Paul McCartney

Biography

In October 1962 the single “Love Me Do” was released. The producer George Martin suggested crediting it to “Paul McCartney and the Beatles”, but McCartney rejected the idea.

He was born on 18 June 1942 at Walton Hospital in Liverpool, where his mother, Mary, worked as a nurse. His parents were of Irish descent; his father, James, had played trumpet and piano in his own jazz band in the 1920s and kept a piano at home. Mary later became a visiting midwife, and her earnings allowed the family to settle on Forthlin Road in Allerton. In 1953 Paul was one of three pupils out of ninety to pass the 11-Plus exam, and he entered the Liverpool Institute; on the bus there in 1954 he met George Harrison. In 1956, when Paul was fourteen, his mother died. His father gave him a trumpet for his birthday, and he traded it for a Framus Zenith acoustic guitar. He is left-handed: after seeing how Slim Whitman played, he reversed the order of the strings. On that guitar he composed his first song, “I Lost My Little Girl”.

On 6 July 1957, at a church fête at St Peter’s in Woolton, he met John Lennon and his skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Soon afterwards he was invited to join. By McCartney’s own recollection, he showed Lennon how to tune a guitar. Harrison joined in 1958, and by 1960, after several names, the group had become the Beatles and left to play in Hamburg. His father at first did not want to let him go but agreed when he heard about the pay. In Hamburg they played for many hours a day, and their lodging was an abandoned cinema. A quarrel with the club owner ended with McCartney and the drummer Pete Best being held by the police and then deported.

He became the band’s bass player in the summer of 1961, when Stuart Sutcliffe left. At first he played Sutcliffe’s bass, then a Höfner that was easy to convert for a left hand. By 1962 Brian Epstein was the group’s manager, and Ringo Starr had taken the drummer’s place. “She Loves You” spent seven weeks at the top of the British chart, in February 1964 the band came to the United States, and in June 1965 they were awarded the Order of the British Empire.

In August 1965 “Yesterday” came out: McCartney recorded it with an acoustic guitar and a string quartet, without the other band members. In London he lived apart from the rest of the Beatles, went to galleries and theatres, befriended the owners of a gallery and of the Indica bookshop, and met William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In his home studio on Montagu Square tape loops were made, and they were used in “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Martin recalled that McCartney brought him these loops “like cats bringing sparrows”. After the last concert, in San Francisco in August 1966, the group retreated to the studio. McCartney wrote the music for the film The Family Way (an Ivor Novello Award) and proposed the idea of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. After Epstein’s death in August 1967 he suggested making Magical Mystery Tour, and the film was poorly received by critics. “Hey Jude” came out in 1968, and in 1969 the group recorded Abbey Road.

The break-up was noisy. McCartney objected to Allen Klein becoming the group’s manager, whom the others insisted on; he announced his departure on 10 April 1970, and on 31 December, through his lawyers, he filed a suit to dissolve the partnership.

He recorded his first solo album, McCartney, in 1970 alone, playing every instrument. Ram followed in 1971, made together with his wife, Linda. In August 1971 he founded Wings with Linda, the guitarist Denny Laine and the drummer Denny Seiwell. Two singles of 1972 were kept off the air by the BBC: “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and “Hi Hi Hi”. For the film Live and Let Die the group recorded the title song, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The album Band on the Run was recorded in Nigeria by the three of them: two members had left before the trip, and McCartney played the drum parts himself. The album topped the charts, and Rolling Stone named it one of the best albums of 1973. In 1977 “Mull of Kintyre” became the first British single to sell more than two million copies. The group broke up in April 1981.

After the murder of John Lennon in December 1980, he recorded the album Tug of War with George Martin and Stevie Wonder; the single “Ebony and Ivory” topped the charts. In 1983 came Pipes of Peace, which includes duets with Michael Jackson. In 1984 he wrote the screenplay for the film Give My Regards to Broad Street and starred in it; the film flopped, while the soundtrack topped the British album chart. In 1988 he released a collection of covers, “Snova v SSSR” (“Back in the USSR”), for Soviet listeners. In the 1990s he worked on The Beatles Anthology project with Harrison and Starr, and in 1991, together with the composer Carl Davis, he wrote the Liverpool Oratorio, which critics received coolly. On 11 March 1997 he received a knighthood.

On 24 May 2003 he played in Red Square in Moscow. On 27 July 2012 he closed the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. In November 2021 his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present was published, based on conversations with the poet Paul Muldoon. On 25 June 2022, a week after his eightieth birthday, he headlined the Glastonbury Festival, with Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen as guests on stage.