Paul

The image is of the thumbs-up, cheery Scouser; the organic farmer and proselytising vegetarian; the loving family man who always takes the wife on tour; the philanthropist who has helped save hospitals and schools. At 53, Paul McCartney remains the rock star most likely to give good PR when out buying a packet of screws. But talk to colleagues in the music industry and a more complex, darker presence emerges. They describe an isolated, still driven individual who has grown dissatisfied with the "normal" lifestyle he has adopted, and who hankers after the old critical adoration that was his main drug of choice throughout the Sixties.

"He worries constantly about not being as successful as he was and not making enough hits," says one. "He can be unpleasant," claims another, a prominent record executive who survived many bruising encounters with McCartney during the Eighties. For all his spaniel-eyed charm, within the music business McCartney inspires dislike as well as admiration for his achievements with the Beatles, especially among those who have grown old with him. These people await this winter's Beatles extravaganza with more scepticism than will be found elsewhere.

Maybe McCartney, always the diplomat among the Beatles, was bound to disappoint in private. For all the stories of his genius and philanthropy, there are also complaints about his "stinginess" and difficulties collaborating with him. It does seem that his acute business instincts can sour professional relationships. Musicians have left his bands complaining of less than adequate rewards.

He can be an imperious employer, making it uncomfortably plain to his key staff that he has bought them 24 hours a day. Lengthy telephone calls, often lasting up to two hours, are made from the back of his chauffeur- driven Mercedes as it speeds up and down to his Soho office at MPL (McCartney Productions Ltd.). The same man will go out of his way to please humble fans and younger musicians - Paul Weller professed himself awe-struck to be working with McCartney on Help, the Bosnia charity record.

What makes a man like this? There is an argument that Paul McCartney has locked himself into one or two myths of his own making, the rural idyll being a good example. His main home is the five-bedroomed farmhouse he designed himself on his estate outside Peasmarsh, a little, weather- boarded village near Rye in East Sussex. Here, on the edge of Romney Marshes, he and Linda McCartney oversee what is possibly Britain's biggest organic farm. There are enough houses to put up friends, security staff and fellow musicians. His recording studio, run by technicians from Abbey Road Studio days, is 20 minutes' drive away on the other side of Winchelsea; he spends most days there, noodling on guitar and piano. Another farmhouse is converted into a studio where he paints.

Selected visitors - he does not have a large circle of close friends - describe his house, built in the local style, as messy and comfortable. Linda's photos jostle for space on the walls with his considerable art collection, which includes Rembrandt etchings, De Koonings, Magrittes, a small Renoir and a Tiepolo drawing, most of it in his bedroom. There is a valuable hoard of Beatles memorabilia, which he has been consistently buying: fans in the Sixties often stole his own possessions as mementoes. For, unlike George Harrison, he has never sickened of his time as a Beatle: those who have worked with him say that, when things go wrong these days, he will always go on about "when I was in the Beatles..."

Although he is now the richest popular musician in the world, worth, it has been conjectured, somewhere between pounds 400 and pounds 500 million, there is nothing in the least precious about the way he lives. Piles of old records, tapes and books lie around, the odd card or snap will be wedged into the corner of a valuable painting, and giant sheepdogs pad around. Family activity centres on a large kitchen looking out on to paddocks and stables.

Of his children, only James, the youngest at 17, is still at home. Mary, 25, works for her father at MPL after having been introduced to the music industry by working at EMI Records and as a picture editor at Omnibus Music Press. Stella, 23, was a fashion student at Central St Martin's: in June, Paul and Linda very publicly attended her graduation collection, modelled by Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Yasmin Le Bon. Heather, 31, Linda's eldest daughter by her first marriage, is a potter. His children, who went to comprehensive schools, have seldom made the news, apart from Heather, who was hospitalised for mental problems seven years ago. It is said that she found it hard to cope with her stepfather's fame.

It is, by the standards of celebrity, a normal family life, and one which should be wholly pleasurable; yet, according to insiders, it leaves McCartney disgruntled, missing the old excitements of London, where he still has a big house in Cavendish Avenue, St John's Wood, which he bought in the Sixties. He could move back, but Linda has the lifestyle she wants.

"You can never leave your lawyer's daughter" is the waspish joke in the music biz, a reference to Linda's father, Lee Eastman, who, until his death in the Eighties, had astutely guided Paul's affairs following the break-up of the Beatles. (Her brother John now fills the same role without the same drive for empire building.) In fact, such spiteful remarks have always seemed to bring the McCartneys closer together: last year, for example, on their silver wedding anniversary, they announced that they had only spent nine nights out of nine thousand apart.

Linda, however, has always had a rough ride, especially from music fans puzzled and irritated by her playing keyboards for her husband. Four years ago, a tape of her singing along to the chorus of "Hey Jude" was privately circulated. Her performance is so bad that radio stations across America played it to demonstrate her ineptitude. It turned out that a mischievous technician had taped her during McCartney's performance at Knebworth in summer 1990. To Linda's credit, she laughed it off: she has never professed to be a musician.

The dynamics of her relationship with Paul have always perplexed. MPL, for example, runs the business affairs of both of them - last year it paid Paul a whacking pounds 869,000 and Linda pounds 580,000 (on a turnover of pounds 6.4 million). Managers in the past have been hired to handle not just Paul but "Paul and Linda". McCartney, who likes to be liked, manages his wife's PR, so it is odd how badly Linda's image has been put across.The tabloids, for example, love to portray her as a militant veggie harridan: the local hunting folk of Sussex and Kent still believe the unfounded talk that she pays the "sabs" pounds 20 a day to disrupt Ashford Valley hunts.

Yet she is much the warmer person, and now almost certainly the more fulfilled. Her vegetarian food company, set up with frozen food giants Ross Young, sold 60 million meals last year, and her cookbooks are bestsellers. Insiders have also noted that she is much more attuned to current music - his "eyes and ears", in the words of one. The old jibes now seem rather thin.

But McCartney is highly conscious of his debt to the whole Eastman family. It is a spooky coincidence that the immigrant Eastmans were really named Epstein, the same as the Beatles' first manager, but the Eastmans, by contrast, have assiduously built up the fortunes which Brian Epstein failed to defend: this is why McCartney made more money out of Wings in the Seventies than he made out of the Beatles in the Sixties. He has followed Lee Eastman's dictum that he should invest in music publishing, something he understands, and he now owns the rights to thousands of songs by composers ranging from Buddy Holly to Hoagy Carmichael, from "That'll Be The Day" to "My Resistance is Low". A Chorus Line, Grease, Annie and Guys & Dolls are among the scores he publishes.

The money these investments make have gone partly on houses around the world - in New York, Arizona and Scotland. But unlike, say, Elton John, he is not a conspicuous spender. As for giving, he did donate pounds 1 million to the new Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, of which he is chief patron, but only after he had been badgered for years by its organisers. His staff say he is a prolific donor but always with the strict proviso that, if it is ever mentioned, there will be no more forthcoming. At MPL, the 1993 accounts show a turnover of pounds 14 million and charitable donations of pounds 11,727. The 1994 accounts list no donations.

Money can't buy everything. McCartney lost the publishing rights of the early Beatles' catalogue, on Northern Songs, to his friend Michael Jackson, who paid $53 million on 10 August, 1985. McCartney reveals in a new book, McCartney: Yesterday And Today, by Ray Coleman, that it was he who advised Jackson at a lunch party given by Adam Faith to get into publishing. Jackson followed his advice and outbid him for his own work, which he had previously had to relinquished to Lew Grade's ATV in another Epstein bungle. McCartney is still furious at Jackson's refusal either to sell it back or, more gallingly, to increase his royalties, despite stories that Yoko Ono has re-negotiated the share due to Lennon. That means she now gets more money from "Yesterday" than McCartney, even though Lennon had no hand in writing it.

Nor does money buy you critical success. McCartney has been through various partnerships - with Jackson ("Say Say Say"), Stevie Wonder ("Ebony and Ivory"), and Elvis Costello (at least an album's worth of material) - and down several new avenues (both film and classical music) in an effort to regain old glories. He has seldom succeeded, which may explain why, finally, he has decided to go backwards and embrace the Anthology project. Those who have worked with him before say that his enthusiasm for it is very puzzling, given that he always fought against unearthing old recordings. If they were not good enough at the time, he argued, there is no point in bringing them out now.

So what changed his mind? Friends have no doubt: as he sees it, he's setting the record straight and correcting certain Beatles myths, particularly those promoting John Lennon as the greater influence on the band, which have long angered him. He hated, for example, the film Backbeat, about the time when the Beatles were in Hamburg, complaining that it robbed him of his "rock'n'roll-ness": "They give John 'Long Tall Sally' to sing and he never sang it in his life," he moaned, "but now it's set in cement." Similarly, in an essay he wrote for his 1990 tour programme, he thumped on about Lennon and the Beatles and who really ran the show. He then declined the suggestion made by tour organisers that, as a gesture of reconciliation, he close his show with a version of "Imagine".

Perhaps to counter the Lennon myth - that John was the wilder, more creative of the two - he has authorised a biography of his life in the Sixties, written by Barry Miles, author of a biography of Allen Ginsberg, which will be published next year. It includes the corrective that, during the time Lennon, living in Weybridge, was out of it on acid, Macca was there at the heart of Swinging London.

And McCartney has devoted himself wholeheartedly to the Anthology project, showing all the old willingness to play the media game which Harrison and Starr disdain. Beatles-watchers will be closely monitoring to see how even-handed it is in portraying the extraordinary rivalry within the world's most famous group. But it remains a neat irony that on the first new Beatles' single in 25 years, it will be McCartney and the other two Beatles backing John