At the beginning of this two-volume book, Paul McCartney says that while he has no intention of writing his autobiography and has never kept a diary, it has been his habit throughout his adult life to turn his life experiences into the words of songs, and so here are 154 of them.
Unsurprisingly, almost everything under I dates from the Beatles’ personal-pronoun period – I Saw Her Standing There, I Wanna Be Your Man, I Want to Hold Your Hand, I’m Down, I’ll Follow the Sun and others – while the average reader may be a bit lost in the O section once they get past Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.
The majority have lived inside us since we first heard them, in my case for almost 60 years, as a consequence of which I am incapable of reading “and the fireman rushes in” without hearing the precise intonation of the way he sang it for the ages on 30 December 1966.
Whereas the other Beatles wrote fitfully after the group broke up, Paul kept getting out his pencil, taking his guitar into a quiet corner and writing yet another song, less on the basis of inspiration than the feeling that it was a muscle he must use or lose.
In the same commentary, he’s forever reaching back to the England of his boyhood: taking phone calls in the cupboard beneath the stairs, being dispatched into the street to collect horse shit for Dad’s roses, watching Bootsie and Snudge on TV, lifting an idea for Mrs Vandebilt from The Vamp of Baghdad by Charlie Chester.
Having learned from Craig Brown’s recent book that Malcolm Muggeridge came to see the Beatles play in Hamburg, I no longer bat an eyelid at the revelation that in 1964 Paul rocked up unannounced at the door of Bertrand Russell.
In teasing us with a lovely story about the last time he saw Jane Asher, but not revealing which decade it was, the book falls short of the “unparalleled candour” promised in its publicity.
From his first song, I Lost My Little Girl, which he wrote at the age of 14 after the death of his mother, to whatever he happens to be chipping away at just as you’re reading this, he’ll still be trying to take a sad song and make it better.