The story of Paul McCartney

A Liverpool boy

James Paul McCartney was born on the eighteenth of June 1942 at Walton Hospital in Liverpool. His mother Mary was a nurse and later a visiting midwife, and her wages actually outstripped those of his father Jim, a cotton salesman who had led his own dance outfit, Jim Mac's Jazz Band, back in the 1920s. Paul had a younger brother, Michael. The family moved around the city's new council estates before settling at 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton. In 1953 Paul was one of only three pupils out of ninety at his school to pass the eleven plus, which won him a place at the Liverpool Institute. A year later, on the bus from Speke, he got talking to a younger boy from the same school called George Harrison.[1] [2]

On the thirty first of October 1956, when Paul was fourteen, his mother died from an embolism after surgery for breast cancer. The loss shaped him deeply. His father had given him a trumpet for his fourteenth birthday, but Paul wanted to sing while he played, so he swapped it for a Framus Zenith acoustic guitar. Right handed playing felt wrong, until he saw a poster of the country singer Slim Whitman, who played left handed, and simply turned his strings around. His first song, I Lost My Little Girl, came soon after his mother's death, and he later suggested it was about her without his realising. His schoolboy hero was Little Richard, and the first song he ever sang in public was Long Tall Sally, at a Butlin's holiday camp talent contest in Filey.[1] [2]

On the sixth of July 1957, at a church fete in Woolton, fifteen year old Paul met John Lennon and his skiffle group, the Quarrymen, and was soon asked to join. Jim McCartney warned his son that John would get him into trouble, yet he still let the band rehearse in the dining room at Forthlin Road. When the group was offered work in Hamburg in 1960, Jim only relented once Paul told him they would each earn fifteen pounds a week, more than Jim earned himself. In those years Paul's steady girlfriend was Dot Rhone. According to the historian Mark Lewisohn she became pregnant, and the couple planned to marry, but she suffered a miscarriage. They stayed together until the autumn of 1962, when Paul, still only twenty, ended it.[1] [2]

The Beatle years, briefly

The full Beatles story has its own chapter elsewhere, so here are the Paul highlights. When Stuart Sutcliffe left in 1961, Paul took over the bass, and historians still argue over whether he did it reluctantly or went after the job. Brian Epstein became manager in January 1962, Ringo Starr arrived that August, and Love Me Do came out in October. Beatlemania followed, and the papers called Paul the cute Beatle. On the eighteenth of April 1963, after a show at the Royal Albert Hall, he met the young actress Jane Asher. He soon moved into her family's house on Wimpole Street in London and lived there for nearly three years. That is where he wrote Yesterday, and Jane inspired several other songs from this era.[1] [2]

Yesterday came out in August 1965, with just Paul and a string quartet, the first Beatles recording to feature only one member of the band. From around that time, the musicologist Ian MacDonald argued, Paul became the group's de facto musical director. He threw himself into London's avant garde scene, made tape loops at home inspired by John Cage, and helped fund the underground paper International Times. In 1966 he wrote the score for the film The Family Way, which won him an Ivor Novello award. When the Beatles stopped touring, he pushed them into Sgt. Pepper and dreamed up its fictional band. After Brian Epstein died in August 1967, Paul effectively took over the leadership, starting with the Magical Mystery Tour film, the first Beatles project that critics actually disliked.[1] [2]

On the fifteenth of May 1967, at the Bag O'Nails club in Soho, Paul met an American photographer called Linda Eastman. They met again four days later at the Sgt. Pepper press launch, then went their separate ways for a year. Paul got engaged to Jane Asher on Christmas Day 1967, but she ended it in the summer of 1968 after learning he was involved with an American writer, Francie Schwartz. Paul and Linda married at Marylebone Town Hall on the twelfth of March 1969, and their daughter Mary was born that August. By then the Beatles were fighting over money. Paul wanted Linda's father and brother, the New York lawyers Lee and John Eastman, to run their affairs. The others chose Allen Klein. On the twentieth of September 1969, John privately told the band he was leaving.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Going it alone

With John gone in all but name, Paul retreated to High Park, the remote farm near Campbeltown in Scotland that he had bought in 1966. He later said he came close to a nervous breakdown. He stayed in bed for days and drank heavily, and the biographer Howard Sounes wrote that this was one of the hardest times of Linda's life, with a young daughter, a new baby and a depressed husband. Paul himself reflected that he might have become a rock and roll casualty. It was Linda who pulled him through, telling him his songs were still good and urging him to keep writing. Those months also fuelled the rumour that Paul was dead, until journalists from BBC Radio and Life magazine tracked him down at the farm.[1] [2]

Back in London just before Christmas 1969, Paul began recording at home in St John's Wood on a brand new Studer four track machine, with no mixing desk at all. He played every instrument himself, guitars, bass, keyboards and drums, with Linda adding harmonies. When he moved to proper studios, he booked the time under the name Billy Martin to keep it secret. The standout song was Maybe I'm Amazed, written for Linda. Then came a clash over release dates. The other Beatles wanted his album delayed so Let It Be could come out first, and Ringo volunteered to deliver the letter in person. Paul told him to get out. Ringo later said Paul went crazy and threatened that he would make them pay.[1]

On the ninth of April 1970 Paul sent the British press a question and answer sheet with promo copies of his album. In it he said he did not know whether his break with the Beatles was temporary or permanent, and that he could not see himself writing with John again. The next day the Daily Mirror splashed that Paul was quitting the Beatles, and headlines worldwide blamed him for the split. The album, simply called McCartney, came out on the seventeenth of April and spent three weeks at number one in America, though critics called it half finished. On the last day of 1970 Paul sued his bandmates to dissolve the partnership. A receiver was appointed in March 1971, and the Beatles were not legally dissolved until the ninth of January 1975.[1] [2]

For his second album, Paul flew the family to New York in October 1970 and auditioned session players, some of whom thought they had been booked for a jingle. He hired the drummer Denny Seiwell, whom he later joked he had found lying on a mattress in a basement. The result, Ram, was credited to Paul and Linda, and gave him his first American number one without the Beatles, Uncle Albert slash Admiral Halsey. The critics were savage, and so was John. Hearing digs in the song Too Many People, he hit back with How Do You Sleep, and early copies of his album Imagine came with a postcard of John pulling a pig's ears, mocking the Ram cover. Today Ram is often ranked among Paul's best records.[1] [2]

The birth of Wings

In the summer of 1971 Paul decided he wanted a proper band again. Seiwell agreed to join, and Paul phoned Denny Laine, the former Moody Blues singer he had known since the early sixties. As Paul told it, he asked Denny what he was doing, Denny said nothing, and Paul told him to come on then. They recorded the first album fast, with five of its eight songs done in a single take, booking the studio under the name Sam Browne. It came out that December as Wild Life, the first record credited to Wings. Their daughter Stella had been born in September after a frightening delivery. Critics were cruel, and they saved special scorn for Linda, whom Paul had taught to play keyboards and insisted on keeping in the band.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1972 the Northern Irish guitarist Henry McCullough joined, and Paul came up with one of the strangest tours in rock history. He loaded the band, his children and his sheepdog Martha into a van and drove around Britain with no bookings at all. When they reached a university, he would find the student union and ask a startled social secretary whether they fancied a gig that night. Tickets cost about fifty pence, and the students paid in coins. There were no Beatles songs, because Paul wanted Wings judged as a new band. Later that summer they toured Europe, again choosing small halls, most of them holding fewer than three thousand people.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirtieth of January 1972, British soldiers shot dead thirteen civil rights marchers in Derry, the day now known as Bloody Sunday. Paul, whose family had Irish roots on both sides, wrote Give Ireland Back to the Irish the next day, and Wings recorded it just two days after the shootings. The chairman of EMI phoned to say it was too inflammatory to release, and when it did come out, the BBC banned it. The official chart could only call it a record by Wings. It still reached number sixteen in Britain and number one in Ireland and Spain. There was a cost at home, too. Henry McCullough's brother was assaulted in Northern Ireland because of the song. That December the BBC banned another Wings single, Hi, Hi, Hi, for drug and sexual references.[1] [2] [3]

The law was catching up with Paul too. In 1972 a Swedish court fined him for cannabis possession, and in 1973 he was fined again in Campbeltown after police found cannabis plants growing on his farm. Those convictions kept him out of America until the end of 1973. The music, though, was getting stronger. My Love, from the album Red Rose Speedway, became Wings' first American number one in 1973, with a guitar solo Henry McCullough made up on the spot in front of a live orchestra. Paul then reunited with George Martin for Live and Let Die, the first rock song to open a James Bond film, which earned an Oscar nomination. But in August 1973, just before the next album, McCullough and Seiwell both quit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Band on the Run and the peak

Paul wanted to record somewhere exotic, so he asked EMI for a list of its studios around the world and picked Lagos in Nigeria. Seiwell walked out the night before the flight, which left just Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, with the engineer Geoff Emerick. They arrived on the thirtieth of August 1973 and found a ramshackle studio with one eight track tape machine and a faulty desk. Paul covered the missing players himself, playing drums and most of the lead guitar on top of bass. There was friction on the ground as well. The Afrobeat star Fela Kuti publicly accused the band of coming to Africa to steal local music, and came to the studio to confront Paul, who played him the songs to show there was nothing African in them.[1] [2]

Lagos turned dangerous. One night Paul and Linda went for a walk despite warnings, and were robbed at knifepoint. The thieves took their valuables, along with a bag holding a notebook of handwritten lyrics and cassettes of demos for the album. The next day, while recording a vocal, Paul suddenly could not breathe. He went pale, stepped outside into the heat and collapsed, and Linda screamed, convinced he was having a heart attack. Doctors blamed a bronchial spasm brought on by too much smoking. The band flew home on the twenty third of September. Waiting for them in London was a letter from EMI, written before they had even left, warning them not to go to Lagos because of an outbreak of cholera.[1]

The album was finished at George Martin's AIR Studios in London that October. Jet was recorded there from scratch, and Tony Visconti taped all the orchestral parts in a single day. For the cover, Paul lined up the band with six famous faces dressed as convicts caught in a prison searchlight, among them the chat show host Michael Parkinson, the actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, and the boxer John Conteh. Band on the Run was released at the end of 1973 and started slowly, but the singles Jet and Band on the Run pushed it to number one in both Britain and America. It was the top selling studio album of 1974 in the UK, won Grammys, and finally won the critics back.[1] [2]

With a hit album and no full band, Paul hired the Scottish guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, formerly of Thunderclap Newman, and the drummer Geoff Britton. In 1974 they went to Nashville and stayed on the farm of the songwriter Curly Putman, which inspired the single Junior's Farm. Under a joke name, the Country Hams, Wings also recorded a tune written years earlier by Paul's father Jim, with Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer sitting in. But McCulloch and Britton clashed, and during sessions in New Orleans Britton quit. His replacement, the American Joe English, had answered an advert for a drummer and walked into a basement to find Paul McCartney waiting. The album, Venus and Mars, topped the charts in 1975 with the single Listen to What the Man Said.[1] [2] [3]

In late 1975 Wings set off on a world tour that ran for more than a year, and for the first time Paul played Beatles songs with his new band. Jimmy McCulloch's drinking caused problems. In Paris in March 1976 he broke a finger after David Cassidy blocked a punch he threw, then claimed he had slipped in the bathroom, and the American dates had to wait three weeks. That same month, on the eighteenth of March 1976, Paul's father Jim died while Paul and Linda were on tour abroad. They chose not to attend the funeral, which kept it out of the press. The American shows became Wings over America, a triple live album, partly because a bootleg of a full Los Angeles concert had already appeared. It reached number one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mull of Kintyre and the end of Wings

In 1977 Linda was expecting again, so touring was off. The band recorded instead on a yacht called Fair Carol in the Virgin Islands, where Paul and McCulloch both hurt their knees, Geoff Emerick got an electric shock through his foot, and United States Customs officers searched the boats for marijuana. Then the band fell apart again. In August 1977 Paul threw Jimmy McCulloch out of Wings, reportedly after a drunken rage at the Scottish farm. Joe English grew homesick and went back to Georgia a couple of months later. Wings was a trio once more. Paul and Linda's son James was born on the twelfth of September 1977, completing a family of four children with Heather, Mary and Stella.[1] [2] [3] [4]

During that break Paul and Denny Laine finished a song about the Kintyre peninsula where the farm sits. They recorded Mull of Kintyre on the ninth of August 1977 at the farm studio, with the Campbeltown Pipe Band playing bagpipes and Paul's vocal and guitar taped outdoors. Released that November, it spent nine weeks at number one over Christmas and became the first single ever to sell more than two million copies in Britain, beating the Beatles' She Loves You. As of 2026 it is still the UK's best selling single that was not released for charity. But it planted a grievance. Denny Laine had been paid a flat fee as a contract writer, so he never shared in the royalties. In America the song flopped.[1] [2] [3]

London Town came out in 1978, and With a Little Luck gave Wings another American number one. The guitarist Laurence Juber and the drummer Steve Holley joined, each on a weekly wage, according to one biographer, of less than a fifth of what the core trio earned. Paul signed a lucrative deal with Columbia Records in America and made Back to the Egg, with the Sex Pistols producer Chris Thomas. For one session he assembled the Rockestra, with Pete Townshend, David Gilmour, John Bonham and John Paul Jones. Keith Moon was meant to play, but had died a month before. Critics hated the album. Then, on the twenty seventh of September 1979, Jimmy McCulloch was found dead in his London flat, aged twenty six. A coroner ruled he died of morphine poisoning.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1979 Paul organised the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea at the Hammersmith Odeon with the UN Secretary General, alongside Queen, the Clash and the Who. Wings closed the final night, the twenty ninth of December. It turned out to be their last ever show. On the sixteenth of January 1980 Paul flew into Tokyo for a sold out tour of Japan, and customs officers found two hundred and nineteen grams of cannabis in his luggage. He was handcuffed, jailed as prisoner number twenty two and held for nine days before being released without charge and deported. The whole tour was cancelled. Back home, he released McCartney II, a quirky synth album he had made alone at the farm, and its single Coming Up so impressed John Lennon that it helped nudge him back into the studio.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the night of the eighth of December 1980, John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York home, the Dakota, by Mark David Chapman. Paul heard the news the next morning. He went to George Martin's studio anyway, where he and Denny Laine abandoned the session part way through. As he left that evening, reporters pushed a microphone at him, and his tired reply that it was a drag was read as cold. He later explained he had meant it with all the sadness he could muster, and that he went home and cried for most of the evening with his children around him. Wings never recovered. Denny Laine quit in April 1981, and Paul finally admitted the band was over in 1982.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Solo in the eighties and nineties

Paul started again with George Martin, flying to Martin's AIR studio on the island of Montserrat in February 1981, two months after John's death. Stevie Wonder, Carl Perkins and Ringo Starr all came to play. The album, Tug of War, came out in April 1982, and Rolling Stone hailed it as the masterpiece everyone always knew he could make. Its duet with Stevie Wonder, Ebony and Ivory, topped the charts in both Britain and America. The album also carried Here Today, Paul's tribute to John, written as an imagined conversation between them. Paul has admitted that at least once every tour the song still catches him out on stage, and he finds himself fighting back tears.[1] [2] [3]

In 1981 Paul also recorded with a young Michael Jackson, who stayed with Paul and Linda during the sessions. They had hits with The Girl Is Mine and then Say Say Say, which went to number one in America in 1983. One evening Paul showed Michael a booklet of all the song copyrights he owned and explained how publishing made the real money. Michael listened. In 1985 he bought ATV Music, which owned most of the Lennon and McCartney catalogue that Paul and Yoko Ono had tried and failed to buy in 1981. Paul criticised the purchase for years. It was not until 2017 that he sued the later owner, Sony ATV, under American copyright law to reclaim his share, settling privately that summer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The mid eighties were bumpy. Paul wrote and starred in the 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street, which critics mauled. Roger Ebert gave it one star and told readers to skip straight to the soundtrack, which did give him the hit No More Lonely Nights. In 1984 Paul and Linda were arrested for cannabis in Barbados, and Linda was arrested again on landing at Heathrow. At Live Aid in 1985 technical faults left his voice and piano barely audible for the first two verses of Let It Be. Press to Play, made in 1986 with the producer Hugh Padgham, became his poorest selling album up to then. He bounced back with Flowers in the Dirt in 1989, co written partly with Elvis Costello, which went to number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In September 1989 Paul went back on the road for the first time in more than a decade, with Linda still at the keyboards. On the twenty first of April 1990 he played to one hundred and eighty four thousand people at the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, at the time the largest paying stadium crowd in history. He also chased new forms. The Liverpool Oratorio, written with Carl Davis in 1991, was torn apart by The Guardian, and Paul wrote to the paper to defend it. With the producer Youth he made anonymous electronic records as the Fireman. From 1994 he worked with George, Ringo and George Martin on the Beatles Anthology, and in 1997 he was knighted for services to music.[1] [2] [3]

In 1995 Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it later spread to her liver. Paul said the doctors privately told him they had caught it too late and that she had about eighteen months, and that is what she had. Linda died on the seventeenth of April 1998, aged fifty six, at the family ranch near Tucson, Arizona, with her family around her. Paul said they had spent barely a week apart in twenty nine years of marriage, and the only real exception was his time in a Tokyo jail. George and Ringo were among seven hundred mourners at a London memorial service, and Paul said simply that she was his girlfriend and he had lost her. He saw a counsellor, then returned to his roots with Run Devil Run, an album of old rock and roll that Linda had long urged him to make.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A new century, a new marriage and a bitter divorce

In May 1999, at the Pride of Britain awards in London, Paul met Heather Mills, a former model who had lost part of her left leg after being hit by a police motorcycle in 1993 and had become a campaigner against landmines. They married on the eleventh of June 2002 at Castle Leslie in Ireland, and their daughter Beatrice was born in October 2003. By then Paul had lived through another shock. On the eleventh of September 2001 he was sitting on a plane at JFK airport and watched the attacks on New York. He helped organise the Concert for New York City that October. Weeks later, at the end of November, George Harrison died. Paul called him his baby brother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2002 Paul put together a new band, with Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars, Paul Wix Wickens on keyboards and Abe Laboriel Junior on drums. As of 2026 he has played live with them longer than he ever played with the Beatles or with Wings. The 2002 tour earned a reported one hundred and twenty six million dollars and was Billboard's top tour of the year. He headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in 2005, and at Live 8 that summer his performance with U2 became the fastest released single in history. For Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, George Martin suggested the Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who refused to let Paul sing songs he did not like. Paul admitted he thought about firing him, then realised that honesty was the point.[1] [2]

The marriage to Heather Mills ended in May 2006, and the divorce became a tabloid war. In court Mills accused Paul of treating her abusively and violently, of abusing alcohol and drugs, and of turning the press against her. None of those claims was proven, and McCartney's side accused her of leaking private material. Mills represented herself and asked for almost one hundred and twenty five million pounds. In March 2008 the judge awarded her about twenty four point three million. He described her evidence as inconsistent, inaccurate and less than candid, and called Paul consistent, accurate and honest. In the courtroom, angry at the judgment, Mills poured a jug of water over the head of Paul's lawyer, Fiona Shackleton.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Paul found calmer waters with Nancy Shevell, an American transport executive from New Jersey, whom he had known for years through their homes in the Hamptons. They started dating in November 2007 and married on the ninth of October 2011 at Marylebone Town Hall, the same place he had married Linda forty two years earlier. Out of respect for Nancy's Jewish faith, they attended Yom Kippur services before the wedding. He wrote My Valentine for her, and it appeared on Kisses on the Bottom, his 2012 album of old standards. In 2011 he also signed with Decca, the label that famously turned the Beatles down in 1962. At the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012 he led the crowd through Hey Jude, and was paid a token one pound.[1] [2] [3]

Paul kept surprising people. In 2014 and 2015 he worked with Kanye West on Only One and with Kanye and Rihanna on FourFiveSeconds, which the three performed at the Grammys. In 2015 he said he had given up cannabis, to set a good example for his grandchildren. In July 2018 he went back to the Cavern Club in Liverpool for a small show with his band. That same year he released Egypt Station, named after one of his own paintings, and it became his first album in thirty six years to top the American chart, and the first ever to debut there at number one.[1] [2]

Still going

When the pandemic shut the world down in 2020, Paul made McCartney III alone at his Sussex studio, playing nearly every instrument just as he had on the first McCartney album fifty years before. He called it rockdown. It became his first British number one solo album since 1989, and by reaching number two in America he became the first artist with a new album in the top two in each of six different decades. In 2021 Peter Jackson's documentary series Get Back recast the Let It Be sessions in a far warmer light, and Paul later won an Emmy as one of its producers. That November he published The Lyrics, a self portrait in one hundred and fifty four songs, built from conversations with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon.[1] [2] [3]

His Got Back tour opened in Spokane in April 2022. That June, a week after turning eighty, he headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, becoming the festival's oldest solo headliner. Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen joined him, and he sang a virtual duet with John Lennon. In November 2023 came Now and Then, billed as the last Beatles song. It was built from a John Lennon home demo from the late seventies, with his voice separated from the hiss using machine learning technology developed for Get Back. It went to number one in Britain and later won a Grammy. A month later, on the fifth of December 2023, Denny Laine died in Florida aged seventy nine, after a long lung illness. Paul wrote that they had drifted apart but had rebuilt their friendship in recent years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

One old wound healed in 2024. Paul's original Hofner violin bass, the one he played in the Beatles' early years, had been stolen from a van in 1972. A former Hofner employee, Nick Wass, launched what he called the Lost Bass Project in 2023, and in February 2024 the bass was found in an attic on the south coast of England. On the nineteenth of December 2024, closing his tour at the O2 in London, Paul played it on stage for the first time in fifty years, with Ronnie Wood beside him and Ringo on drums for the encore. That year Wings' shelved 1974 studio film and album One Hand Clapping finally came out, and in 2025 came a Wings book and a documentary, Man on the Run.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In March 2026 Paul announced The Boys of Dungeon Lane, named after a road in Speke that leads down to the Mersey shore, where he used to go birdwatching as a boy. The first single premiered on BBC Radio Merseyside. He made it with the producer Andrew Watt, whom he had first met over a cup of tea in 2021, and he played most of the instruments himself. It includes a duet with Ringo Starr and songs about his parents Jim and Mary. Released on the twenty ninth of May, it drew some of the best reviews of his career, and in America it became his twenty second top ten album, counting Wings, a span of fifty six years since his first. That month he also played Saturday Night Live, still going strong in his eighties.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney. They met at a London club in May 1967 and married in March 1969. Linda pulled Paul out of his depression after the Beatles split, co wrote and sang on his records, played keyboards in Wings through all the mockery, and photographed his life for three decades. They went vegetarian together in 1975. Paul said they spent barely a week apart in twenty nine years. She died of breast cancer in 1998.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and John Lennon. After the split they traded insults in interviews and songs, with Ram and How Do You Sleep as low points. They agreed to end their public feud in early 1972 and grew close again in 1974, and on one night in April 1976 they sat in John's apartment watching Saturday Night Live offer the Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite, and nearly went. Their last phone call was friendly. After John's murder, Paul wrote Here Today for him.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and Denny Laine. Denny was the only musician besides Paul and Linda to stay in Wings for its whole ten years. He co wrote Mull of Kintyre and sang lead on several songs. But he left in 1981, bitter over money and the lost Japanese tour, and for years they were distant. Paul said they had rebuilt their friendship before Denny died in December 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. They met in 1999, a year after Linda's death, and married in Ireland in 2002, with a daughter, Beatrice, born in 2003. Paul wrote songs inspired by her and joined her campaigns against landmines and seal hunting. They split in 2006, and the divorce, settled in 2008, was one of the most public and bitter in British celebrity history.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell. An American transport executive and a cousin of the broadcaster Barbara Walters, Nancy had known Paul for years before they began dating in 2007. They married at Marylebone Town Hall in October 2011, the same register office where he wed Linda. Paul wrote My Valentine for her, and as of 2026 they remain married.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. Paul met the actress in April 1963 and lived for years in her family's London home, where he wrote Yesterday. She inspired several love songs. They got engaged at Christmas 1967 and travelled to India together, but she ended it in 1968 after finding out about another woman. Jane has always refused to discuss the relationship in public.[1] [2]

Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. Friends and duet partners on The Girl Is Mine and Say Say Say, they fell out over business. Paul explained music publishing to Michael over dinner, and a few years later Michael bought the company that owned most of the Beatles songs. Paul criticised the deal for years and eventually went to court against Sony ATV to reclaim his share.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and George Martin. The Beatles' producer stayed Paul's most trusted collaborator. He produced and arranged Live and Let Die in 1973, then steered Paul through the grief after John's murder on Tug of War and Pipes of Peace. Later he recommended the young producer Nigel Godrich, who pushed Paul hard on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.[1] [2] [3]

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The two surviving Beatles have played on each other's records for five decades, from Paul's song Six O'Clock for Ringo in 1973 to Broad Street, Flaming Pie and Now and Then. They clashed in 1970 over the release of Paul's first album. Ringo has joined Paul on stage many times, and they sing together on The Boys of Dungeon Lane in 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Schoolfriends from the bus to the Liverpool Institute, they later grew apart, with George complaining that Paul dictated his guitar parts. Yet George called Paul his mate. After George died in 2001, Paul called him his baby brother and has since played George's song Something on a ukulele at many shows.[1] [2]

Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello. In the late eighties the two wrote a batch of songs together, including My Brave Face, some of which revived Paul's career on Flowers in the Dirt. Costello even persuaded him to dig out his old Hofner bass. But it was not always harmonious, and Paul's manager at the time admitted Paul had ranted about Costello's attitude in the studio.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Paul McCartney

• Paul's dad wired the family radio to headphones so his sons could listen to Radio Luxembourg in bed. Jim McCartney ran extension leads from the living room radio to two pairs of Bakelite headphones, so Paul and his brother Michael could hear rock and roll on Radio Luxembourg late at night.[1]
• At eleven, Paul auditioned for the Liverpool Cathedral choir and was turned down. Encouraged by his father, Paul tried out for the cathedral choir as a boy but was not accepted, so he sang instead in the choir at St Barnabas Church in Mossley Hill.[1]
• He wrote the tune of When I'm Sixty Four as a teenager on the family piano. The melody that became When I'm Sixty Four was one of Paul's earliest compositions, worked out on the upright piano in the front room at home. The Beatles finally recorded it years later.[1] [2]
• To keep his first solo album secret, Paul booked studio time under the name Billy Martin. In early 1970 Paul took his home recordings to Morgan Studios and then EMI, booking both under the alias Billy Martin, so only a handful of people knew a solo album was being made.[1]
• For one track on McCartney, he played a bow and arrow bought at Harrods. The experimental track Kreen Akrore, inspired by a TV documentary about an Amazon tribe, used a bow and arrow from the Knightsbridge store, while Linda added breathing and animal noises.[1]
• A song Paul wrote for Frank Sinatra hides at the end of his first solo album. A short snippet of Suicide, a piano song Paul wrote as a teenager hoping Sinatra would record it, closes a medley on McCartney without being listed. He played it in full in the 1974 film One Hand Clapping.[1] [2]
• Linda's daughter Heather sang backing vocals on Ram. Heather, whom Paul had adopted, can be heard on the backing vocals of Monkberry Moon Delight, one of the wildest vocal performances of Paul's career.[1]
• Paul secretly released an orchestral version of Ram under the name Percy Thrills Thrillington. In 1971 he had the whole of Ram rearranged as instrumental easy listening. It sat on the shelf until 1977, when it came out under the invented bandleader Percy Thrills Thrillington.[1]
• The Ram mono mix was pressed only for radio stations and is now highly prized by collectors. Although mono records were being phased out, Ram got its own mono mix, sent only to radio. It was not officially issued on CD until the 2012 reissue.[1]
• The B side of Give Ireland Back to the Irish was an instrumental version, so DJs still had to say the title. Expecting trouble, Paul put an instrumental of the song on the flip side. If radio played the B side to avoid the words, presenters would still have to announce the song's name.[1]
• Wings once released a song written by Paul's father, under the fake name the Country Hams. Walking in the Park with Eloise was a tune Jim McCartney wrote long before. Wings recorded it in Nashville in 1974 with Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer, and issued it as the Country Hams.[1] [2]
• A popular 1940s hit called Linda was written for Linda McCartney when she was one year old. Her father, the lawyer Lee Eastman, asked his client Jack Lawrence to write it. Buddy Clark's recording reached number two in America in 1947.[1]
• Linda was the first woman to have her photograph on the cover of Rolling Stone. Her shot of Eric Clapton ran on the cover in May 1968. In 1974 her photo of herself and Paul made her the only person to appear on the cover who also took the picture.[1]
• Wings put out a reggae single under the name Suzy and the Red Stripes. Linda's song Seaside Woman came out in 1977 under a pseudonym. Suzy was her nickname in Jamaica, and Red Stripe is the island's best known beer.[1]
• Wings guitarist Henry McCullough's voice is on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Near the end of Money you can hear McCullough answering a question, saying he did not know because he was really drunk at the time. He was recalling a fight with his wife.[1] [2]
• Henry McCullough improvised the guitar solo on My Love in a single take. Paul later called it a classic that McCullough made up on the spot, in front of a live orchestra.[1] [2]
• Christopher Lee, James Coburn and Michael Parkinson all posed as convicts on the Band on the Run cover. The shoot at Osterley Park also featured Kenny Lynch, Clement Freud and the boxer John Conteh. Everyone had to stand still for two seconds because the searchlight was so weak.[1] [2]
• The Band on the Run track Picasso's Last Words grew out of a conversation with Dustin Hoffman. Paul wrote it in Jamaica after talking with the actor and his wife, and the track weaves in fragments of other songs from the album, plus a snatch of a French radio broadcast.[1]
• Paul lent Throbbing Gristle a sixteen track tape machine. It was a return favour to the design team Hipgnosis, who made the Venus and Mars artwork. Member Peter Christopherson's band used it to record their 1979 album.[1]
• Wings over America became a triple album partly because of a bootleg. A triple bootleg of a complete Los Angeles show, pressed on red, white and blue vinyl, pushed Paul to expand the official release from two records to three.[1]
• Every member of Wings sang lead on at least one song on Wings at the Speed of Sound. It was Paul's answer to critics who said Wings was just his backing band. Drummer Joe English got his lead vocal after Paul overheard him singing along.[1]
• Jeff Beck was dropped from the Rockestra because he wanted a veto over his own guitar parts. Paul withdrew the invitation. Keith Moon was also meant to take part, but died a month before the October 1978 session.[1]
• In the Coming Up video, Paul plays ten different band members. He appears as himself, guitarists, a drummer, a keyboard player and four saxophonists, while Linda plays two backing singers, one of them male. The fake band was called the Plastic Macs.[1]
• Michael Jackson covered a Wings song, Girlfriend, on Off the Wall. Paul had remarked that the London Town track sounded like the Jackson 5, and Jackson recorded it for his 1979 breakthrough album.[1]
• The title Ebony and Ivory came from something Spike Milligan said. Paul heard the comedian say you need black notes and white notes to make harmony. South African state radio later banned the song during apartheid, after Stevie Wonder dedicated an Oscar to Nelson Mandela.[1]
• In 1979 Guinness named Paul the most honoured composer and performer in music. At that point he had sixty gold discs, forty three with the Beatles and seventeen with Wings, and had written forty three songs that each sold a million copies.[1]
• Paul is the only artist to top the UK chart as a soloist, duo, trio, quartet and quintet. He did it with Pipes of Peace, Ebony and Ivory, Mull of Kintyre, She Loves You and Get Back, and he also topped it in a charity ensemble.[1]
• Paul's coat of arms shows a Liver bird holding an acoustic guitar. Granted in 2002, it also features four curved shapes resembling beetles' backs. The Latin motto means behold my heart, which became the title of a choral work he wrote.[1]
• He was paid one pound for closing the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Paul donated his time, and the organisers handed him a token fee of a single pound for leading the stadium through Hey Jude.[1]
• In 2011 Paul signed to Decca, the label that rejected the Beatles in 1962. Decca famously turned the band down after an audition in January 1962. Nearly fifty years later it released his ballet score Ocean's Kingdom.[1]
• Paul wrote to the Dalai Lama to ask why he was not a vegetarian. The Dalai Lama replied that his doctors told him he needed meat. Paul wrote back arguing he could get protein elsewhere.[1]
• Paul secretly painted for fifteen years before showing anyone. He took up painting in 1983 after watching Willem de Kooning at work, and first exhibited in Siegen, Germany, in 1999, with portraits including John Lennon and David Bowie.[1]
• Paul played the drums on a 2017 Foo Fighters song. He sits behind the kit on Sunday Rain, from Concrete and Gold. He also played all the drums on Band on the Run and on his three self titled albums.[1]
• The Royal College of Music made Paul an honorary fellow even though he cannot read music. Prince Charles presented it in 1995, and Paul joked it was amazing for somebody who does not read a note.[1]
• Paul sang backing vocals on George Harrison's 1981 tribute to John Lennon. Paul, Linda and Denny Laine all sang on All Those Years Ago, with Ringo on drums.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.