'AT FIRST, JOHN, GEORGE AND RINGO WEREN'T TOO POSITIVE ABOUT WINGS'

In an exclusive interview, Sir Paul McCartney talks about his rivalry with the other Beatles, practising his songs with Paul Mescal and how he is now in a 'really, really active period'

- EVGENY LEBEDEV

John and I were always in competition." So speaks Sir Paul McCartney, reflecting not on his time as a Beatle but on what came after the Fab Four disbanded. At the start of the 1970s, he and his ex-bandmates took different paths: John Lennon became a successful solo artist while McCartney formed a new band, Wings, with his then-wife Linda, Denny Laine and Denny Seiwell. Yet the spirit of rivalry that had powered so much of the Lennon-McCartney partnership — Hey Jude, Yesterday, Let it Be — continued to live on.

"There was a song that I did called Coming Up," McCartney recounts, "and I understand that John [Lennon] heard that on the radio and thought, 'Oh shit, Paul's done a good song, and I've got to get working.'"

This is the only interview McCartney is giving around his new book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, published earlier this week and edited by former White House speechwriter, Ted Widmer. I wrote him a letter drawing on my love of both Wings and The Beatles, and my connection to their music, which dates back to childhood. My parents, who lived in Moscow, were fans and played their records on a loop. I remember it as the sound of freedom: a great unifier in a world torn apart by ideology. This struck a chord with McCartney. "I think of the time when our Wings Over the World tour played Zagreb, behind the Iron Curtain," he writes in his foreword to the book. "The fact is, they're just music fans, and that's how your message gets over."