Paul McCartney

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul McCartney wrote his first song, "I Lost My Little Girl", on a £15 Framus Zenith acoustic guitar he had traded for a nickel-plated trumpet his father gave him for his fourteenth birthday. That swap - brass for strings, a solo instrument for one that lets you sing - tells you almost everything about what would follow. From that teenage bedroom in Liverpool, McCartney would go on to co-write a record 32 songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100, sell an estimated 100 million records, and earn an honorary fortune of £1 billion. He is one of only three recording artists who have sold over 100 million records both as a solo artist and as a principal member of a band. But the numbers, extraordinary as they are, do not answer the more interesting questions. How does a self-taught musician with no formal training become the dominant creative force behind one of history's most celebrated bands? What drove him to keep performing decades after he had nothing left to prove? And what does it mean that a man who helped define the sound of the 20th century released a protest track in 2025 that was mostly silence?

• 2. Liverpool Roots

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  James Paul McCartney was born on the 18th of June 1942 at Walton Hospital in Liverpool, to a mother who worked as a visiting midwife and a father who had once led a jazz band called Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s. The family moved through several homes in the Liverpool area before settling at 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, a move made possible by his mother Mary's earnings. In 1953, McCartney was one of only three students out of 90 to pass the 11-Plus exam, earning him a place at the Liverpool Institute grammar school. On the bus to school in 1954, he met George Harrison, a year his junior. McCartney later admitted, "I tended to talk down to him because he was a year younger." On the 31st of October 1956, when McCartney was 14, his mother died of an embolism following surgery for breast cancer. The loss became one of the most formative facts of his life, and it would later form a bond with John Lennon, whose mother Julia also died, in 1958, when Lennon was 17. McCartney's father kept an upright piano in the front room, encouraged both sons toward music, and suggested formal lessons. McCartney preferred to learn by ear. When rock and roll arrived on Radio Luxembourg, McCartney noticed a poster advertising a Slim Whitman concert and realized Whitman played left-handed; he reversed the strings on his guitar to match. Little Richard was his schoolboy idol, and the first song McCartney ever performed in public was "Long Tall Sally", at a talent competition at a Butlin's Filey holiday camp. A second early composition, written on the family piano, would eventually become "When I'm Sixty-Four".

• 3. Becoming a Beatle

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  On the 6th of July 1957, at the St Peter's Church Hall fete in Woolton, a fifteen-year-old McCartney watched John Lennon perform with his skiffle group, the Quarrymen. The invitation to join came soon after, and McCartney brought Harrison into the fold in 1958. By May 1960 the group had tried names including Johnny and the Moondogs and the Silver Beetles before settling on the Beatles in August. In January 1962, Brian Epstein became their manager, and Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best on drums in August of that year. Their first hit, "Love Me Do", came in October 1962. The press took to calling McCartney "the cute Beatle", a label he would later say he outgrew. When bassist Stuart Sutcliffe left the band in 1961, McCartney moved to bass, a transition whose enthusiasm or reluctance remains disputed. In August 1965, the Beatles released McCartney's "Yesterday", featuring a string quartet and only his voice and guitar. It was the first Beatles recording that involved just a single member of the band, and it became one of the most covered songs in popular music history. During the Rubber Soul sessions that same year, recording engineer Norman Smith observed that tensions within the band were already visible: "the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious … as far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right." Musicologist Ian MacDonald noted that from 1965 onward, McCartney was ascending as songwriter, instrumentalist, arranger, and de facto musical director. When the Beatles played their final commercial concert at the end of their 1966 US tour, McCartney already had his first solo project underway: a film score for the UK production The Family Way, a collaboration with producer George Martin that won McCartney an Ivor Novello Award for Best Instrumental Theme.

• 4. The Experimental Years

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  McCartney's entry into the London avant-garde came through artist John Dunbar, who introduced him to art dealer Robert Fraser. At Fraser's flat, McCartney met Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Blake, and Richard Hamilton. He also visited Dunbar's flat to experiment with tape loops, using a Brenell tape recorder to record voices, guitars, and bongos, then splicing and reversing the results. He called the finished pieces "electronic symphonies". Elements of that work appeared in the Beatles songs "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "The Fool on the Hill". Heavily influenced by American avant-garde musician John Cage, McCartney was absorbing ideas that would reshape the band's studio approach. When the Beatles stopped touring and needed a new creative direction, McCartney pressed them toward Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album he later described as his response to feeling "fed up with being the Beatles". In his own words: "We really hated that fucking four little mop-top approach. We were not boys we were men … and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers." The album's "A Day in the Life" required a forty-piece orchestra, which McCartney and Martin took turns conducting. Its cover, featuring a collage by pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth and based on an ink drawing by McCartney, prompted what journalists described as a frenzy of analysis. After Brian Epstein's death in August 1967, McCartney stepped into the role of de facto group leader and proposed Magical Mystery Tour, which Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn later called "an administrative nightmare throughout". McCartney largely directed the film, which earned the band their first unfavourable critical response. The experimental impulse never left him; decades later, he would release three electronica albums under the alias the Fireman, in collaboration with Youth of Killing Joke.

• 5. Wings and Solo Flight

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  McCartney announced his departure from the Beatles on the 10th of April 1970, and filed for the band's formal dissolution on the 31st of December that year. An English court legally dissolved the Beatles' partnership on the 9th of January 1975. His first solo album, McCartney, reached number one in the US in 1970; he played every instrument and sang every vocal himself. Wings formed the following year with Linda McCartney, drummer Denny Seiwell, and former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine. The band's debut tour began in 1972 with a performance at the University of Nottingham in front of an audience of seven hundred, part of an unannounced run through UK universities where the band stayed in modest accommodation and received payment in coins collected from students. McCartney said he chose the approach to sidestep "five rows of press people with little pads, all looking at me and saying, 'Oh well, he is not as good as he was.'" Wings' 1973 James Bond theme "Live and Let Die" was nominated for an Academy Award and reached number two in the US. The band recorded Band on the Run in 1973, after McCullough and Seiwell departed, making it the first of seven platinum Wings LPs. It topped charts in both the US and the UK, remained on the UK charts for 124 weeks, and in 1975 won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance. Wings followed with the chart-topping albums Venus and Mars and Wings at the Speed of Sound. The 1977 single "Mull of Kintyre", co-written with Laine, became the most successful single of McCartney's solo career: it sold 2.5 million copies and held the UK sales record until the 1984 charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" achieved double the sales of the previous record holder, which had been the Beatles' own "She Loves You". By 1981, McCartney felt he had accomplished what he set out to with Wings, and the group disbanded in April after Laine quit over disputes about royalties and salaries.

• 6. The Musician's Craft

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  Musicologist Ian MacDonald described McCartney's musicianship as "by nature drawn to music's formal aspects yet wholly untutored", producing "technically 'finished' work almost entirely by instinct". McCartney himself compared his approach to "the primitive cave artists, who drew without training". His bass playing drew particular recognition: he was voted the best rock bassist in Creem's 1973 and 1974 reader polls, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked him the ninth greatest bassist of all time. He cited James Jamerson of Motown as a hero for his melodic style. During his early Beatles years, he primarily used a Hofner 500/1 bass, then shifted to a Rickenbacker 4001S for recording from 1965. MacDonald identified "She's a Woman" as the turning point when McCartney's bass playing began to evolve dramatically. Authors Bacon and Morgan described the bassline for the Beatles song "Rain" as "an astonishing piece of playing", noting McCartney was "thinking in terms of both rhythm and 'lead bass'". MacDonald traced the influence of Indian classical music in exotic melismas in the bass part on that same track. On guitar, McCartney bought an Epiphone Casino in 1964 specifically because the hollow body would produce more feedback; he has kept that original guitar to the present day. He played lead guitar on several Beatles recordings, including what MacDonald called a "fiercely angular slide guitar solo" on "Drive My Car" and a "startling guitar solo" on Harrison's composition "Taxman". His voice spans over four octaves, and Rolling Stone ranked him the 11th greatest singer of all time. He has named as vocal influences his own Little Richard impersonation, developed for songs like "I'm Down", as well as his exploration of gospel-style melismas on "Hey Jude" and what MacDonald described as heavy metal on "Helter Skelter". McCartney identified Sgt. Pepper's as containing his strongest bass playing, particularly on "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

• 7. Still Here

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  On the 21st of April 1990, McCartney performed for the largest paying stadium audience in history when 184,000 people attended his concert at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. He has continued touring without significant interruption since 1989. His Driving World Tour in 2002 earned a reported $126.2 million, an average of over $2 million per night. On the 12th of December 2012, he performed with three former Nirvana members during the closing act of the Concert for Sandy Relief, seen by approximately two billion people worldwide. On the 25th of June 2022, a week after his 80th birthday, McCartney headlined Glastonbury Festival, becoming the oldest solo headliner in the festival's history. Special guests that night were Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen. In 2021, his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a self-portrait in 154 songs based on conversations with Irish poet Paul Muldoon, was named Book of the Year by both Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. In November 2025, he released a nearly silent protest recording, running about two minutes and forty-five seconds of quiet hiss and brief clatters, on a protest LP called Is This What We Want? The message was explicit: "the British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies." The project was organised by composer Ed Newton-Rex and backed by artists including Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer, Sam Fender, and the Pet Shop Boys. McCartney's twentieth solo studio album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, was released on the 29th of May 2026, and he appeared on the 16th of May 2026 season finale of Saturday Night Live, performing "Days We Left Behind" alongside Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. On the 21st of May 2026, he was the final guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater - the same building where the Beatles first appeared on American television more than six decades before.