Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles Secker & Warburg 617pp, £17.99 in UK
Weeks before he died, John Lennon gave a number of in-depth interviews to Playboy magazine about his time with The Beatles which he said would become "the reference book". It has taken seventeen years for Paul McCartney to do the same, and in this extensive, well researched, authorised biography he opens by saying: "I have my side of the affair as well, which sometimes gets ignored." Musical revisionism or petty retribution? Neither, actually.
The one thing that has always rankled with McCartney, now 54, is the received wisdom that he was the "cute Beatle", the one with the nice line in melodies and syrupy lyrics who acted as a counterpoint for Lennon's more primal and substantial song-writing abilities. Hence, major parts of this impressive tome are given over to McCartney's claims that he was the "avant garde" Beatle, the one who introduced the rest of the band not only to the "field of consciousness expanding" drugs du jour but also to the experimental and progressive recording techniques that informed their work from the Revolver album onwards. Fortunately, there is enough information in the public domain about The Beatles to corroborate some of his claims, but still, it is largely McCartney's word against Lennon's - and, indeed, Harrison's and Starr's.
McCartney's biographer, Barry Miles, an "arty" friend of his who some might remember as the cofounder of the underground magazine International Times, wisely takes a back seat for the duration of the book, letting McCartney undergo his catharsis free of editorial interference.
The early parts of the book are given over to warmly nostalgic stories of working-class life in postwar Liverpool which add little to the information already available, but when The Beatles hit a London in the throes of the decade that "swung", the story takes a few novel turns. McCartney, who unlike Lennon was single and lived in the centre of town, explains that he embraced the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle, expanded his cultural awareness by diving deep into the limitless pool of "avant garde" artistic expression, and knocked around with the likes of Bertrand Russell and Harold Pinter. One of his stories has him recalling how shocked John Lennon was when McCartney lit up a hash pipe in a nightclub.
Punctuating the text is Mc Cartney's own "why, where and how" of every Beatles song ever recorded. Consulting Lennon's account in the Playboy interviews, he finds that the two of them, amazingly, agreed as to who wrote what (verse, chorus, middle eight, etc) on every song, except for two minor discrepancies on A Day in the Life and Eleanor Rigby. McCartney is at pains to emphasise how much they collaborated, but still manages to mention more than a few times that the two most popular Beatles records of all time (judged on radio play) are two of his solo efforts, Yesterday and Mi- chelle - and this constant selfcongratulatory tone about all his musical, social and personal efforts turns the book at times into more of an air-brushed autobiography than a rigorously analytical biography. The author might have been better served jumping in and contradicting McCartney or seeking further evidence to substantiate many of his claims.
When he's not scoring points, though, McCartney speaks intelligently and eloquently about the group's musical progression, how they instigated the use of tape loops and backwards recordings (particularly on songs like Tomor- row Never Knows on Revolver, which remains a template for much of today's dance music), and generally gives a fascinating and evocative account of the cultural life of the day.
Ambiguous in his treatment of Yoko Ono, he veers from snide and sarcastic to loving and protective; rather ungraciously, he blames George Harrison for being the instigator of the hostility towards her - anybody who has ever seen the footage of McCartney singing Get Back when he looks Yoko straight in the eye while singing "Get back to where you once belonged" will be in no doubt about how McCartney felt about her, and he really should have owned up in this book to writing the song about her. Then again, he refuses to blame her (as the rest of the world did) for breaking up The Beatles, and, rather strangely, he claims that he was responsible for reuniting the couple after John had moved to Los Angeles and got involved with May Pang.
Blaming the break-up of The Beatles on their accountant Allen Klein (too boring to go into here), he refuses to acknowledge that at this stage John Lennon was pursuing a more adventurous and politically radical song-writing route which was diametrically opposed to fluff like Ob La Di, Ob La Da. The complexity of the Lennon/McCartney relationship is teased out to varying degrees of success, and while there are some barely disguised barbed comments about Lennon, McCartney never descends to the degree of vituperation that Lennon employed when he wrote How Do You Sleep about his erstwhile collaborator.
Surprisingly, there is precious little about Brian Epstein, not an awful lot about Linda McCartney, nothing about his Tokyo drugs bust in the Seventies and little about his decidedly patchy solo career.
For a biography that set outs to reclaim McCartney's position as an innovator, an experimentalist and an artist in his own right (pun intended), it's ironic that the name with the most references below it in the index is "Lennon, John".
Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist and critic