Paul McCartney has a legacy to be proud of – even if memories sometimes get hazy

Does it matter who wrote the first verse of a Beatles song?

Some nit-pickers have reviewed Sir Paul McCartney’s upcoming double-volume tome, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, marking it down for deviating from “what really happened”.

The former Beatle claims, for example, to have based the classic track “A Day in the Life” on the death of his friend 21-year-old Tara Browne, the Guinness heir whose life ended in a fatal car crash. It was long believed that John Lennon had written the track, having given a similar explanation about its origins – with McCartney previously claiming the lyrics were about a politician off his head on drugs.

Is this blurring McCartney’s way of settling scores, and burnishing his reputation? Would his life have been happier if the songwriting credits had read McCartney/Lennon instead of the other way around?

I hardly think so, but there’s no denying that the relationship between the two could be prickly, and McCartney admits in the book that Lennon’s “bluster” was sometimes hard to stomach, even though Lennon was a warm and loving person under the prickly exterior – perhaps the result of an unhappy childhood.

McCartney claims that Lennon was responsible for the break-up of The Beatles, even though (in reality) Paul told the press first that he would no longer record or perform with the band and would not be writing any more music with John in 1970. That marked the culmination of a deteriorating relationship.

Again, what version do we believe? There’s always two, three or more sides to every breakup, and John isn’t here to give us his views. Although I am sure that Yoko could give her account, and probably has.

How important is absolute truth when you’re describing events that took place in the last half century? The history of The Beatles, like the British housing crisis and the decline of the Labour Party, isn’t set in stone. The story of The Beatles – with all their different personalities – is important because of their huge impact on contemporary music. Put simply, they became the soundtrack to our lives, and are part of our stories too. Every band member has told a different version of their story.

History is elastic, but some in our cancel culture might find hard that to understand. Unfortunately, there is an increasing trend to try and define one way of thinking, one set of values, one version of events, as the gold standard, the “truth”. Statues must be toppled, university lecturers must be hounded from their jobs, and bestselling authors shunned for not conforming to a particular set of views.

Along with our increasingly narrow notion of what’s acceptable – which is a real threat to freedom of speech – there is the modern fashion to parade and promote your personal history, your story, to validate yourself as if you’re as important as any politician, power broker or creative genius.

From Katie Price to Alan Carr, most successful entertainers, television chefs and comedians have probably produced an autobiography (often written by someone else) by the time they have reached the ripe old age of 30.

The Lyrics is in another category. Paul McCartney isn’t a reality show contestant presenting his working-class struggle as worthy of praise, but one of the most successful and well-loved musicians of the last 60 years. He has always refused to pen an autobiography, so perhaps this weighty opus (912 pages) is as near as we will get to his version of events in his life, based on conversations with the acclaimed Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

It focuses on 154 songs and contains photographs, and images of the hand-written lyrics from the singer’s own collection. It has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Book Of The Year award. That is a rich feast, but I was astonished to read one critic whingeing that Paul had “missed out” another 350 songs because they “might have lowered the tone”. For God’s sake!

Yes, McCartney has chosen to omit his 10 days in jail in Japan in 1980 for possessing cannabis and his ex-wife Heather Mills.

There’s a few memory malfunctions. He claims that Jimi Hendrix’s flamboyant style with extensive feedback influenced the recording of “A Day in the Life” – but Hendrix had not arrived in London at that point.

In the end, it’s irrelevant. Sure, McCartney recorded some duds with Wings, and his lyrics could be shameless singalongs. But the book gives a charming personal account of key moments in his early career, including how he met Lennon – at a church fete in the summer of 1957.

The style might be folksy and persistently positive, but that is McCartney’s character. He muses: “I do often stop and wonder about the chance of The Beatles getting together. We were four guys who lived in this city in the north of England but we didn’t know each other. Then, by chance, we did get to know each other.”

The randomness of their encounters is captured perfectly.

Listening to McCartney interview himself on the radio about the book, his recollection of how one of the greatest songs of the last half century (”Eleanor Rigby”) came to be written varies from previous versions. He’s said that his mum’s favourite cream was Nivea, and in the song Eleanor “keeps her face in a jar by the door”. He talks about an old lady he used to go and chat to as a teenager, who seemed lonely, which led to the line about “picking up the rice in the church after a wedding has been” because she would never be married herself, it would just be a dream.

Was Eleanor Rigby a name on a grave in a churchyard in Liverpool, or a sign on a shop in Bristol – it doesn’t really matter. McCartney’s recollections might be variable, his memory might be playing tricks, but in the end, there’s no denying that he (and Lennon) created songs that have become modern classics. Songs which capture daily life in the modern world as well as any pompous historian or diary writer, from dabbling in drugs to mixing with high society and poets.

McCartney might have felt overawed at times, seemingly jealous of Lennon’s intellectual pretensions, but this book confirms he is right to be proud of his legacy. Sod the fact checkers.