Paul McCartney

Wings became, for most of the 1970s, one of the largest acts on earth, and the reason is that McCartney eventually got the group right. The turning point was Band on the Run in 1973, recorded partly in Lagos under conditions that fell apart around him — two band members quit on the eve of the sessions, he was robbed at knifepoint and lost demo tapes, the studio was barely functional. He and Linda and Denny Laine finished it as a trio, McCartney covering the missing parts himself. It became the record that silenced most of the doubt, a genuine album rather than a collection of singles, and it sold enormously.

The success didn't turn him precious. Through the rest of the decade Wings churned out hits, filled stadiums on the 1975 and 1976 tours, and generally behaved like a working band rather than a legacy project. When the group finally wound down at the start of the eighties — a lineup that had rotated members repeatedly, always with Paul and Linda and Laine at the core — he didn't retreat into elder-statesman mode. He went looking for other people to write with.

In 1991 McCartney did something that made no commercial sense for a man with his catalogue. He wrote a piece of orchestral classical music — the Liverpool Oratorio, a large choral work about a life shaped by his home city, premiered in Liverpool Cathedral. He couldn't read or write standard notation, so he made it the only way he could: alongside someone who could. The composer Carl Davis translated what McCartney sang and played into a score, the two of them building the thing across the gap between a self-taught songwriter and a trained conductor. Critics were divided, sometimes sharply. It hardly mattered. He'd proven to himself he could work in a form that had no verse-chorus to hide behind.

The temptation with a figure like McCartney is to read his life as a story about one exceptional individual — the natural, the melodist, the man who could apparently pull tunes out of the air. It's a flattering frame and it's mostly wrong about how the work got made. The through-line of his whole career, Beatles and after, is not solitary genius. It's collaboration treated as a method rather than a happy accident. He writes by being across a table from someone.

This is why the post-Beatles decades matter more than their uneven reviews suggest. The band gave him the greatest writing partner of the century, and when that ended, most people assumed the well would run dry, because they assumed the songs had come from inside him and John had merely been a colleague. What the second act shows is closer to the reverse. The partnership wasn't a stage he passed through on the way to being a soloist. It was the native form of his talent, and losing it sent him not into solo brilliance but into a fifty-year search for new rooms to write inside — a wife on keyboards, a band that toured universities, a producer, a punk who'd argue with him, a conductor who could read the notes he couldn't.

The self-interview that announced the end in 1970 has a strange afterglow now. It reads, at the time, like a man declaring his independence, insisting he could do it alone. What the following half-century actually did was disprove that reading in the gentlest way possible — not by failing, but by succeeding through exactly the opposite means. He never really worked alone. He built Wings, he sought out Wonder and Jackson and Costello, he leaned on Carl Davis to reach a form his own hands couldn't. The clearing of the table was only ever a prelude to inviting someone else to sit at it.