James Paul McCartney ( Liverpool , 18 of June of 1942 ), is a musician multi -instrumentalist , singer, record producer, activist for animal rights, and British composer. Former member of the rock group The Beatles .
Biographical synthesis
Childhood and youth
James Paul McCartney was born on 18 of June of 1942 in Walton General Hospital in the city of Liverpool . His parents were Jim McCartney and Mary Patricia, Jim was a cotton seller and played in a jazz band but during World War II (1939-1945) he had to leave it. During the war he worked in two different places, by day he operated a lathe and at night he put out the fires caused by German bombs. Her mother worked in a hospital as a midwife (midwife) and on her income the McCartney family lived well. Paul was a plump child and very kind to others.
On one of Paul’s birthdays, his father gave him a trumpet but when he checked that if playing the trumpet he could not sing and he changed for a guitar. He soon discovered that, although he was right-handed at everything else, he was left-handed playing the guitar, which he solved by reversing the guitar strings.
The sudden death of her mother from breast cancer was an emotional and financial blow to the family. On June 6, 1957, Paul went with some friends to the social gathering that was organized in the gardens of the Saint Peter church and there was John Lennon playing , Paul was impressed by his way of playing. Over the course of the evening a friend of both introduced them and John was able to verify that young Paul played the guitar very well, so after a few days Paul became part of the Quarrymen group.
the Beatles
Later, on March 13, 1958, George Harrison’s friend and schoolmate joined the group. They would get some gigs, especially in Hamburg , but the great leap to fame was about to come, when on August 18 , 1962 Ringo Starr joined the group to play drums, John, Paul and George had already recorded their first single and with the four definitive components the success arrived.
On January 11, 1963 would be published, “Please, please me” (‘please, please me’), his first world number one. But among all the songs that the Beatles composed, one of those composed by Paul, “Yesterday”, stands out, as many music critics consider the best ballad of all time and as if this is not enough, it is also the most covered in history. , with more than three thousand performances.
Another relevant event in Paul’s life was when in June 1967 the Beatles recorded the LP, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , considered the summit, Beat and which would mark a milestone in the history of music. Paul was directly involved in the recording of the album, conducting a 40-piece conservatory orchestra. Paradoxically, he, who had no musical training, reached the aureole of the best symphonic composer of our day and also baptized as The Mozart of the 20th century .
In 1969 Paul traveled to Washington to the Capitol convention, where he announced the release of his next album, under the Apple label. By January 1969 the separation of The Beatles was eminent, but Paul convinces his colleagues to make a new project, Let It Be , a documentary about a day of work in the recording studios.
But the relationship between them was so strained that in the end Paul would conclude this solo project a few months later. “Let it be” won an Oscar for the best song of the film in 1970, an award that Paul went to collect alone, somehow he deserved it. And in April 1970 Paul announced at a press conference the separation of The Beatles.
Already alone Paul would record his first album with Linda, under the name McCartney, he formed the group Wings with which he toured almost all of Europe . In 1977, the UK Minister for the Arts presented him with a decoration in rhodium, a rare metal, to proclaim him the most successful composer in history.
His career in the group The Beatles .
In the final setup of the group, which was renamed The Beatles, Paul McCartney was the bassist using the legendary violin bass, replacing his predecessor bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, prior to this he played rhythm guitar and lead vocalist, alongside John Lennon , as well as co-author of part of the songs. As a multifaceted artist, in the studio he also recorded guitars, piano, and experimented with new instruments and sounds.
Due to an agreement between McCartney and Lennon, all the songs of the group composed by either of them appear signed like Lennon McCartney. Although the first compositions are the result of a real collaboration between the two musicians, in the songs that appeared approximately from 1965 on, it was more common for each one to write separately.
Through the numerous statements of both there is a broad consensus about the degree of authorship of each of the composers in practically all the songs of The Beatles. For this reason, McCartney proposed to Lennon’s widow, Yōko Ono , that the songs in which he was the main author be signed as McCartney-Lennon, a request that was denied by her on more than one occasion.
One of McCartney’s most iconic songs with the Beatles is the ballad “Yesterday.” Other popular songs he composed around this time include, among others, Hey Jude, Get Back, Let It Be, Lady Madonna, and Helter Skelter.
His solo career
In 1980, he released McCartney II, an album containing the song “Coming up” whose live version, “Coming up (live at Glasgow)” and taken from the European tour with Wings, once again placed Paul in the first position of the Billboard Hot. 100. In 1982, he published Tug of War, which is produced by George Martin and with the collaboration of Ringo Starr . The album includes his personal tribute to John Lennon, “Here Today,” as well as a duet with Stevie Wonder on “Ebony and ivory,” an acclaimed anti-racist tune that reached first place in the United States in the summer .
Before the year was out, Paul collaborated on the singles The Girl Is Mine, included on Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller , and on Say, Say, Say, again alongside Michael Jackson and included on his 1983 album Pipes of Peace. In 1984, Paul wrote and directed the film Give My Regards to Broad Street. The song “No more lonely nights” reaches number 1 in the British charts, despite the failure of the film. At the end of the year, he edited the children’s theme “We all stand together” for the animated film Rupert and the Frog Song .
In the second half of the decade, Paul begins to collaborate with new artists. Together with Eric Stewart he will record most of the songs that will make up his album Press To Play, 1986. However, it will be with Elvis Costello with whom he will achieve relative success on his albums Flowers in the Dirt, 1989, which falls directly into the number 1 of the British charts, and Off the Ground 1993. In 1988 McCartney made the production CHOBA B CCCP is an album of rock’n’roll classics recorded by Paul McCartney and released exclusively in 1988 in the Soviet Union which later on 1991 would be released globally, with an extra theme.
In late 1989, Paul McCartney embarks on his first world tour. On this tour he performed again in Spain almost 25 years after his concerts in Madrid and Barcelona with The Beatles in 1965. Specifically, there were two concerts, on November 2 and 3, 1989, at the Palacio de los Deportes in Madrid. These concerts began with a projection on a screen divided into three parts, with excerpts from Paul’s musical history, highlighting references to The Beatles.
In addition to songs from his individual stage, the Beatles stage pieces were especially celebrated, performing among others “Yesterday”, “Penny Lane”, “Let it be”, “The fool on the hill”, etc. Curiously, he did not sing any of the songs composed by John Lennon . The concert concluded spectacularly, after several encores, with the final part of the second side of the Abbey Road album , that is, the suite of linked songs that end with “The End.”
Achievements
It appears several times in the Guinness Book of Records:
- Once for ” Yesterday “, the song with the most covers in history: “Yesterday” was confirmed as the most popular song in the world, with more than six million radio reproductions in the United States alone.
- He again appears as the most successful songwriter and singer of popular music, with sales of 100 million singles sold, and 60 gold records.
- He appears a third time for having gathered the largest audience in the world, when 184,000 people paid to see him sing at the Maracana Stadium in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in April 1990.
- The fourth is for being the fastest ticket seller in history when, in 1993, 20,000 tickets for his two concerts in the city of Sydney (Australia) were sold in eight minutes.
He received an honorary doctorate in Music from the University of Sussex . He was the first rock singer to receive the Order of Merit in Chile for services to music, peace, and human understanding.
On January 13, 2018, 18 years after the musician’s visit to Restaurante del Morro (near Castillo del Morro ), a sculpture by Paul McCartney was inaugurated .