PAUL MCCARTNEY: THE BIOGRAPHY

BY PHILIP NORMAN, HACHETTE.

Apart from his imprisonment in Tokyo’s Kosuge Prison for a week in 1980, after being stopped at Narita International Airport with marijuana, Paul and Linda McCartney had never spent a night apart. This follow-up to Norman’s 1981 Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation bio had the “tacit approval” of Sir Paul. While digging into his troubled partnership with Lennon, the book is at its most bare documenting the first inside story of 25 years of marriage to Linda. The wife who took him a simple cheese sandwich when finally allowed to visit him in captivity was liked by his entourage from the beginning. “She was lovely,” said Paul’s childhood friend, Tony Bramwell. “She just stayed in the background, taking photographs.” When Linda was diagnosed with a malignant breast tumour in December 1995, it brought back the misery of a 1950s’ hospital ward. McCartney’s beloved mother, Mary, had died of breast cancer at just 47. Linda died at 56 in 1998, the year after Paul was knighted for services to music.