The problem with Paul McCartney is he wrote too many good songs

Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer of all time, was once asked if he reckoned he could have maintained his batting average of 99.94 against the fearsome West Indian bowling attack of the time. Oh no, he said. Not a chance. He’d probably be hitting in the 50s, like the very best batsmen of the time. But then again, he added, he was in his late 60s so it was unrealistic to expect better.

That’s the position Paul McCartney occupies in the world of pop. No, at 82 years old he is not going to make a new Revolver or Abbey Road. And no, he can’t do the Little Richard scream like he used to 60 years ago. But he is still, as they say in sport, the Goat. The undisputed champion of the world. One of the four men who invented the concept of the guitar band as we now know it, writer of dozens of the best-loved songs in the world.

Consider this: McCartney played for the best part of three hours on the last night of his Got Back tour, and these were among the songs he either wrote or had a large part in writing that he did not play: ‘Yesterday’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘The Night Before’, ‘Paperback Writer’, ‘Michelle’, ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, ‘Hello, Goodbye’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘The Fool on the Hill’, ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Birthday’, ‘Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Clearly, for almost any other artist those songs alone would be a greatest hits set of astonishing magnitude. That’s how far ahead of the game McCartney has been.