After resisting many offers for a book, McCartney agrees to put pen to paper
Sir Paul McCartney has always saved his writing for lyrics, believing his story had been told ‘‘so many times’’ he never needed to dabble in a memoir.
But yesterday it was announced the
78-year-old had finally penned a book ‘‘as close to an autobiography as we may ever come’’, after enlisting the help of a prize-winning poet and pop fan.
McCartney has assembled 154 songs spanning his life from boyhood to The Beatles and beyond into The Lyrics ,a
900-page volume with each text providing a frame for biographical detail about the time it was written.
The book has been edited with the help of Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon, who as a former professor of poetry at Oxford might seem a world away from celebrity ghost writers.
His style, described by academics as ‘‘irreducibly esoteric’’ and ‘‘pregnant with allusions and linguistic play’’, is not the kind of writing found in the average airport paperback or Fab Four hit.
But the Northern Irish poet, once a friend of the late Seamus Heaney, is a confessed devotee of Sixties pop who said he will ‘‘still go to see Paul McCartney every chance I get’’, and agreed to work with the fellow ‘‘literary figure’’.
He said: ‘‘Based on conversations I had with Paul McCartney over a fiveyear period, these commentaries are as close to an autobiography as we may ever come. His insights into his own artistic process confirm a notion at which we had but guessed; that Paul McCartney is a major literary figure who draws upon, and extends, the long tradition of poetry in English.’’
He added: ‘‘We know he’s a prodigious musician, even better now than he was 60 years ago, but I’m not sure if we know just how significant a writer he is.
‘‘This book will underline his real importance as a literary phenomenon.’’
Muldoon’s own importance as a writer has been acknowledged with prizes either side of the Atlantic for his 14 volumes of verse. The sometime librettist and lyricist from County Armagh has compiled collections of his own songs, performed with his own band, the Wayside Shrines, and in the past said that ‘‘songs and poems have always existed together for me’’.
But fans of McCartney may be surprised at his decision to take part in the project after persistently refusing, along with Ringo Starr, to pen his memoirs. In 2013 he turned down a £5 million (NZ$9.5m) offer to write an autobiography, stating ‘‘so many people’’ have told his story that ‘‘I don’t need to do it’’. Six years ago he again argued that ‘‘there have been enough books done on me already’’. In the 2016 biography Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman, it was stated the musician flew into a rage when his then-wife Linda was approached to produce her own autobiography, Mac the Wife, saying: ‘‘There’s only one effing star in this family.’’
The songwriter, whose long-awaited book is published in November, said: ‘‘I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks.
‘‘What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.’’