out there, perhaps tailor-made to your exact musical taste and being made available at lower and lower costs, then what’s the harm? Who cares if it’s made by a robot or a Robert?

Indeed artist/producer Timbaland is already embracing AI platforms such as Suno to improve his music, giving raw ideas new shape and harmony that he otherwise wouldn’t have come up with. Although Timbaland insists: “You still need that human element to operate this tool,” he says. “It doesn’t replace anything. All it does is add to your arsenal.”

It’s a battle that’s only going to get hotter, with an endgame that, potentially, could end the recording, publishing, music-making and music gear industries entirely. (Keep it light - Ed)

A new biography of Paul McCartney has revealed that work was started on a collaboration between Macca and the sci fi writer Isaac Asimov that could have ended up as a musical in which Wings battled an alien invasion.

The treatments for the proposed movie have been unearthed by writers Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair whose book The McCartney Legacy Volume 2 is published this week. The second of a series of five books covering the ex-Beatle’s solo career, it covers the years 1974 to 1980, the peak years of success for Wings.

After the success of the Beatles films, McCartney was keen for his new band to try their hand at a movie. The musical was to have titled Five and Five and One and the documents show the basic plot outline. It begins: “A ‘flying saucer’ lands. Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ (Wings). They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile – back in the sticks of Britain – lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens…”

And the cringe doesn’t end there – there’s also a fist in mouth reference to Laurel and Hardy: “Onboard the boat they are feeling depressed – huddling leather-jacketed in the corner alcove of the dining room. ‘Another fine mess you got us into Stanley,’ says one of the group.”

It appears that Asimov did at least try and improve on Macca’s original ideas. He turned the aliens into ‘energy beings’ from a dying planet who want to occupy, rather than clone, Wings. He suggested that they communicate through “thought-waves”. When they hear music being played, they are “strangely affected” and “decide that they must use the musical key to unlock human emotion”.

In the end, McCartney didn’t like Asimov’s version and by early 1975 project was quietly dropped.

Sinclair said of the treatments that “they’ve just been sitting there...Paul’s treatment reads like something Paul and Linda cooked up while they were smoking something particularly potent … the Laurel and Hardy reference is really bizarre. You can’t really comprehend what Asimov would have made of that.”

As we know, the failure of the Asimov collaboration didn’t mark the end of McCartney’s cinematic ambitions. In the late '70s he asked Willy Russell to prepare a script that would use the songs on Wings’ Band On The Run album. When that didn’t work out, he asked Tom Stoppard if he could come up with something. Again, the ex-Beatle was unsatisfied.

So he wrote the script himself and the result was Give My Regards To Broad Street, an out-and-out turkey that did lasting damage to his reputation - he’d only reach the UK Top Ten one more time after its 1984 release – and which you’ll notice is always politely ignored whenever McCartney is interviewed about his illustrious career.

A hoard of legal papers relating to the Beatles' break up and final legal separation have been discovered and will be auctioned off later this month.

Over 300 pages of typed documents compiled by the group’s various advisors and legal representatives were found in a cupboard where they had been stashed since the 1970s. Auctioneers Dawsons are selling them on December 12 in Maidenhead – they are expected to fetch anywhere between £5000 and £8000.

Denise Kelly, Head of Entertainment and Memorabilia at Dawsons said that the documents had only been discovered in bthe last year after the seller’s brother died. They reveal how fiendishly complicated, and exhausting, the whole process was: "As I read the minutes of meetings - notes which included discussions between the legal teams and accountants - I wondered how on earth they were going to sort everything out, and at times I could sense panic in the room as more and more complexities came to light.”

"One of the lawyers even suggested during one meeting when they had gone round and round and round in circles: ‘Would it be easier if The Beatles just retired?’"

She added: "It has crossed my mind that if I were a script writer, these documents would be all I'd need to tell the real story of what led to one of the best-selling bands in history splitting up and going their separate ways."

As we all know, the Beatles' break-up was drawn-out and acrimonious. Though the group had ceased to function as a creative unit after the release of Abbey Road in 1969, the four were still linked as one legal entity via Apple Corps, which had by then fallen under the control of Allen Klein. 

Paul McCartney essentially had to sue his three bandmates, and Klein, to break up the partnership. This he began in early 1971, but as is the way when large sums of money are at stake and lawyers are involved, things dragged on for years. The final documents ending The Beatles were only signed in December 1974, fifty years ago this month.

Inevitably, the legal marathon coloured the four members’ songwriting. George Harrison’s Sue Me Sue You Blues, from his 1973 Living In The Material World album comments in typically sardonic fashion on the whole turgid process: ‘Hold your Bible in your hand/Now all that's left is to find yourself a new band’.

Later in the year McCartney and Wings released Band On The Run. The title track is in itself a metaphor for escape from the legal morass, pivoting as it does on the phrase ‘if we ever get out of here’, which Harrison had a habit of using during the Beatles’ endless legal meetings.

Paul McCartney invited St Vincent and Jack White up on stage to jam on a couple of Beatles numbers during his headlining set at a festival in Mexico City over the weekend.

McCartney was playing the Corona Capital fest at the city’s Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez Stadium on Sunday. St Vincent aka Annie Clark came on for Get Back and in this fan shot footage you can just about make out her contributing guitar alongside Macca, before they exchange kisses at the end.

Clark came back on during the encore for the show’s finale – The End, needless to say. And she was joined by Jack White who also contributed guitar. Indeed for the extended intro there were no fewer than five guitarists on stage: Clark, White, McCartney’s bandmates Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray and Macca himself - he’d swapped his Hofner bass for a six string.

McCartney cajoled solos out of everyone, pointing at other band members at random, and of course performing a few himself. Eventually the guitar pyrotechnics came to an end and the crowd got the big ending, harmonies and all.

The Mexico City festival was the final date of the South American leg of McCartney’s Got Back tour. The date in Montevideo, Uruguay at the beginning of October was notable, not just for being the first time the 82 year old had played in the country, but also for being the first time he’d played Now And Then, the supposedly ‘last’ Beatles track, which was released this time last year.

Pieced together from a demo John Lennon had made in the late 70s, plus work the other three had done on it in the 1990s and new drums and vocals that McCartney and Starr laid down, it reached Number One last November, becoming the group’s 18th UK chart topper.

McCartney has a couple of weeks to get his breath back now, before he returns for a short European tour in December, which finishes with a couple of nights at London’s 02 on December 18 and 19.

What’s Paul McCartney really like to work with in the studio? Other than Ringo, the members of Wings and his other backing bands, not many musicians know, but ex-Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was given a peek into what it must be like on the day he crossed paths with the Beatle.

Sambora was talking on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast and revealed how it happened. Bon Jovi were in Henson Studio in Los Angeles mixing their live record One Wild Night, which must date the encounter to around 2000/early 2001.

"We were pretty popular, so, I'm the guy that likes to go around the studio and go, 'Who's in today? What's happening?' ‘Don Henley’s over here in B, and Sting’s doing his thing over there. And then Paul's in there.' I go, 'Paul, who?' ‘Paul McCartney’. I had never met a Beatle in my life. I was probably almost 40."

"He was in A and I was in B, and I was working on a Bon Jovi live record that I was mixing, and I was peeking out the door, waiting for Paul to walk in, because his band and everybody was there," Sambora continues.

"It's like two hours now, he's not showing up. So I walk out of one studio to go into the other overdub studio to actually do some overdubs on this live thing. I walk smack into him, and he goes, 'See you're practising, are you, mate?' And he takes the guitar, and he's lefty and I'm righty, and he takes the guitar and starts to play it."

"There's a couch there, and we sit down, and he just goes right into it, man. And they had to pull us apart, actually, because we just got into talking to each other so much. So, then he had to go into his respective studio, and I was in my respective studio, and I looked back, and Paul's got one of my guitars, and he's kind of messing around with it, right? And I'm mixing, so I said, 'Well, if you're going to be in here, why don't you help me mix this?' And he did."

Sambora didn’t say which track he mixed, but whichever one it was McCartney’s contribution went uncredited.

When Quincy Jones claimed that The Beatles were “the worst musicians in the world”, Paul McCartney’s response was equally unexpected. In a reply to Quincy’s comment, Macca said: “I love this guy.”

In the wake of Jones’ death on 3 November 2024, an infamous interview that Quincy gave to The New Yorker in 2018 was widely circulated.

In this interview, Quincy said of The Beatles: “They were no-playing motherf***ers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.

He recalled: “I remember once we were in the studio with George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it.

“We said, ‘Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.’ So, he did, and we called Ronnie Verrell, a jazz drummer. Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says, ‘George, can you play it back for me one more time?’ George did, and Ringo says, ‘That didn’t sound so bad.’ I said, ‘Yeah, motherf***er, because it ain’t you.’ Great guy, though.”

But later in 2018, McCartney was interviewed by GQ and responded to Quincy’s comments in humorous fashion.

Macca said of Quincy: “I love this guy. He’s totally out of his tree. But the great thing was, he rang me after this. I’d only heard about it, and I’d thought, I’m not sure if it’s true. The joke is, I love Quincy, even after this.”

Macca said that when Quincy called to apologise, the conversation went like this: “‘Paul, I didn’t really say that thing. I don’t know what happened man, I never said that. You know I love you guys!’ I said, ‘If you had said that, you know what I would have said? F*** you, Quincy Jones!’ And he laughed. I said, ‘You know I would say to that: F*** you, Quincy Jones, you f***ing crazy motherf***er!’ So, actually, we just had a laugh.”

Macca added: “He’s an old guy. I don’t know what it was. But I don’t think I’m the worst bass player he’s ever heard. Or maybe he’s never heard bad bass players. He’s talking all of this jazz and musicianship, and he’s an arranger and stuff.

“This is like Buddy Rich saying Ringo couldn’t drum. Because, coming from Buddy Rich’s sensibility, Ringo can’t drum. But coming from our sensibility, Buddy Rich is a load of s***. But God bless him.”

One of John Lennon’s closest confidants during the latter part of his life has written a book and in a new interview with Spin magazine has talked about his life and his relationship with Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Elliot Mintz was a radio and TV broadcaster who found himself in Ono’s orbit in 1971 and stayed in close contact with the couple throughout the rest of the decade. He is one of the few people who was in regular contact with Lennon throughout his ‘house husband’ years of the late 70s when he seemed to have disappeared completely.

He paints a portrait of the ex-Beatle as in turns melancholic, competitive and insecure about his standing in music history. His attitudes towards two of his contemporaries – Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan – bear this out.

“He felt the Rolling Stones got the kind of adulation and respect that ‘The Mop Tops’ didn’t, and that the Stones were perceived as the revolutionaries because they came forward with Street Fighting Man as opposed to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,” Mintz says.

“He loved Mick Jagger, and the two of them spent countless nights together in London. But when he would get really angry about it, he’d called them ‘the Rolling Pebbles.’”

“He had that same kind of envy of the way people perceived Bob Dylan,” he continues. “He insisted to me he was a far better writer than Dylan was. It was a love-hate thing. He loved Bob’s earlier work, but he liked the simpler, direct stuff… We would have these conversations where John would insist that I Am the Walrus was superior to anything that Bob had ever penned.”

And of course, he was still competitive with his old partner. “John as a solo artist didn’t sell a lot of albums compared to Paul McCartney. That bothered him. So did the adulation that Paul received when he’d go out on the road, which was all rightfully deserved, in my opinion.

"He believed he was a creative genius. He believed that throughout his entire life. When he was in art school, he thought he was brilliant.”

“That’s a very confining place to find yourself, because you really believe that you’re sitting at a dining room table and you’re alone,” Mintz points out.

“You’re not being celebrated. Especially between 1975 and 1980, he felt like the pieces just didn’t seem to fit, and it caused him great personal anguish.”

Mintz’s book We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me is out now. The author, now 79, explained why, after all this time, he decided to spill the beans: “I had received in recent years some encouragement from Sean Ono Lennon to tell my tale, (but also) I thought to myself, ‘If not now, when?’

"If I didn’t tell my story at this moment, people would have to get a Ouija board to hear me speak.”

Paul McCartney surprised punters at a tiny venue in the Hamptons, Long Island this week when he guested on stage with producer Andrew Watt and Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. 

The Beatles legend sang spirited versions of I Saw Her Standing There and Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World. Watt’s girlfriend, singer songwriter Charlotte Lawrence, added vocals to the latter and by the look of the videos that have appeared on social media everyone present had a fine ol’ time.

The venue, Stephen Talkhouse (yes that’s actually its name), has a capacity of just 250. For a British equivalent – imagine if Macca had turned up to a pub venue in, say, Margate.

It was something of a home gig for McCartney. The ex-Beatle has had a house for decades in the Hamptons, the well-to-do beach resort that’s situated at the far end of Long Island.

Bit odd to see him without his trusted Hofner bass (or indeed any guitar) slung over his shoulder, isn’t it?

Watt is said to be working on the new McCartney album, the first since the lockdown album McCartney III in late 2020. Over the last few years, the 33-year-old has developed a reputation for re-energising rock legends’ new material. 

He’s worked with Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop and Pearl Jam, and last year produced Hackney Diamonds, the first new Rolling Stones album since 2016. Indeed Watt and McCartney’s paths crossed during those sessions, when Macca guested on the track Bite My Head Off.

McCartney heads back on the road on October 1 in Montevideo, Uruguay and will spend most of the autumn touring South America. He returns to the UK for two shows at London’s O2 on December 18 and 19.

Snoop Dogg has been talking about what happened when he met Paul McCartney earlier this year and how the ex-Beatle told him not to put his blunt out.

In an interview with the Complex, Snoop – who was speaking alongside Dr Dre – revealed that he crossed paths with McCartney at a live show in Hollywood.

“I’ve never met him before but I’m a fuckin’ fan of the Beatles. I know Jimmy (Iovine) knows him, Dre knows him,” Snoop said. “So I’m in the back smoking and they’re like, ‘Sir Paul would like to meet you’. I’m like, ‘Oh, for real? Hold on’.”

He said that he put his blunt out “out of respect” for the music legend. “He walks in the room like, ‘Don’t put that down’,” Snoop continued. “He gives me a hug and he meets me, and it’s like, ‘Fuck. Paul McCartney knows who the fuck Snoop Dogg is’.”

Maybe Snoop wasn’t aware of Macca’s long-standing love of weed. One of the things the two share is that both have been charged with marijuana possession. In McCartney’s case, even smuggling, on one occasion in 1980.

The interviewer then asked whether Snoop would be up for collaborating with McCartney, to which he replied: “F**k yes, in a heartbeat. (McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s) Ebony And Ivory, (Michael Jackson and McCartney’s) The Girl Is Mine… what do you wanna do?”

Hmmm... those examples. Perhaps it’s best if we don’t encourage them.

Snoop and Dre were being interviewed in the run up to the release of Missionary, their long anticipated follow up to Doggystyle, which came out all the way back in 1993. When asked when we can expect it to drop, Snoop said that the new album would arrive “before Christmas”.

It’s been a busy time for the pair, who performed at the Olympics Closing ceremony last week. Snoop had spent two weeks in Paris as NBC’s ‘Special Correspondent’, a role for which he’s been paid a tidy $9 million. The rapper also opened his own weed-dispensary in Los Angeles last month. He’s named it S.W.E.D, an acronym for, ahem, Smoke Weed Every Day.

Infamously, Snoop posted on Twitter/X last year about how he was “giving up smoke”. However, this soon turned out to be a part of a promotional campaign for a new line of smokeless stoves he was in a partnership with.

Macca for his own part gave up weed a long time back. He said in 2015 that he had wanted to “set an example to his kids and grandkids”.

Flea has named the person he thinks is the "greatest rock bass player", and some might see it as a slightly surprising choice for a man whose name is most closely associated with funk and out-and-out rock.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers man appeared on Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name (I wonder where they got the inspiration for that title from?) and he got talking about Paul McCartney, whose bass playing skills are often overshadowed by his songwriting and the immense weight of his achievements whilst part of the Beatles.

“I think Paul’s the greatest rock bass player,” Flea said. “He’s just great. I mean, there are so many guys that are great in different ways, but Paul’s bass playing is so lyrical and melodic, and it’s just so beautiful. One of the things I’ve heard is that he put the bass on after. A band like mine, the bass sometimes the song starts with basslines, so coming first, or the music comes first.”

He continued: “Whereas I think Paul and John and George when they wrote songs and Paul would do the bass. And after multitracking came in, at the beginning of them, they just went and played live and would do it after, like ‘Sgt Pepper’s, the melody is already there. So then he’s doing, like a counter melody, so the bass is like a melody as opposed to just rhythm, and that’s amazing. He’s amazing.”

Separately, Flea took to Twitter/X and a propos of nothing named his favourite female rock singer in a single sentence: “Chrissie Hynde is the greatest female rock singer of all time.”

The Chili Peppers played to their biggest ever audience on Sunday night when they were part of the Olympics closing ceremony. Their 2002 hit By The Way was heard as Tom Cruise took the Olympic flag from the Stade De France and was seen roaring through the streets of Paris on his motorbike. Then, when the flag – through the magic of television – appeared in Los Angeles seconds later, the action moved to a live gig at Venice Beach where the band played Can’t Stop before handing over to fellow Los Angeles artists Billie Eilish and Snoop Dogg.

A rare Paul McCartney documentary is set to hit the cinemas this September.

One Hand Clapping was originally recorded at Abbey Road in August 1974 and featured McCartney and his then band Wings performing their hits live in the studio, along with some covers and a few old Beatles numbers.

It was supposed to have come out soon afterwards - indeed, voiceover interviews with the band had been recorded and a TV sales brochure was produced - only for the project to be shelved.

Both the album and the accompanying film gathered dust for decades, and was only seen for the first time in 2010 as part of a reissue for Band On The Run.

The film was originally shot on 1970s videotape but has now been scanned and fully restored. The between-song dialogue has been de-mixed using Wingnut's MAL software and the film features a new Dolby Atmos audio mix by Steve Orchard and Giles Martin.

The original idea behind One Hand Clapping was to capitalise on the success of the Band On The Run album. McCartney was on a roll at the time – after a difficult few years he was enjoying both commercial and critical success and had just resurrected Wings, bringing in guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and karate expert Geoff Britton on drums to join himself, wife Linda and Denny Laine. The band had just come back from Nashville where they had recorded the non-album single Junior’s Farm.

The doc was directed by David Litchfield and includes live-in-studio versions of Wings classics like Live And Let Die, Band On The Run, My Love and Jet. McCartney also talks about his writing process and how as a teenager he thought he might end up as a cabaret singer. The other members talk about the experience of working with the ex-Beatle and there are even some karate displays from the new boy Britton.

McCartney himself has fond memories of that time: “It's so great to look back on that period and see the little live show we did,” he said in a statement. “We made a pretty good noise actually! It was a great time for the band, we started to have success with Wings, which had been a long time coming.”

One Hand Clapping is set for a limited release at cinemas from September 26. Ticket details can be found here.

Veteran producer Ken Scott has been talking about his experiences recording with the Beatles.

In a lengthy interview with Headliner website, the 77-year-old goes into detail about his work engineering the White Album and lets slip a few secrets about the inner workings of the album. 

Take the fade-out, fade-in ending of Helter Skelter – there was no creative reason behind it, merely a case of creating different mixes for the mono and stereo versions of the record.

“Because there was a deadline for The White Album – because there'd been so much publicity about Apple Records and they had to release a record on a certain date – there was a 36-hour session to get it finished. 

"I believe it was actually during that 36-hour session we mixed the mono version of Helter Skelter and then we moved on to the stereo.”

“The way I remember it is that Paul was sitting by me. I set up the stereo mix – basically the mono mix but just putting things in some different places. We got to the end, and I fade out exactly the same way as I did for the mono, and when I get to the bottom, Paul says to me, ‘Okay, now fade back up again’. 

"I look at him and he says, ‘Fade back up’. So I start to fade it back up again. When I get to the top, he said, ‘Okay, now fade it down again,’ and I fade it down again. I'm just going down and he says, ‘Okay, now bring it up really quick’. So I bring it up at, "I’ve got blisters on my fingers," and he says, ‘Put it down’.

"I pulled it down quickly and I just looked at him and said, ‘What the f**k was that all about?’ 

"He said, ‘Well, we've been getting lots of fan mail saying that there are differences between the mono and the stereo, so we thought we would actually make differences and that way, we might sell twice as many records’. That's how that happened. It's always, ‘follow the money’.”

Incidentally, in a recent edition of the McCartney: A Life In Lyrics podcast the 82-year-old Beatle elaborates on this and the move from mono to stereo in this period. “We thought of it in a different way than you do now. Now you just think it makes it more realistic like listening to a band and you'll get a surround feeling when you listen to it (stereo). 

"We thought ‘no – with these two speakers we can have a thing wandering from one speaker to another.”

Elsewhere, Scott’s memory of the landmark album is distinctly hazy. That Eric Clapton solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps (the first time another guitarist had guested on a Beatles track)? He doesn’t remember it at all.

“Neither does Chris Thomas, who was George Martin's assistant, and he was the producer at that time because George was on holiday," he told MusicRadar last year. "He doesn't remember it. And John Smith, my assistant engineer at that time, does not remember it. We were in the centre of a storm, and there was so much going on. We had no idea that 60 years later, people would be asking about the sessions…”

However, he does have firm opinions on Now And Then, the AI-assisted ‘last’ Beatles single that was finally released last year. “To me, it's kind of milking a dead cow. It's putting something together to sell more records, kind of thing. It's that, ‘If there are differences between the mono and stereo, we may be able to sell twice as many records; If we put out a new single that we put together, it doesn't matter if it's not quite as good as our old stuff, but it will boost the interest again, so maybe we'll sell more records.’”