Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney was a singer and multi-instrumentalist in The Beatles. Alongside John Lennon, he was half of one of the world's most successful songwriting teams in history.

Paul was one of the most innovative bass players that ever played bass, and half the stuff that's going on now is directly ripped off from his Beatles period. He was coy about his bass playing. He's an egomaniac about everything else, but his bass playing he was always a bit coy about. He is a great musician who plays the bass like few other people could play it.

The early years

James Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool's Walton Hospital on 18 June 1942. His father Jim worked in the cotton trade and played trumpet and piano in jazz and ragtime bands, and his mother Mary worked as a midwife.

Paul attended the Stockton Wood Road primary school, then went on to the Joseph Williams junior school before passing his 11 Plus in 1953 and gaining a place at the Liverpool Institute.

The following year, while travelling on a bus to the Institute, he met George Harrison, who was also a student there.

In 1955 the McCartneys moved to 20 Forthlin Road, a council house in the Allerton district of Liverpool. It cost them one pound and six shillings a week to live there. The house was bought by the National Trust in 1995, and today is a popular tourist destination. Back then, though, it was an unassuming terraced house built by the local authority in the 1920s.

On 31 October 1956, Mary McCartney died of an embolism following a mastectomy. She was a heavy smoker who had been suffering from breast cancer. The death shook the McCartney family, and later led to a bond between Paul and John Lennon, who lost his mother in 1958.

Jim McCartney was a keen musician who had been leader of Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s. There was an upright piano in the front room at 20 Forthlin Road, which Jim bought from Harry Epstein's NEMS store, which Beatles manager Brian Epstein would later take over.

Jim encouraged Paul and his brother Mike to be musical, and gave Paul a trumpet following the death of his mother. When skiffle became a national craze, however, Paul swapped the instrument for a £15 Framus Zenith acoustic guitar.

Being left-handed, Paul initially had trouble playing the instrument. He later learned to restring it, and wrote his first song, I Lost My Little Girl. He took music lessons for a while, but preferred instead to learn by ear. Paul also began playing piano, and wrote When I'm Sixty-Four while still living at Forthlin Road.

Paul McCartney met John Lennon at the Woolton fete on 6 July 1957, between performances by the Quarry Men. They became friends and began writing and performing songs together. McCartney later persuaded Lennon to allow George Harrison into the band as lead guitarist in 1958.

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• Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr holiday in Greece
• Paul McCartney is born
• What Goes On