Or, in the “Love Me Do” piece, to walk us in forensic detail from the street, “past my dad’s lavender hedge” to the dining room of the McCartney home, where he and Lennon wrote many of their early songs. Instead, his non-muso, poet’s eye gives McCartney licence to suggest with uncharacteristic self-examination “I know about delving into your mind to look for solace in a song”. Muldoon avoids falling into the trap of merely describing how a song was written. The result, as McCartney surely intended, is autobiography by delightfully disjointed default. Instead of adulation or muck-raking, McCartney took a different course, plumping for Paul Muldoon, the Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of poetry, and gave 50 hours of his time, over five years. He notes too that Yoko’s studio presence during the recording of “Let It Be” was “challenging” and he alludes to Lennon’s heroin habit during the twilight of The Beatles. Inevitably his version of their post-Beatles relationship is the sweet one where, in an international version of a Liverpool garden fence, whenever he was in New York, he’d pop round to the Ono-Lennons for a coffee.Īlong this long and winding road, old hurts still simmer, though and he does admit thinking “oh f**k off you fucking idiot” when the pair were trading barbs in the early 70s. In selecting his collaborator, he avoided both hardcore Beatles fans who could bore for Liverpool and anyone seeking to unearth new information on “some supposed feud between John and Yoko and me”.
#Paul mccartney book full#
It’s beautifully presented with photographs, original lyric sheets and such ephemera as McCartney’s diary entry for the Abbey Road cover shoot, which he accompanied with sketches of the foursome.Īs ever when he has full control, McCartney has been canny.
It does very well indeed.īeautifully presented over two weighty volumes, The Lyrics is McCartney discussing 154 of his songs, from 1956’s “I Lost My Little Girl” to the present day, arranged in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He’ll be 80 next year and since it’s hard to conceive of anyone bar The Queen whose day- to-day life since the early 60s has been chronicled quite so extensively, a formal autobiography is unlikely to emerge.
At almost any point after The Beatles split, it must have been tempting for Paul McCartney to set the record straight.
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