McCartney talks!

As his marriage crumbled, he maintained a dignified silence. Now, Sir Paul McCartney has finally broken cover to give his first interview since the break-up. He talks about music, love, life and death. Everything, in fact, except her. While he is full of praise for his late first wife Linda, he makes no reference at all to his soon to be ex-wife Heather Mills.

Sir Paul gave the interview last month, in which he talks about his latest album, a classical work called Ecce Cor Meum. He had been recording over the past few months, although the writing of the score had been ongoing for eight years. It began in 1997 and was interrupted by Linda's death from breast cancer in 1998.

"I started it and I had the whole thing going and I was on a fast track then suddenly Linda died and it just stopped me. And I had to take a year out just to grieve," he said in the interview to be broadcast by Classic FM on 24 September, the day before the album is released.

Sir Paul revealed how, even after four and a half decades in the music business, he has to relearn the process of writing when he begins each new project. "You make a great album, a successful album, and you come to make your next one and you think, 'well, I know how to do it now because we just made a great one', but you don't. Each time you come to it you relearn the whole thing. It's as if you forget it all. It's as if your memory goes blank."

Sir Paul, who was commissioned to create the new work by Oxford's Magdalen College, has previously written two classical works, Liverpool Oratorio and Standing Stone. He said it was producer Sir George Martin's string scores for the Beatles which had sown the ideas of classical composition in his mind.

"It was round about 'Eleanor Rigby' when I thought, 'What am I going to do when I'm 30?' I had this image of myself in a kind of tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and a pencil and manuscript paper and I thought, 'That's what I'll do. That's what I'll do when the Beatles runs out.'"