By Michael Laster
After the success of Band on the Run, Paul appeared on a 1974 TV special called One Hand Clapping, where he showcases his knack for writing songs in the style of old jazz standards, especially in the song All of You.
In 1975, Paul and Linda, long-time animal lovers, realized that it took a certain level of cognitive dissonance to love animals while simultaneously enabling their cruelty when it came to food. From then on, they became vegetarians and vocal animal rights advocates. Paul and Linda guest-starred on The Simpsons in the episode “Lisa the Vegetarian.”
When John was seeing his girlfriend, May Pang in 1974, he briefly reunited with his son Julian, in addition to Paul. John’s attitude towards Paul mellowed out ever since he himself and the other two Beatles became dissatisfied with their manager, Allen Klein. However, once John moved back in with Yoko in 1975, he became very hard to reach. Some say Yoko was possessive of John, or envious of his bond with Paul, though the extent of Yoko trying to sabotage John’s friendship with Paul is pure speculation. Regardless of Yoko’s intention, it was ultimately John who could’ve done more to preserve the friendship.
On his band Wings’ next album, Venus and Mars, there’s a song called Call Me Back Again. Paul never commented on it, but many speculate that it’s about his frustration in trying to reach his former best friend and songwriting partner.
Their next album was Wings Speed of Sound, with the best known song being Paul’s retort to those who criticized his lyrics as being corny or sentimental. It’s called Silly Love Songs.
Paul’s father Jim McCartney, died in 1976. Paul was on tour and didn’t make the funeral. Some of Paul’s other bandmates didn’t even know that Paul’s father died until he was asked about his parents in an interview. According to Wings bandmate, Denny Laine: “He likes to stay positive, because if he gets negative, he gets really negative, and he knows it, so he tries to rise above these things, and not have other people reminding him of too many negative things, or hurtful things, because of who he is. He has to be out there looking like he’s Paul McCartney, happy-go-lucky, and not bothering the world with his problems.”
As we’ll see, public displays of grief were never Paul’s specialty.
In 1976, Wings went on tour in America, finally winning over those segments of the public that wouldn’t take anything less than a Beatles reunion, though Paul did perform his own Beatles songs. A compilation of four of the concerts was released as a movie four years later, titled Rockshow.
Their next album, London Town, featured a new catchy synthesizer–driven hit, With a Little Luck. The lyrics feature the same McCartney–esque optimism of We Can Work It Out from over a decade earlier.
That same year, in 1976, Wings released a song co-written by key bandmate, Denny Laine, which is (or was) was a tribute to the Scottish countryside called Mull of Kintyre. It is one of Paul’s best-selling singles of all time, especially in the UK, reaching over 2 million sales, and is also one of the few pop hits in history to feature bagpipes.
After their next album, Back to the Egg, Wings was scheduled for a world tour, including Japan. Paul and Linda were emphatically warned that Japan was not like other countries and that drug enforcement was taken incredibly seriously. Paul didn’t heed the warnings. He figured he could manage to sneak some marijuana through unnoticed, or if caught, get a slap on the wrist like his previous convictions in the form of a fine. Or, perhaps, he just didn’t like other people giving advice to him. He was caught with 7.7 ounces of marijuana in his suitcase, and risked the harsh sentence of 7 years in jail. He spent 9 days in prison, which included sporadic interrogations. It was the first time in his marriage to Linda that they ever spent a night apart – in this case, 9 nights. No one in the prison spoke English, but Paul tried to make the best of the situation by calling out Japanese brand names to other prisoners as they yelled back American brand names.
Paul’s recklessness in Japan basically ended Wings, though he was growing weary of the band anyway. He was already privately working on music that was more experimental, prompting him to create his McCartney II album. It was the sequel to his first solo album, titled McCartney, that he had largely made alone at his modest home recording studio. The McCartney II standout track was called Coming Up, and a music video was made in which Paul and Linda play all the characters.
In addition to the Band On The Run album, the song Coming Up was also praised by John, who said he couldn’t get it out of his head. In fact, some people say his appreciation of the song was one of the factors that got him back into the studio to record his final album, Double Fantasy. A few weeks after its release, John signed a copy of the album to a so–called fan. That same man, Mark David Chapman, ended up fatally shooting him later that evening. Paul’s manager telephoned Paul with the news. Like the other deaths in his life, Paul pushed through the grief and continued to spend the day working as if nothing happened. Paul’s handling of John’s death generated a bit of controversy itself after he was put on the spot by reporters the next day.
He instantly regretted these comments, and later clarified what he meant:
“I still haven’t taken it in. I don’t want to,” Paul said in a 1984 interview. In 2020, 40 years after the murder, he admitted he still hadn’t come to terms with it. “I can’t think about it. I’m sure it’s some form of denial. But denial is the only way that I can deal with it. Having said that, of course, I do think about it, and it’s horrible.” He expressed the same thing in a separate interview on CBS Sunday Morning several days later. “I don’t think I’ve dealt with it very well. In a way… I wouldn’t be surprised if a psychiatrist would sort of find out that I’m slightly in denial, ’cause it’s too much.” Paul admits that he’s internalized John’s voice in his head, and often defers to this “inner Lennon” to provide constructive criticism to whatever song he’s working on.
Over the next two years, Paul was busy at work on his next album, Tug of War. He teamed up again with George Martin to produce the album, their first collaboration since 1973’s Live and Let Die. The songs What’s That You’re Doing? and Ebony and Ivory are collaborations with Stevie Wonder, and Get It is a duet with rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, who was a major influence on The Beatles in their early years.
At one point during the making of the album, the weight of John’s death hit Paul all at once. He was moved to record a song in honor of John called Here Today. In an interview that same year, Paul shares a song from John’s last album, Double Fantasy. The song is Beautiful Boy, a celebration of John’s five-year-old son, Sean. Paul tries to keep his composure, but John’s lyrics are just too powerful, and in context, too tragic. Paul holds back tears throughout.
Shortly after the release of Tug of War, Paul collaborated on three songs with Michael Jackson. The song, Girl Is Mine, written by Jackson and produced by Quincy Jones, ended up on Jackson’s best-selling album, Thriller. The other two songs, The Man, and Say Say Say, ended up on Paul’s next album, Pipes of Peace.
While Pipes of Peace featured many leftover tracks from the Tug of War sessions, they were both his most successful albums of the 1980’s. Another great tune from Pipes of Peace is Keep Under Cover.
While making these albums, Jackson asked Paul for career advice, so Paul advised him to go into publishing, enthusiastically showing Michael the list of songs by other artists that Paul’s publishing company bought the rights to. Several years later, when the ATV catalogue went on sale in 1984, which included all of the Beatles’ songs, Paul tried to coordinate the purchase with George, Ringo, and Yoko, but coordinating the details of the bid proved too complicated. It was Michael who used his wealth from Thriller to make the purchase for 47 million dollars. Despite buying the catalogue fair and square, Paul saw this as a betrayal of their friendship.
During this period, Paul desired to branch out into other mediums, and ended up writing the screenplay to a film called Give My Regards to Broadstreet, in which he played himself, and also featured his wife Linda, Ringo, his wife Barbara, and George Martin as themselves. Tracey Ullman also played a supporting role. The plot revolves around Paul’s search to track down his assistant Harry, who’s gone missing. Harry is a reformed convict who was supposed to deliver Paul’s master tapes to the factory for distribution. Some characters suspect that he stole the tapes, but Paul worries that he may have been kidnapped, or worse. If the tapes aren’t found by midnight, a villainous executive will take over the record company. While audiences enjoyed the many musical sequences, which featured new songs in addition to arrangements of many of his Beatle’s hits, the film was a total flop. Critics panned the dialogue as being dull, and Paul’s acting as being stiff. After filming was complete, the director, Peter Webb, who was primarily a director for television, was hospitalized for exhaustion, and it allegedly took him two years to recover.
Paul’s next album, Press to Play – from 1986 – generally wasn’t well received, and today, much of the 80’s production style sounds a bit dated. However, there’s a ballad called Only Love Remains that sounds like it could have been written during any point in his career.
For his next album, Flowers in The Dirt, he teamed up with Elvis Costello for several songs, including My Brave Face, and You Want Her, Too. Two songs from these sessions that didn’t make the album, Mistress and Maid, and The Lovers That Never Were, ended up on his next album, Off The Ground, from 1993. In between both of these albums, Paul was involved with another fruitful and incredibly ambitious collaboration – this time, with the English conductor and composer, Carl Davis. Davis was the music director of The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and he persuaded Paul to compose a work celebrating the orchestra’s 150th anniversary. Paul sang and played his ideas to Davis on piano, and in turn, Davis scored them for orchestra.
The Liverpool Oratorio was generally not well received by those who expected a traditional classical vocal work, but was generally appreciated by die–hard McCartney fans. Paul would write several more classical works in his lifetime, including Standing Stone, made up of unrelated short movements for orchestra, his second oratorio, Ecce Cor Meum, and Ocean’s Kingdom, for the New York City Ballet, written in 2011. To compose these works, he used computer programs where he selected the desired pitches without having to use traditional notation, believing that learning to read and write music could interfere with his intuitive process.
Throughout the mid–90’s, Paul joined up again with George Harrison and Ringo to collaborate on the Anthology project, a documentary about the Beatles from their first–person point of view. Since their former producer George Martin was now suffering hearing loss, they used George Harrison’s recent producer Jeff Lynne to complete two of John’s unfinished demos, Real Love, and Free as a Bird. Paul ended up using Jeff as producer for his next album, Flaming Pie, though George Martin did contribute some orchestral arrangements. The album received critical acclaim for its return to the more intimate sound of his early 80’s work like Tug of War. The song Calico Skies is almost a twin to Blackbird in its folksy finger–picking technique.
After recording Flaming Pie, Paul was officially knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. As cheerful an event as this was, in addition to his latest successes with Flaming Pie and his classical album, Standing Stone, 1997 was a very tense year for Paul. Two years earlier, Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was caught at too late a stage to prevent metastasis. The chemo treatment was making her increasingly weak, though she and Paul still continued to make plans into the future. She passed away surrounded by her family in April of 1998 on the family horse ranch in Arizona, though her death was announced as being in Santa Barbara, California, in order to maintain privacy and deter a media frenzy. Paul remembers, “I think I cried for about a year on and off. You expect to see them walk in, this person you love, because you are so used to them. I cried a lot, and it was almost embarrassing, except it seemed the only thing to do.” A year later, two of Linda’s friends organized a tribute concert in Linda’s memory, with all the proceeds going to various animal rights charities. In addition to Paul, performers included Tom Jones, (shin-AID) Sinéad O’Connor, Elvis Costello, and George Michael.
A little after a year following Linda’s death, Paul met Heather Mills at a charity event to raise awareness of land mines. Mills was a former model who was struck by a police motorbike, costing her her left leg. Ever since the accident, she became a disability rights advocate, founding a charity that provided prosthetic limbs to amputees. Paul became interested in her charity work, and after several meetings, they started dating. Some of Paul’s children thought that, out of loneliness, Paul moved into a serious relationship too quickly without fully moving on from Linda. As we’ll see, his decision to not sign a prenup proved to be one of his major mistakes.
After 9/11, Paul took part in the Concert for New York, where he performed several old hits, in addition to two new songs from his newest album, Driving Rain. They were the anthem Freedom, written as a response to 9/11, and From a Lover to A Friend.
Sadly, another tragedy was right around the corner, which was the death of fellow-Beatle and younger schoolmate George Harrison, who, like Linda, was also taken by cancer. Paul had befriended George two or three years before meeting John. Paul let George and his family stay in a home that he owned during his final weeks in order to shield them from being hassled by the press.
For Paul’s next album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard in 2005, he teamed up with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The album proved to be Paul’s most creative and Beatle-esque in years, and his fans usually rank it among his best. Like Calico Skies from Flaming Pie, the song Jenny Wren proves (proved?) he could still deliver masterpieces for acoustic guitar.
Not too long after the release of the album, his marriage to Heather Mills suddenly fell apart in one of the ugliest, most publicized divorces of all time. Even in the years leading up to the separation, while they both told the press how happy they were, insiders knew otherwise. Their lawyers were the same two lawyers who represented the divorce between Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Heather claimed Paul was a controlling and abusive husband, but ultimately her testimony and evidence were labeled by the judge as “inconsistent, inaccurate, and less than candid.” Paul ended up paying only 24 million pounds, significantly less than the 125 million she was originally seeking. Luckily there were no further battles over their daughter Beatrice, and the two continued to split custody equally.
In 2007, Paul released his next album, Memory Almost Full. It was less experimental than Chaos and Creation, but was still powered by his usual masterful sense of melody. Mr. Bellamy is a good example of Paul’s trademark ability to create rock suites consisting of contrasting sections, like a bite–sized opera unfolding before our ears.
Also in 2007, Paul began dating philanthropist Nancy Shevell. They would marry four years later in 2011. Unlike Heather, Nancy preferred to stay away from the limelight, having never participated in any interviews with Paul or by herself. To this day, they remain together in what appears to be an incredibly successful marriage. It’s worth noting that they were married in the same office Paul and Linda were married in, but this time on October 9th, John’s birthday. Paul never publicly commented on the reasoning for these parallels, though we can almost be sure it was intentional.
Speaking of John, in 2002, Paul started incorporating his 1981 tribute song to John, Here Today, into his live concerts. In a clip from 2007, the emotion of the lyrics hit him especially hard.
A year after marrying Nancy, Paul released Kisses On The Bottom, an album of American songbook standards, which included an original song, “My Valentine”. In 2025, Paul re–recorded it as a duet with Barbara Streisand.
The next year, Paul released another album called New, marking a shift towards a more pop–oriented direction.
In 2018, Paul released the album Egypt Station, followed by McCartney III in 2020, which he recorded at home during the pandemic.
Paul has five children and eight grandchildren. Heather, Paul’s adopted daughter from Linda, stays out of the limelight and currently sells pottery online. Of Paul and Linda’s biological children, Stella McCartney is a fashion designer who uses animal-free materials for her work. Mary is a photographer and vegetarian cookbook author like her mother, and James, like his father, is a musician and songwriter. Beatrice, from his marriage to Heather Mills, stays out of the limelight.
Now 83 years old, Paul has another album due to come out in May of 2026. While his singing voice is no longer as powerful as it used to be, his energy and work ethic are still forces to be reckoned with. He continues to regularly perform and tour around the world to sold–out crowds. He stays in peak physical condition, in part from his vegetarian diet – in addition to exercise and occasional yoga, which includes his impressive ability to do headstands. It’s one thing to write great songs, but it’s another to also be the best person suited to sing and perform them, making Paul a complete musician, or, as some would say, a musician’s musician.
Since the Beatles, there have been many other successful rock bands. But because of Paul’s intuitive grasp of melody, arrangement, and his emphasis on optimism, his songs will most likely be part of people’s lives for centuries to come. We close with one of his most iconic anthems during the Beatles, Let It Be.