Paul McCartney

By BJ Heinley

Key Moments

Born in Liverpool (June 18, 1942): Walton Hospital, where his mother had been a nurse — which got the family a private ward.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Marries Paul (March 12, 1969): Marylebone Register Office. George was late, having been raided that morning.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Wings formed (July 1, 1971): With Linda on keyboards, to general derision. He said he would rather start again than be a legacy act.
Band on the Run (November 30, 1973): The vindication. Number one on both sides of the Atlantic and the end of the question about whether he still had it.
Headlines Glastonbury at 80 (June 25, 2022): The festival's oldest solo headliner, three days after his birthday.

Every event

Born (July 7, 1902): Everton. Self-taught on piano, with an ear damaged in a childhood fall.
Born (September 29, 1909): Liverpool, to Irish immigrant parents.
Born (September 24, 1941): New York, to a showbusiness lawyer and a department-store heiress.
Born in Liverpool (June 18, 1942): Walton Hospital, where his mother had been a nurse — which got the family a private ward.
Dien Bien Phu falls (May 7, 1954): French colonial rule in Indochina ends. The country is partitioned at the 17th parallel.
Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954): School segregation ruled unconstitutional. The same September, Paul meets George on a bus in Liverpool.
'That's All Right' (July 5, 1954): Sun Studio, Memphis. Three years before John and Paul met.
Meets George on the bus (September 1, 1954): The 86 to the Liverpool Institute. Paul is twelve, George eleven. The earliest thread of the band.
Rosa Parks arrested (December 1, 1955): Four days later, the Montgomery bus boycott begins.
Ravi Shankar first tours the West (January 1, 1956): A decade before a Beatle picked up a sitar, and he had been playing for thirty years before that.
'Heartbreak Hotel' (January 27, 1956): His first national number one. John Lennon bought a guitar.
Buys Paul a trumpet (June 18, 1956): Swapped for a guitar once Paul worked out he could not sing and play trumpet at the same time.
His mother dies (October 31, 1956): Breast cancer, after an operation nobody explained to him. He asked what they would do for money, and never forgave himself for it.
Meets John at Woolton (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête. He tunes John's guitar, plays 'Twenty Flight Rock', and writes out the words from memory.
Sputnik (October 4, 1957): The space age opens three months after John and Paul meet at Woolton.
Drafted into the Army (March 24, 1958): Two years away at the exact moment British teenagers needed something to replace him.
Berry Gordy founds the label (January 12, 1959): Detroit, on an $800 family loan.
Born (November 20, 1959): Edison, New Jersey, into a transport family.
Sharpeville massacre (March 21, 1960): 69 killed at a pass-law protest. South Africa leaves the Commonwealth the following year.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Gagarin orbits the Earth (April 12, 1961): First human in space.
Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25, 1961): Before this decade is out.
Moves to bass (July 1, 1961): Stuart Sutcliffe stays in Hamburg to paint and nobody else volunteers.
The Berlin Wall goes up (August 13, 1961): Overnight. The Beatles are in the middle of their Hamburg years, a few hundred miles west.
First gig at the Marquee (July 12, 1962): Five weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Mandela arrested (August 5, 1962): Two weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Surfin' Safari (October 1, 1962): Released the same week as 'Love Me Do'.
Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16, 1962): Thirteen days. 'Love Me Do' had been out for eleven of them.
Please Please Me session (February 11, 1963): The whole debut album cut in one day at Abbey Road — ten hours and forty-five minutes, with John singing 'Twist and Shout' last because it would wreck his voice.
Please Please Me (March 22, 1963): Debut LP, recorded in a single 10-hour session at Abbey Road.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 27, 1963): The Beatles played it constantly in Paris the following January.
With the Beatles sessions (July 18, 1963): Recorded in snatched days between tours and TV dates.
Partial Test Ban Treaty (August 5, 1963): Atmospheric nuclear testing banned by the US, USSR and UK.
'She Loves You' (August 23, 1963): Begun with John on tour in Newcastle. The best-selling UK single of the decade.
March on Washington (August 28, 1963): 'I Have a Dream'. Three months before the band's first American single.
'I Wanna Be Your Man' (November 1, 1963): Written for them by Lennon and McCartney in about twenty minutes, in front of them. Keith Richards said it was the moment the Stones decided to write their own.
Royal Variety Performance (November 4, 1963): Prince of Wales Theater, in front of the Queen Mother. John tells the cheap seats to clap and the rest to rattle their jewelry.
With the Beatles (November 22, 1963): Released at the peak of UK Beatlemania.
The Beatles cover three Motown songs (November 22, 1963): With the Beatles carries 'Please Mr. Postman', 'You Really Got a Hold on Me' and 'Money'.
Kennedy assassinated (November 22, 1963): Dallas. With the Beatles was released in Britain that same day.
A Hard Day's Night sessions (January 29, 1964): Started at Pathé Marconi in Paris, finished at Abbey Road around the film shoot.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Washington Coliseum (February 11, 1964): First US concert, two days after Ed Sullivan. 8,092 people, a boxing ring stage, Ringo's kit turned by hand between numbers.
Rivonia Trial: life sentence (June 12, 1964): Mandela and seven others to Robben Island. He would be there for eighteen years.
Civil Rights Act signed (July 2, 1964): Segregation in public accommodation outlawed — mid-way through the Beatles' first American tour, on which they refused to play segregated venues.
A Hard Day's Night (July 10, 1964): First LP entirely by Lennon–McCartney.
Gulf of Tonkin (August 2, 1964): The incident that produced the resolution, and with it an American war. Six months after Ed Sullivan.
'You Really Got Me' (August 4, 1964): A slashed speaker cone, and arguably the first hard rock record.
Beatles for Sale sessions (August 11, 1964): Squeezed between two tours. The exhaustion is audible and largely the point.
Supremes: 'Where Did Our Love Go' (August 22, 1964): The first of five consecutive American number ones.
Meets the Beatles at the Delmonico (August 28, 1964): New York. He introduced them to cannabis, having misheard 'I can't hide' as something else entirely.
Beatles for Sale (December 4, 1964): Written and recorded between tours.
Brian Wilson stops touring (December 18, 1964): A panic attack on a flight to Houston. He stays home to write — two years before the Beatles do the same.
Help! sessions (February 15, 1965): Film soundtrack first, then the rest — including 'Yesterday' with a string quartet.
Selma to Montgomery (March 7, 1965): 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
First combat troops land (March 8, 1965): 3,500 Marines at Da Nang. The band is in the middle of Help!
Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965): Half electric. The line between folk and rock stops existing.
Banned from touring America (June 1, 1965): Four years, for reasons never made entirely clear. It cost them the American market at the moment it mattered most.
'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' (June 4, 1965): The riff Keith Richards wrote in his sleep.
'Yesterday' (June 14, 1965): Arrived complete in a dream at Wimpole Street; carried around for months as 'Scrambled Eggs' while he checked he had not stolen it.
Goes electric at Newport (July 25, 1965): Booed off after three songs.
Help! (August 6, 1965): Second film soundtrack, contains 'Yesterday'.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
The Beatles visit Elvis (August 27, 1965): Bel Air. Awkward for an hour, then they played together. No recording was made, which everyone involved later regretted.
Rubber Soul sessions (October 12, 1965): Four weeks against a Christmas deadline. The studio starts becoming the instrument.
'My Generation' (October 29, 1965): Recorded four weeks before the Rubber Soul sessions ended.
Rubber Soul (December 3, 1965): The studio pivot. Sitar debuts on 'Norwegian Wood'.
Revolver sessions (April 6, 1966): Opens with 'Tomorrow Never Knows' — tape loops, Leslie-cabinet vocal, artificial double tracking.
Pet Sounds (May 16, 1966): Made in answer to Rubber Soul. Paul called it the record that made him want to make Sgt. Pepper's.
Shankar begins teaching Harrison (June 1, 1966): Six weeks in London, Srinagar and Bombay, starting with how to sit.
Nippon Budokan (June 30, 1966): First rock act to play the martial-arts hall. Nationalist protests and 35,000 police on duty.
Motorcycle crash (July 29, 1966): Woodstock, New York. He disappears from public view for eighteen months.
Revolver (August 5, 1966): Tape loops, reversed tape, Indian drone in a pop song.
South Africa bans Beatles records (August 8, 1966): Over John's remark about Christianity. The ban was not lifted until 1971.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
The television show debuts (September 12, 1966): Built on A Hard Day's Night, down to the running.
Arrives in London (September 24, 1966): Chas Chandler brings him over. Within weeks Clapton, Townshend and Beck have all come to watch.
'Good Vibrations' (October 10, 1966): Seven months, four studios and around ninety hours of tape for three and a half minutes.
Sgt. Pepper's sessions (November 24, 1966): His concept, his push, and the record that justified stopping touring.
Four No. 1 albums in a row (January 1, 1967): 1966–67. The story that they outsold the Beatles and the Stones combined came from Nesmith, who later admitted it wasn't true.
Apollo 1 fire (January 27, 1967): Three astronauts killed on the launch pad, during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions.
Magical Mystery Tour sessions (April 25, 1967): Runs straight out of Pepper and through Epstein's death in August.
Smile abandoned (May 1, 1967): Wilson hears Sgt. Pepper's and shelves the record meant to answer it. It stayed shelved for thirty-seven years.
'Waterloo Sunset' (May 5, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and largely buried by it.
Are You Experienced (May 12, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and kept off the top by it.
Meets Linda Eastman (May 15, 1967): At the Bag O' Nails club during a Georgie Fame show. Two weeks before Sgt. Pepper's.
Meets Paul (May 15, 1967): At the Bag O'Nails. Four days later she photographed him at the Sgt. Pepper launch.
Headquarters (May 22, 1967): The one they actually played on. It went to number one and was immediately displaced by Sgt. Pepper's, where it stayed for eleven weeks.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Opens with 'Sgt. Pepper's' (June 4, 1967): Saville Theatre, nine days after the album came out, with Paul and George in the audience. Paul called it one of the great honours of his life.
Burns his guitar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): The introduction to America.
Shankar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): Three hours on a Sunday afternoon, and a standing ovation from an audience that had come for rock.
Monterey Pop (June 18, 1967): They smashed their equipment; Hendrix followed and set fire to his.
Jagger and Richards sentenced (June 29, 1967): Drug convictions, quashed on appeal. The Times: 'Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?'
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 4, 1967): Recorded at Abbey Road in the studio next door to Sgt. Pepper's. The Beatles dropped in.
Brian Epstein dies (August 27, 1967): Manager's death at 32 changes the group dynamic forever.
Magical Mystery Tour (November 27, 1967): Soundtrack to a widely-panned TV film. But: 'I Am the Walrus'.
Tet Offensive (January 30, 1968): The turn in American opinion. Runs through the weeks the band spent in Rishikesh.
Maharishi's Rishikesh course (February 16, 1968): Sixty students including four Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow and Mike Love. Around thirty songs came out of it.
Rishikesh (6 weeks) (February 19, 1968): Paul stays six weeks before returning to London for business.
Martin Luther King assassinated (April 4, 1968): Memphis. The band had returned from India eight days earlier.
Syd Barrett leaves (April 6, 1968): They stopped picking him up for gigs. He was twenty-two.
White Album sessions (May 30, 1968): May–Oct 1968. Recorded across five London studios amid fraying relationships.
Soviet tanks enter Prague (August 20, 1968): The Prague Spring crushed. 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' had been recorded ten days earlier.
'Hey Jude' (August 26, 1968): Written on the drive to see Cynthia and Julian after the separation.
First gig (September 7, 1968): Denmark, billed as the New Yardbirds, while the Beatles were finishing the White Album.
Head (November 6, 1968): A film built to demolish their own image, co-written by Jack Nicholson. It worked.
The Village Green Preservation Society (November 22, 1968): Out the same day as the White Album, and sold almost nothing.
The White Album (November 22, 1968): Sprawling double LP recorded amid fracturing relationships.
The Comeback Special (December 3, 1968): Black leather, back on television, seven years after his last live show.
Marvin Gaye: 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' (December 14, 1968): Seven weeks at number one.
Get Back sessions (January 2, 1969): Twickenham then Apple. Culminated in the rooftop concert.
Led Zeppelin I (January 12, 1969): Released the same month as the rooftop concert. The decade turns over.
Yellow Submarine (January 17, 1969): Half unreleased Beatles material, half orchestral score.
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): His idea, and the last time the four of them played to anyone.
Abbey Road sessions (February 22, 1969): Recorded after the abandoned Get Back sessions were shelved.
Marries Paul (March 12, 1969): Marylebone Register Office. George was late, having been raided that morning.
Tommy (May 23, 1969): A rock opera, arriving as the Beatles were recording Abbey Road.
Brian Jones drowns (July 3, 1969): Aged twenty-seven, a month after leaving the band he founded.
Hyde Park free concert (July 5, 1969): Two days after Brian Jones died; a quarter of a million people.
Apollo 11 lands (July 20, 1969): Six weeks before the Abbey Road sessions finished. Roughly 600 million people watch.
Woodstock (August 18, 1969): Monday morning, most of the crowd gone, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.
Mary McCartney is born (August 28, 1969): Paul and Linda's first child.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Moratorium march on Washington (November 15, 1969): Half a million people. Pete Seeger leads them in 'Give Peace a Chance', written in a Montreal hotel room five months earlier.
Altamont (December 6, 1969): A stabbing in front of the stage, four months after Woodstock. The counterculture's other bookend.
'Let It Be' released (March 6, 1970): Mother Mary in the lyric is his own, from a dream during the worst of the band's arguments.
Announces the split (April 10, 1970): A self-interview packaged with his solo album. John had left seven months earlier and been asked to keep quiet.
McCartney (April 17, 1970): Recorded at home on a four-track with everything played himself, down to the mouth percussion.
Kent State (May 4, 1970): National Guardsmen kill four students. Three weeks after the Beatles' split is announced.
Let It Be (May 8, 1970): Recorded before Abbey Road, released after.
Lola released (June 12, 1970): Banned by the BBC until Coca-Cola became cherry cola.
Dies at 27 (September 18, 1970): London, five months after the Beatles announced the split.
Sues to dissolve the partnership (December 31, 1970): The only way out of a contract that would have tied his earnings to Allen Klein. It cost him thirty years of reputation.
Sticky Fingers (April 23, 1971): First on their own label; the tongue logo arrives.
Ram (May 17, 1971): Credited to Paul and Linda. Savaged on release, and the one that aged best.
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (May 21, 1971): Gordy thought it would fail. A soul record about Vietnam, poverty and ecology.
Wings formed (July 1, 1971): With Linda on keyboards, to general derision. He said he would rather start again than be a legacy act.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Shankar asks Harrison for help with famine relief; the result invents the benefit concert.
Who's Next (August 2, 1971): Salvaged from an abandoned science-fiction project.
Surf's Up (August 30, 1971): The title song, shelved since SMiLE, finally surfaces.
Born (September 13, 1971): London, during the first year of Wings.
Led Zeppelin IV (November 8, 1971): Untitled, four symbols, and one of the best-selling records ever made.
First university tour (February 9, 1972): Turning up unannounced at student unions for fifty pence a ticket, deliberately starting at the bottom.
Exile on Main St. (May 12, 1972): Recorded in a basement in the south of France, in tax exile.
Aloha from Hawaii (January 14, 1973): Beamed by satellite to more than a billion people.
Paris Peace Accords (January 27, 1973): American withdrawal agreed.
The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973): Fifteen years on the American chart, recorded in the same building as everything above.
Lagos sessions (August 30, 1973): Two members quit the week before the flight. He was mugged at knifepoint and lost the demo tapes, then made the record anyway.
Quadrophenia (October 26, 1973)
Band on the Run (November 30, 1973): The vindication. Number one on both sides of the Atlantic and the end of the question about whether he still had it.
Partnership dissolved (December 29, 1974): The legal end, nearly five years after the public one. John signs last, at Disneyland; the court makes it final on 9 January.
Blood on the Tracks (January 20, 1975)
Fall of Saigon (April 30, 1975): The war ends, twenty-one years after Dien Bien Phu.
Dies (March 18, 1976): Paul was on tour and did not go to the funeral, which he later called a mistake.
Wings Over America (May 3, 1976): Thirty-one shows, and the first time he played Beatles songs live since 1966.
Soweto uprising (June 16, 1976): Schoolchildren protest against Afrikaans-medium instruction; hundreds are killed.
Dies at 42 (August 16, 1977): Graceland. Lennon: Elvis died the day he went into the Army.
Some Girls (June 9, 1978): The answer to punk and disco in the same record.
Keith Moon dies (September 7, 1978): Aged thirty-two. He had given Ringo's son Zak his first proper kit.
Slow Train Coming (August 20, 1979): The first of the gospel records.
The Wall (November 30, 1979)
Cincinnati stampede (December 3, 1979): Eleven fans died in the crush before the show.
Concerts for Kampuchea (December 29, 1979): Hammersmith Odeon, with the Rockestra. Wings' last significant performance.
Arrested in Tokyo (January 16, 1980): Half a pound of cannabis at the top of his suitcase. Nine days in jail, eleven shows canceled, and Wings effectively over.
McCartney II (May 16, 1980): Home synthesiser experiments nobody asked for, later adopted as an electronic touchstone.
John Bonham dies (September 25, 1980): The band ends within three months.
Led Zeppelin disband (December 4, 1980): We could not continue as we were.
Wings dissolved (April 27, 1981): Denny Laine leaves. Ten years and seven albums.
Tattoo You (August 24, 1981): Start Me Up, salvaged from a shelved reggae take.
Tug of War (April 26, 1982): Produced by George Martin, and carrying 'Here Today', written to John.
Dennis Wilson drowns (December 28, 1983): The only Beach Boy who surfed.
The Never Ending Tour begins (June 7, 1988): Concord, California. It has not really stopped.
Motown sold to MCA (June 28, 1988): The end of Gordy's independent Detroit-born label.
Kokomo reaches No. 1 (November 5, 1988): Their first chart-topper in 22 years, without Brian.
Steel Wheels (August 29, 1989): The reconciliation record; the tour that reinvented the stadium business.
World tour (September 26, 1989): His first in thirteen years, and the one where the Beatles songs came back for good.
Launches her food company (January 1, 1991): Vegetarian ready meals, at a time when British supermarkets had almost none.
Unplugged (The Official Bootleg) (May 20, 1991): The first MTV Unplugged released as a record.
Voodoo Lounge (July 11, 1994): First without Bill Wyman.
Anthology 1 (November 20, 1995): Outtakes, demos and 'Free as a Bird' — the three surviving members recording over a John Lennon cassette.
Creative director at Chloé (March 1, 1997): Two years out of Central Saint Martins, where Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss had walked her graduate show.
Knighted (March 11, 1997): Knight Bachelor for services to music. He said his mother would have been pleased.
Time Out of Mind (September 30, 1997): The late-career resurrection; Album of the Year.
Linda dies (April 17, 1998): Breast cancer, in Arizona — the same illness that took his mother.
Launches her own label (January 1, 2001): Vegetarian from the start: no leather, no fur.
Marries Heather Mills (June 11, 2002): Divorced in 2008 after a settlement conducted largely in the newspapers.
John Entwistle dies (June 27, 2002): The night before a tour was to open.
Live 8 reunion (July 2, 2005): Waters and Gilmour on one stage, once.
A Bigger Bang (September 5, 2005): Followed by the highest-grossing tour yet staged.
Reunion at the O2 (December 10, 2007): One night, with Jason Bonham on drums.
Marries Nancy Shevell (October 9, 2011): Old Marylebone Town Hall, where he had married Linda forty-two years earlier.
The SMiLE Sessions released (November 1, 2011): The great lost album, 44 years late.
That's Why God Made the Radio (June 5, 2012): The 50th-anniversary reunion with Brian back at the center.
Olympics opening ceremony (July 27, 2012): 'Hey Jude' to eighty thousand people and a billion more.
50th anniversary shows open at the O2 (November 25, 2012): Fifty years and four months after the Marquee.
Nobel Prize in Literature (October 13, 2016): For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
Blue & Lonesome (December 2, 2016): Back to Chicago blues covers — where they came in.
Egypt Station (September 7, 2018): His first US number one album in thirty-six years.
WHO (December 6, 2019): Townshend and Daltrey, still at it.
Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 19, 2020): A 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination went to No. 1.
McCartney III (December 18, 2020): Made alone in lockdown, fifty years after McCartney and forty after II.
Charlie Watts dies (August 24, 2021): The quiet center of the band, 58 years at the kit.
Headlines Glastonbury at 80 (June 25, 2022): The festival's oldest solo headliner, three days after his birthday.
Hackney Diamonds (October 20, 2023): First originals in eighteen years; Paul McCartney plays bass on one track.
'Now and Then' (November 2, 2023): He finished the 1977 demo John never did, fifty-three years after the split.
Hackney Diamonds tour opens (April 28, 2024): Houston. Still touring, sixty-two years in.

Eras

Liverpool (1942–1960): Childhood, his mother Mary’s death when he was 14, and meeting John at the Woolton fete.
The Beatles (1960–1970): Paul’s Beatles years, from Hamburg to his announcement that he’d left.
Wings (1971–1981): The band he formed with Linda: Band on the Run, the huge 1970s tours, until it quietly ended in 1981.
Solo (1981–now): Records and world tours under his own name, ever since.
Interregnum (1970–1971): Between the Beatles and Wings: McCartney and Ram, made at home and on the farm in Scotland.
Elder statesman (1997–now): From his knighthood on: honors, stadium tours, Glastonbury at 80.

Paul McCartney

Key Moments

Every event

Eras

Sources

Original Horizontal (Phone) · mockup