Paul McCartney

It’s slightly galling, after years of sticking up for Paul McCartney, to read a new biography of the bloke and realise that you don’t, in the end, really like him that much. But that’s how good Philip Norman’s book is — Macca has no agenda, it simply lets you make up your mind. And for me, it was the leg-combing wot won it.

You can’t argue with McCartney’s work. In fact, what you have to argue against is the ridiculous notion that he was the poppy, pappy one while John Lennon was the radical. It was Macca who funded the underground newspaper International Times; who was into Stockhausen, Cage and Berio while Lennon was (to quote McCartney himself) ‘living on a golf course in bloody Weybridge’. And you can understand McCartney’s irritation when ‘Hey Jude’ (entirely his own work, but subject like all their songs to the joint-credit agreement) is rendered by his iPad as ‘Hey Jude by John Lennon and…’