He penned some of the best music of the 20th century, picked up a knighthood, and now he's into a little bit of history revisionism. Brian Boyd on the man who sees the world in terms of McCartney/Lennon.
Staring her straight in the eye, he sang "Get Back . . . Get back to where you once belonged". Paul McCartney's none too subtle message to Yoko Ono is recorded in all its technicolour spite and malice in the Let It Be film. It was 1969, and the biggest and best band that ever was and ever will be were disintegrating in a miasma of ego, drugs, greedy lawyers/accountants and cloying personal relationships.
The Japanese conceptual artist coldly met McCartney's baleful gaze in her characteristic inscrutable way, even then well inured to the received myth that she was the woman who broke up The Beatles.
Industry talk has it that Ono (who, amazingly, turned 70 this week) exacted a revenge of sorts recently - McCartney had just finished recording his new live album, Back In The US and rang his beloved Abbey Road studio (home of all the Beatles' greatest moments) to get the work mixed. "Sorry Sir Paul" came the alleged reply, "the studio has been block booked - under the name of a Ms Ono".
It's just another chapter in the dirty little war between the most successful recording artist of all time and the widow of the man who helped get him there. With his place in musical history sacrosanct, and with a personal wealth of close to £1 billion, what continues to motivate the 60-year-old McCartney, according to sources, is his continuing posthumous battle with John Lennon, a hubristic battle over "legacy".
In a bar in Rome two years ago, McCartney wandered over to the piano at the end of the night to bash out a few tunes for the rapt late-night drinkers. Flicking through the resident pianist's songbook, he came across the sheet music to Hey Jude - the song had been credited to John Lennon, even though it was written from first note to last by McCartney.
The incident got him thinking. "I just thought 'If that gets on a hard disk 100 years from now, history could end up being rewritten'. I just wanted people, when they call up data in the future, for my side to be there," he said in an interview.
When McCartney and Lennon first started writing together, they aped the songwriting credit form of Rogers and Hammerstein, deciding that regardless of whatever the two of them contributed to a song - lyrics, chorus, bridge, middle eighth - the work would be credited to both of them. With Rogers and Hammerstein though, there was a clear lyric/music writer divide. McCartney and Lennon both wrote lyrics and music.
In the early days, when they composed "eyeball to eyeball" over two acoustic guitars, their songwriting intertwined almost line by line but by the time of The White Album in 1968, if not well before, they were distinctly solo songwriters.
The difficulty arises because a song Yesterday (historically, the most played song on radio) is a solo McCartney composition, but under their original agreement, is still credited to Lennon/McCartney.
It's now public knowledge which of the mid-to-late Beatles songs belong solely to Lennon and solely to McCartney (although there's still a battle royal being fought over two songs: Eleanor Rigby and In My Life) and all McCartney wants to do now is to re-credit his solo Beatles' songs as "McCartney/Lennon" as opposed to the familiar "Lennon/McCartney".
It may seem trivial (after all, Lennon's name isn't being removed from anything - even songs which he himself admitted he had no hand in) but Yoko Ono's lawyer, Peter Shukat has reacted sharply to McCartney's decision to re-arrange the credit on 19 of the Beatles' songs which appear on his new Back In The US album.
"It's ridiculous, absurd and petty," says Shukat, "Paul and John agreed on Lennon/McCartney over 40 years ago, to change it now . . . well, John's not here to argue". Ono, herself, weighed in with: "If these songs are credited to McCartney/Lennon and the rest of the 200 or so Beatles' songs credited to Lennon/McCartney, people may think Paul wrote those songs. I told him not to do it." Ono added she's "looking into" what legal avenues are available to her to force McCartney to change the credit order on Back In The US.
The row over songwriting credits is but a symptom of a deeper, more fractious struggle still being played out between the two Liverpool near neighbours who first met at a summer fair in 1957. McCartney has long been incensed by the fact that Lennon is portrayed as the edgy, arty, "true genius" Beatle. It's a myth that has been perpetuated down the years, aided and abetted by Lennon's near sainthood in the music press - the corollary being that McCartney was the "nice" Beatle, who did a neat line in sentimental melodies and was a bit of a "square".
The truth, according to McCartney, is that he was the real "avant-garde" Beatle, the one who first introduced the band to the experimental and progressive recoding techniques that informed their work from the Revolver album on, and the one who turned them on to "field of consciousness" expanding drugs. While Lennon was living in suburban isolation with his first wife, Cynthia, he talks of hanging around with Bertrand Russell and Harold Pinter, and putting the "swing" into the "Sixties".
There's even a story of how shocked John Lennon was when McCartney lit up a hash pipe in a nightclub.
With the break-up of the band in 1970, McCartney got hammered critically for his solo work, which was regarded as "twee" and "insubstantial" compared with Lennon's earthy, politically tuned-in fare. Undeniably, he released some dreadful, "I Love Linda"/"Peace 'n' Love" type rubbish but there was some marvellous stuff in there too - the Ram (1971) album and the stand-out Wings album Band On The Run (1973). The 1980s was not a good decade for McCartney, apart from being imprisoned for 10 days in Japan for possession of marijuana, he reached a career low with the egregious Give My Regards To Broad Street album and film.
Beefing up his artistic credentials in the 1990s, he composed his first classical work, Liverpool Oratorio - which was met by "mixed" reviews, unveiled a collection of his abstract paintings and published a book of his lyrics and poetry. He also, not generally known, released a series of ambient techno albums under the pseudonym of The Fireman. All of these activities, coupled with his re-telling of the Beatles story in the acclaimed Anthology series, did much to redress his "soppy old hippy" image.
Although he hasn't written a memorable song for over 20 years, his drawing power as a "heritage" artist is immense.
Last year, he earned £68 million from his tour of the US and the European leg of the same tour will see him performing in Dublin for the first time since The Beatles played the Adelphi Cinema in November, 1963.
"Playing in Dublin is going to mean a lot to me because Ireland is such a special place for me," he said in a release announcing the Dublin date, "my mother originally hailed from Ireland [Co Monaghan], it's where Heather \ and I chose to be married and I have a lot of ties with the land and the people." Even with ticket prices at €105 and €75, the show at the RDS Arena on May 27th is expected to sell out within minutes when booking opens at 9 a.m. next Thursday.
Regardless of whether or not he is a spent creative force, he still possesses the best back catalogue in the business. He has written or co-written the most memorable and enduring music of the last century. From Hamburg to The Cavern Club to Shea Stadium to a London rooftop . . . Love Me Do, In My Life, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane.
He's a Beatle. He shook the world.