“LINDA looks so beautiful, so cool,” says Paul McCartney.
He’s just been watching a film about the decade of his life after The Beatles broke up — and it is filled with images of his much-missed first wife.
“The Linda stuff was very emotional,” he admits at the Man On The Run launch event in London.
“Linda, the kids, me and John [Lennon] — all these memories. It’s like my life flashing in front of me.”
Macca is talking to an intimate gathering that includes his daughter Stella, son James, superfan Noel Gallagher and the actor who will play him in a forthcoming biopic, Paul Mescal. Oh, and me.
He continues: “Seeing me and Linda interacting is special because, you know, she’s not here.
“So is seeing the kids when they were little, because they’re not little any more. They’ve got kids of their own now.”
The film stirs memories of forming his own band, Wings, with Linda in 1971, prompting this from McCartney: “We tried to follow The Beatles — it’s mad!”
It also brings into sharp focus his relationship with Lennon, which broke down in the wake of The Beatles split but, as we see, they reconciled shortly before John’s death.
Directed by Oscar-winning Morgan Neville, Man On The Run is a masterpiece of documentary storytelling.
Rich in source material, partly because Linda was a professional photographer who also shot home movies, it is raw, heartfelt, funny, poignant and, crucially, not remotely sugar-coated.
Before the screening starts, Sir Paul, looking fit and well for his 83 years, strolls on to the stage and quips: “I just want to say thank you to Morgan for keeping in all the embarrassing moments that I asked him to take out.”
But let’s get back to the big question: How DO you follow The Beatles?
It was a conundrum that weighed heavily on McCartney as the Swinging Sixties drew to a close.
As he puts it himself in the movie, the first thing he did was “escape” and then he had to learn how “to grow up”.
He had married American Linda Eastman in March, 1969, at Marylebone Town Hall, London, and soon afterwards adopted her daughter Heather from a previous marriage.
McCartney was still only 27 when, on April 10, 1970, he told the world that he, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were going their separate ways.
The announcement came amid acrimony over the band’s crooked business manager Allen Klein, favoured at the time by John and the others but later described by Paul as “a sort of demon”.
It was all over for the band of four likely lads from Liverpool who changed popular culture for ever.
In private, McCartney had known for months that his songwriting partner Lennon was leaving.
“John broke up The Beatles,” Macca affirms in Man On The Run. “But I got the rap. And that’s a bit of a weight to bear.”
Around the same time as Lennon’s bombshell, in late 1969, there were rumours across the US and around the world that “Beatle Paul may be dead”.
There’s a hilarious moment in the film when his younger brother Mike is asked whether it’s true.
“It’s a hoax, it’s a con,” he exclaims, before being asked when was the last time he saw his brother.
Mike replies: “The last time? It was his funeral, I think!”
It turned out that McCartney had the perfect bolthole, in an archetypal middle of nowhere, to hide away and reset his life.
In 1966, he had bought High Park Farm, a 183-acre sheep farm on the Mull of Kintyre (yes, that explains the song) in Argyllshire, only reached via a “long and winding” track.
With its corrugated iron roof and general state of dilapidation, it was, as someone in the film points out, the sort of place a poor farm labourer might baulk at accepting.
But, as the Sixties ebbed to a close, Paul, Linda, their daughters, Heather and baby Mary, plus their Old English Sheepdog Martha decamped to the Scottish wilds.
In the movie, McCartney suggests, “We got up there to escape”, and ponders whether he would write “another note of music” before confessing to drowning himself in one wee dram of Scotch after another.
But, with the responsibility of supporting a young family on his shoulders, he realised that “it was a question of HAVING to grow up”.
At the Man On The Run launch, McCartney reflects: “With The Beatles, we were just lads. Everyone, all our management, used to call us ‘the boys’.
“Then I got married and then there was a baby [Mary] on the way.
“I had to grow up. I thought, ‘We can’t just be these ‘boys’ any more’. It was time to think about stuff.
“Even though the film is kind of madcap and you see all our insane decisions, in the background there were some sensible decisions, too.”
He remembers how Linda was his guiding light through those years.
“If there was an idea that was a little bit crazy, I’d say, ‘Should I do that? Could I do that?’ She’d say, ‘It’s allowed’. It was a brilliant philosophy in life.”
Director Neville picks up on this theme: “I looked into the questions Paul was trying to ask of himself, questions that I felt were universal.
“How do you deal with your own legacy and the expectations people have of you? How do you balance your career with your family?
“In Paul’s case, he made them one and the same. And that, I thought, was completely inspirational.”
Though Kintyre provided a necessary respite from the dazzling glare of publicity, Macca has never been far away from making music. It’s in his blood.
In 1970, he released his debut solo album, simply titled McCartney, with its intimate DIY aesthetic and featuring at least two songs with his beloved partner in mind — The Lovely Linda and Maybe I’m Amazed.
In 1971, he formed Wings with ex-Moody Blues musician Denny Laine and, controversially, Linda, who until that point had little or no experience, as core members.
Rehearsals for their debut album Wild Life took place at Macca’s converted barn in Scotland, dubbed Rude Studio.
It felt to him as if he was starting over, at the bottom of the pile.
“It was so impossible to do something like that,” he says today.
“Just go back to square one, show up at a university, don’t book hotels, take the dogs in a van. For some reason, we thought it was a great idea!”
If Wings took time to take flight, everything changed in 1973 when they released third album Band On The Run, loaded with classic tunes such as the title track, Jet and Let Me Roll It.
Recorded in extraordinary circumstances at EMI’s studio in Lagos, Nigeria, not far from where Paul and Linda were mugged at knifepoint, it paved the way for stadium-sized shows in America.
Without the McCartneys’ sojourn to Scotland, there would have been no Mull Of Kintyre, which, at the time of its release in 1977, became the biggest selling single of all time.
A “love song” to that remote idyll, it featured Great Highland bagpipes played so passionately by the local Campbeltown Pipe Band.
Yet, interwoven with stories of Wings’ upward trajectory, there are musings on McCartney’s strained relationship with Lennon during the Seventies.
We’re reminded of John’s caustic song How Do You Sleep?, directed at Paul with its line, “The only thing you done was yesterday”.
And there’s his old buddy left thinking, “Aside from Yesterday, what about Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, Let It Be and the rest?”
Macca says: “As it shows in the film, I knew John from a very early age — we were just a couple of rock and roll fans.
“We enjoyed hanging out together and we started writing little songs round at my place.
“My dad had a pipe in his drawer. So we thought we’d smoke it. We couldn’t find any tobacco so we smoked tea! We had all those memories in common.
“Then we went through the whole trajectory of The Beatles. But John was always just that guy to me, even when he was being really mean and I was having to take it.
“At the same time, it was like, ‘Yeah, it’s just John, he does that’. He’d always done that — so that made it a little bit easier.
“But I loved him, you know. I loved all the guys in The Beatles.
“I try and think of how else it could have been, but with just me, John, George and Ringo, it was a magic grouping. And we did OK!”
Near the end of Man On The Run, you see McCartney being confronted by camera crews about the shocking death of Lennon, who had been shot the day before outside the Dakota Building apartment he shared with partner Yoko Ono in New York.
Macca was criticised at the time for a rather cool, unemotional response — but one look in his eyes reveals his utter devastation.
As for the aforementioned “embarrassing moments” on display in the film, they are what make it so refreshing and endearing.
Hence you see McCartney singing Mary Had A Little Lamb wearing a red clown’s nose with Wings guitarist Henry McCullough looking as if he wants the earth to swallow him.
There’s a moustachioed Paul in a baggy pink suit performing the cabaret-style Gotta Sing Gotta Dance, complete with dancing girls, for his 1973 variety show.
And what about him getting busted by Japanese cops in 1980 for having 219g of cannabis in his luggage, spending nine days in custody before being booted out of the country?
McCartney was supposed to be embarking on a Wings tour of Japan but, as it turned out, they never played together again.
He says: “So many bits are embarrassing. The look on Henry McCullough’s face! He’s not happy.
“I was thinking, ‘Maybe we could cut those bits, the dance routine, cool out my image’.
“But Morgan said, ‘No, let me keep them in. You’ll see all that stuff but because you overcame it all and found yourself, you won in the end’.”
Finally, McCartney takes a long hard look at himself — at the person “growing up” in Man On The Run and the man he is today.
He says: “You start to see yourself, not just in the mirror, but to realise what your character is like.
“It’s natural for me to be enthusiastic so I don’t always see pitfalls, With me, it’s, “Nah, nah, just do it’.”