Paul McCartney

Sir James Paul McCartney (born Liverpool, 1942) is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century popular music. He gained worldwide fame as the bassist, singer and songwriter of the Beatles, the band widely regarded as the most popular and influential act in modern music. His songwriting partnership with John Lennon is among the most celebrated in music history. McCartney is also a painter, writer, actor and multi-instrumentalist, although his name is chiefly linked to songs and records.

He was born on 18 June 1942 at Walton Hospital in Liverpool, where his mother, Mary Patricia Mohin, had qualified as a nurse and worked as a midwife. His father, Jim McCartney, had been a salesman for a cotton firm and had played trumpet and piano in a jazz band. His mother's earnings were the family's main income, and her death in 1956, from an embolism after surgery for breast cancer, marked the fourteen-year-old Paul deeply. His father encouraged him to study music, but he preferred to learn by ear. When rock and roll became popular, he traded a trumpet he had been given for an acoustic guitar, because it let him sing while playing. Being left-handed, he reversed the order of the strings after noticing that Slim Whitman played that way. Little Richard was his great idol as a teenager.

In 1957 he met John Lennon at a church fête in Woolton and soon joined the Quarrymen as rhythm guitarist. George Harrison joined in 1958. The group adopted the name the Beatles in 1960 and played in Hamburg, where in 1961 Stuart Sutcliffe left and McCartney took up the bass, though it is disputed whether he did so reluctantly or actively sought the role. Brian Epstein, who became their manager in 1962, was crucial to their development. Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best that year, and the band reached popularity in Britain in 1963 and in the United States a year later. The frenzy among their fans became known as Beatlemania, and McCartney was sometimes called "the cute Beatle".

In 1965 the group released "Yesterday", a McCartney composition accompanied by a string quartet. It was the first Beatles song to include classical elements and the only one featuring a single Beatle, and it became the most covered song in the history of popular music. That same year, during the sessions for Rubber Soul, McCartney began taking a dominant creative role. The musicologist Ian MacDonald described him as composer, instrumentalist, arranger and de facto producer and musical director of the group. From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) onwards he became the band's de facto leader, providing creative impetus for much of their music and film projects, and he brought experimental aesthetics from the London avant-garde into their studio work.

After the Beatles split, he debuted as a solo artist with the 1970 album McCartney. He then formed Wings with his first wife, Linda, and Denny Laine. Under his leadership Wings became one of the most successful bands of the 1970s, with number-one hits such as "My Love", "Band on the Run" and "Mull of Kintyre", the last among the best-selling singles in Britain. He resumed his solo career in 1980 and has toured as a solo artist since 1989. Other chart-toppers include "Ebony and Ivory", with Stevie Wonder, and "Say Say Say", with Michael Jackson.

McCartney is among the best-selling recording artists of all time and has written or co-written a record 32 songs that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 and knighted in 1997 for services to music. He has been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1988 as a Beatle and in 1999 as a solo artist. His legacy also includes long involvement with charities concerned with animal rights, seal hunting, land mines, vegetarianism, poverty and music education. He has married three times and has five children.