The nearest thing to Paul McCartney’s autobiography: his guide to the Beatles’ songbook

Whatever your favourite theory of creativity, Paul McCartney has a cheery thumbs-up to offer. You think the secret is putting in the hours? ‘We played nearly 300 times in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962.’ Or could it be a wide range of cultural inputs to assimilate and remix? The Arty Beatle hoovered up Shakespeare, Dryden, not just Desmond but Thomas Dekker, Berio and Cage and rock’n’roll and light jazz, and sublimated them all. In one of the great missed opportunities, when it came to arranging ‘Yesterday’, his first thought was Delia Derbyshire. Some people credit childhood trauma: McCartney recalls how his father Jim would weep alone in a neighbouring room after Paul’s mother died. The sexual drive? Paul and John wrote ‘dit-dit-dit’ into the chorus of ‘Girl’ purely so they could secretly sing ‘tit-tit-tit’ instead. Drugs? There is a lot of LSD and marijuana here — although ‘Fixing a Hole’ turns out to be about DIY. Or could it be as simple as synaesthesia? ‘I used to see the days of the week in colours.’

The Lyrics, presented in two huge volumes in a slipcase, is at once engrossing and frustrating. It is the closest McCartney is likely to come to an autobiography: 154 song lyrics, ranging from a scrap from a 14-year-old hand in 1956 to songs from McCartney III at the end of last year. His comments on each song and the circumstances of its composition are drawn from edited interviews with Paul Muldoon that point towards his muses (his parents; Lennon; Linda).

Most are illustrated with photographs and some with the original handwritten lyrics, on scraps of exercise book or hotel stationery. There is little vanity about the selection: ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘We All Stand Together’ make it in, though not ‘Wonderful Christmastime’.