6 Paul McCartney McCartney

APPLE 1970, £11.69

You say: “A portrait of a broken man leaving the band he steered for the arms of a woman he loved.” E.M. Lyng, Twitter

As The Beatles slowly decayed, McCartney had a tape machine from Abbey Road delivered to his nearby St John’s Wood home and began his solo journey. McCartney was regarded as an oddity: low-key – and proto lo-fi – songs and experiments (one used the thwacking sounds of arrows hitting a target as percussion). Beatles offcuts such as the gently mesmeric Junk and the cooing Teddy Boy sat side-by-side with admissions about McCartney’s troubled state of mind (Every Night). Where on December 1970’s Plastic Ono Band, John was primal screaming his pain, Paul cloaked his own in artfully twisty melodies.