If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole St years, living with Jane Asher and her family

Think you know all about the Beatles? Wait till you read this mesmerising biography of one of the world’s greatest bands – by our renowned critic.

Ok, there’s no more booze,’ said John Lennon. ‘Let’s talk about sex, Jane,’ before asking her an outrageously intrusive question. The Beatles had first met Jane Asher, the 16-year-old actress and TV personality, backstage at the Royal Albert Hall that afternoon. The group were in awe of her, perhaps Paul most of all: ‘We had a photo taken with her and we all fancied her. We’d thought she was blonde, because we’d only ever seen her on black-andwhite telly doing Juke Box Jury, but she turned out to be a redhead.’

Now Jane and the four Beatles, plus Shane Fenton – later Alvin Stardust – and a few others, were at a tiny flat in the King’s Road. Lennon had found a bottle of amphetamines and washed them down with Mateus rosé. Charged up, he became aggressive towards Jane. For John, thwarted sexual attraction could sometimes shrivel into spite.

‘I’m not going to talk about that,’ said Jane, shocked but cool.

‘You’re the only girl here and I want to know.’

‘You know, John, you can be very cruel sometimes,’ said Jane. She started crying and was comforted by George Harrison.

‘It’s the beast in me,’ replied Lennon.

Paul ushered Jane out of the room and away from John.

They sat on a bed together and chatted about food and books, Paul at one point quoting from Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales, which they had both been taught at school. Jane seemed much more impressed by this than by Paul’s status as a pop idol, and this, in turn, impressed Paul. Dropping her off that night on the doorstep of the Asher family home, he asked for her phone number, and Jane happily gave it to him.

After Paul McCartney and Jane Asher became boyfriend and girlfriend in 1963, Jane’s parents gave Paul his own little bedroom on the top floor of 57 Wimpole Street.

Paul was to live there, as part of the Asher family, for the next three years, his bedroom filling up with the fruits of his extraordinary career: eventually he was to stow his gold records under his bed, and his MBE on a shelf, alongside two drawings by Jean Cocteau. It was at Wimpole Street that Paul received a letter from the Beatles’ accountant in 1965 informing him that, at the age of 23, he had become a millionaire.

The Ashers were a remarkable family in every way: remarkably accomplished, remarkably civilised, remarkably welcoming. Jane’s father, Dr Richard Asher, was a pioneering endocrinologist who in 1951 had named and identified Munchausen’s Syndrome, the mental disorder that drives individuals to fabricate symptoms of illness.

Her mother Margaret was a music professor. The whole Asher family involved themselves in discussions around the table, alive with erudition and curiosity and fun.

‘They would do things that I’d never seen before, like at dinner there would be word games,’ Paul told his biographer Barry Miles.

He remembered an argument over dinner between Dr Asher and his son

Peter, Paul’s contemporary, over when the tomato was first introduced to England. This was not the sort of topic they discussed in Paul’s family home in Forthlin Road, Liverpool.

Throughout his years with the Ashers, Paul was treated not as a pop star, but as one of the family: ‘It was very good for me, because in their eyes I wasn’t just the Beatle.’

Inevitably, Beatles fans would linger outside the house, ready to pounce. While Paul was away filming Help!, Jane’s father set himself the task of plotting an escape route for him. He climbed out of a back window and scaled his way along to the house next door, then tapped on a window to explain Paul’s peculiar problem to the occupier of the neighbouring flat.

On Paul’s return to London, Dr Asher was thus able to present him with a secret route through to New Cavendish Street. ‘I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, onto a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn’t that wide, it was only a foot or so, so you had to have something of a head for heights.

‘You’d go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-Army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming. “Uh! Coming through, Colonel!” “Oh, oh, OK, hush-hush and all that!” and he’d see me into the lift and I’d go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they’d see me out through the kitchen and into the garage.’

If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cosseted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life, alive to culture, adored by the world, and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by

magic, from my brain and out through the piano: I Want To Hold Your Hand, I’m Looking Through You, The Things We Said Today, And I Love Her, We Can Work It Out, Here, There And Everywhere, Yesterday.

But nothing lasts. On Christmas Day 1967, Paul and Jane announced their engagement; seven months later, in reply to a chance question from the TV chat-show host Simon Dee, Jane announced that it was all over: ‘I haven’t broken it off, but it is broken off, finished. I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again when we’re about 70.’

Over 50 years on, they both remain discreet about the break-up, speaking about it in nothing but the most general terms, leaving others to speculate. Some suggest Jane caught Paul in bed with an American woman called Francie Schwartz.

One or two of their acquaintances claim to have seen it coming. Marianne Faithfull never felt they were a natural fit: ‘I always thought Jane and Paul were very tense. I do remember very clearly an evening at Cavendish Avenue where she wanted the window open and he wanted the window shut. That really was like a Joe Orton play.

‘I sat there all night watching Jane get up and open it, and Paul close it, and… nothing was said. And quite soon after they split up, which of course I could have told anyone they would.’

But Marianne fails to offer a reason why Jane would have wanted the window open. Might it have been to release the fumes of marijuana that were the necessary accompaniment to any visit by Mick and Marianne?

‘JANE WAS MORE IMPRESSED THAT PAUL KNEW CHAUCER THAN BY HIS STATUS AS POP IDOL’