No group better captured the sense of artistic freedom and joyous optimism of the late Sixties than the Beatles. The songs which emerged from this period, and which indelibly bear McCartney’s fingerprint, are among the finest of his career – Fool on the Hill, She’s Leaving Home, Eleanor Rigby: a mixture of English pastoral, childhood memories, the Victorian nursery and Play for Today, conjured in a luscious marijuana haze. Above all, there is Penny Lane with its litany of the commonplace – a barber showing photographs, a banker with motorcar, a nurse selling poppies, “there beneath the blue suburban skies”, as if seen for the very first time through fresh and wondering eyes.

It is these songs, along with Hey Jude, Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road – the Beatles’s last number one – that will endure for as long as music is played.

The solo years

Historians will deliberate on the break-up of the Beatles for decades to come. But as the group imploded, it was McCartney, rightly or wrongly, who was held to account, the first to release his debut solo album in April 1970, on the same day he formally announced his departure from the group – and a month before the release of the Beatles’ final album, Let It Be.

The offspring of the marriage of Lennon and McCartney – their Northern Songs back catalogue – would ultimately go to Michael Jackson. (When McCartney contacted Jackson enquiring about an increase in the royalty rate – which had remained largely unchanged since the first contract in the early Sixties – Jackson refused, explaining: “That’s just business, Paul.”)