Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney: The Cave Painter with Perfect Pitch

"Yesterday" is the most covered song in the history of popular music. It was also the first Beatles recording that involved only one Beatle, and the first to use classical instruments. The man who wrote it cannot read a note of standard notation and never could. He has compared himself, without much modesty and with total accuracy, to "the primitive cave artists, who drew without training."

Liverpool, and a Mother's Death

James Paul McCartney was born at Walton Hospital, Liverpool, on 18 June 1942, to Mary Mohin, a midwife, and Jim McCartney, a jazz musician — both families of Irish descent. His father pushed him towards piano lessons; he refused, and learned by ear instead, on piano and then guitar. Being left-handed, he reversed the strings after watching Slim Whitman play. At fourteen he traded his trumpet for a Framus acoustic because he had discovered Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.

He was fourteen when his mother died, on 31 October 1956, of an embolism following surgery for breast cancer. Nine months later, on 6 July 1957, he went to a church fête at St Peter's, Woolton, where a skiffle group called the Quarrymen was playing, and met a boy called John Lennon who had also lost his mother.

The Woolton Fête

He joined as rhythm guitarist. George Harrison came in 1958, Stuart Sutcliffe on bass in 1960; when Sutcliffe left in 1961, McCartney took the bass, whether willingly or under protest depending on whose memoir you read. The name became the Beatles in August 1960, Brian Epstein took over management in January 1962, and Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best that August.

The Lennon–McCartney credit went on "I Saw Her Standing There," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Can't Buy Me Love." It became the most successful songwriting partnership in the history of the form.

The Ascendancy

From 1965 the balance shifted. The musicologist Ian MacDonald's judgement is the standard one: from that point McCartney "would be in the ascendant not only as a songwriter, but also as instrumentalist, arranger, producer" and de facto musical director. "Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby," "Blackbird" and "And I Love Her" are his. *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band* — rock's first concept album — was his idea, born of exhaustion with the band's own image: "We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top approach."

It came at a cost in the room. The engineer Norman Smith remembered that "the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious [...] Paul was absolutely finicky." After Epstein died in August 1967, McCartney became the de facto leader and business manager, which is a large part of why the ending was so ugly. Lennon left privately in September 1969; McCartney announced his own departure on 10 April 1970, sued for dissolution that New Year's Eve, and got a court judgement on 9 January 1975.

The Break, and Wings

He answered with volume. After the ragged, homemade *McCartney* in 1970, he formed Wings in 1971 with his wife Linda and Denny Laine and spent the decade making hit records: *Red Rose Speedway* and "My Love," then *Band on the Run* in 1973 — number one on both sides of the Atlantic and *Rolling Stone*'s album of the year — then *Venus and Mars*, *Wings at the Speed of Sound*, *London Town* and *Back to the Egg*. "Mull of Kintyre," a bagpipe waltz released in 1977, sold two and a half million copies in Britain and remained the country's best-selling single until Band Aid in 1984. Wings ended in April 1981.

The Long Second Act

Then forty more years. *Tug of War* in 1982 with "Ebony and Ivory"; two hits with Michael Jackson; *Flowers in the Dirt* in 1989 and a world tour that put 184,000 people into the Maracanã on 21 April 1990, the largest paying stadium audience ever recorded. *Flaming Pie*, *Chaos and Creation in the Backyard*, *Memory Almost Full*. The experimental Fireman records with the producer Youth. Collaborations with Kanye West and Rihanna in 2014 and 2015. *Egypt Station* in 2018 gave him his first *Billboard* 200 number one in thirty-six years; *McCartney III* in 2020 his first solo UK number one since 1989. In 2021 he published *The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present*, a self-portrait in 154 songs assembled in conversation with the poet Paul Muldoon.

The Composer Without Notation

He also kept walking into rooms he was not qualified to enter. His score for *The Family Way* in 1966 won an Ivor Novello. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society commissioned the *Liverpool Oratorio* in 1991. *Standing Stone* topped both the British and American classical charts in 1997, followed by *Ecce Cor Meum* in 2006 and *Ocean's Kingdom*, a score for New York City Ballet, in 2011. All of it dictated, sung, or played to collaborators who could write it down.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The most precise account of what McCartney has comes from Ian MacDonald, who was not a flatterer. McCartney, he wrote, was "by nature drawn to music's formal aspects yet wholly untutored [...] [he] produced technically 'finished' work almost entirely by instinct, his harmonic judgement based mainly on perfect pitch and an acute pair of ears."

That sentence contains the whole claim. The unusual thing is not the melodic gift on its own — pop is full of tunesmiths — but the combination of an ear that works at the level of formal structure with a complete absence of the training that normally produces such structure. Trained composers reach a modulation by rule. McCartney reaches it because he can hear that it is the correct one, and the results survive analysis afterwards. Add the bass playing, which turned a timekeeping instrument into a countermelodic one — *Rolling Stone* ranked him ninth among all bassists in 2020, *Bass Player* third — and a multi-instrumentalist's willingness to play the drums or the piano himself when the take needed it. The tally is a form of evidence: thirty-two songs he wrote or co-wrote have topped the *Billboard* Hot 100, a record, and around 100 million records sold. The Library of Congress gave him its Gershwin Prize in 2010, its Librarian, James Billington, citing five decades of writing and performing "as a member of iconic groups and as a solo artist" across genres.

The counter-case has two parts and both are serious. The first is Lennon. The catalogue everyone means when they say McCartney is a genius is the one made in friction with a collaborator who pushed back on his sweetness; the engineers' accounts of the sessions describe a partnership held together by irritation. The second is what happened after that irritation stopped. The same instinct that produced "Eleanor Rigby" produced "Silly Love Songs," and the solo catalogue is spectacularly uneven — a body of work with no editor. The classical scores sold on the strength of the name, and it is a fair question whether they would be programmed at all without it. The gift is not in dispute; the judgement about when to deploy it sometimes is.

Legacy

He was made MBE in 1965 with the rest of the band and knighted in 1997 for services to music. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — with the Beatles in 1988 and alone in 1999 — and holds nineteen Grammys, an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy, the last of them in 2022 for producing *The Beatles: Get Back*. His fortune was estimated at a billion pounds in 2024, and the songs remain what all of that money was made from. Somewhere a wedding band is playing "Yesterday" wrong. It survives that too.

Achievements

• Member of the Order of the British Empire — 1965
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1990
• Grammy Award for Best Historical Album — 2011
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1999
• Academy Award for Best Original Score — 1971
• Notable work: Ram
• Notable work: Band on the Run
• Notable work: Maybe I'm Amazed
• Notable work: Band on the Run
• Instruments: bass guitar, guitar and piano