Now I think the rumours of my death were more accurate... In many ways I was dead... The old Paul was not the new Paul

For several years from 1966 there were persistent rumours that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash and The Beatles had brought in a lookalike to keep the band going.

- MARK JEFFERIES Showbiz Editor

The Secret Service had a hand in the deception, so the conspiracy theory went, with believers speculating that the cover of the 1969 Abbey Road album depicted a funeral procession - with a white-clad John Lennon representing a priest, George Harrison an undertaker, Ringo Starr a gravedigger and a barefoot Paul himself representing a corpse.

While he obviously was alive and well, now, nearly 60 years on, the singer admits he did feel as if part of himself had "died" at the end of The Beatles.

And he reveals that career doubts meant he almost quit music soon after, following a backlash from reviewers.

In his new book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, Sir Paul says: "The strangest rumour started floating around just as The Beatles were breaking up, that I was dead. We had heard the rumour long before but, suddenly, in that autumn of 1969 stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all of its own, so that millions of people around the world believed I was actually gone."

Sir Paul says that he and wife Linda were "aware of the power of gossip and the absurdity" of the stories circulating - and that they had moved out of London "precisely to get away from the kind of malevolent talk that was bringing The Beatles down".

He goes on: "But now that over half a century has passed since those truly crazy times, I'm beginning to think that the rumours were more accurate than one might have thought at the time.

"In so many ways, I was dead, a 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows that were sapping my energy, in need of a complete life makeover."