If it's your own history, you might as well use it. In August , during a brief break from one of their final recording sessions, the four members of the Beatles were photographed in mid-stride on the London crosswalk a few yards from where they were working. In the photo used on the Abbey Road sleeve, Paul McCartney is out of stride with the other three Beatles, and is also the only Beatle barefoot. These chance details would later be taken as principal pieces of "evidence" for a conspiracy theory that still inspires a significant literature to this day: that in late the real McCartney had died in an accident and that at the time of this photo he had been replaced by an impostor who has played the role of "Paul McCartney" ever since.
He didn't; he hadn't. Your coffee table could use some style. Click here to subscribe to GQ. Ever since, fans and tourists have been lining up here, day in, day out, blocking traffic as they duplicate this photo. And so when, around lunchtime on a sunny day in July, one more man re-creates that iconic scene while his daughter films him, it would be nothing in the least unusual.
Except that, on this occasion, the man doing so happens to be one of those original four walkers, following his own distant footsteps. Paul McCartney is 76 years old. Today, he is on his way to the studio where most of the Beatles' records were recorded, as well as a fair few of those he has made since, to play an invitation-only lunchtime concert. All of thisβthe concert which, it now being , is for Spotify , the video from the crosswalk which, it now being , swiftly radiates around the world from McCartney's Instagram , and plenty else in the surrounding weeksβis to drum up excitement for a new Paul McCartney album called Egypt Station.
If you imagine that by now McCartney might have reached the point where he would relax and look back with cozy satisfaction on his life's achievements, only releasing new music just for the pure pleasure of it, happy to let it slip out into the world and find its own audienceβ¦well, then you're already very wrong about both who Paul McCartney is and who he ever was.
One of the first things McCartney will say to me when we meet is "I'm still very competitive," another is "Do you know anyone who doesn't have insecurities? A dominant but wrongheaded myth of the modern celebrity era is that great fame and success changes people. There are ways in which it sometimes can, of course, but what is far more notable is that we are who we are, and thatβno matter how much fame and acclaim and money and experience are added to the equationβwe tend to change very little, both for better and for worse.
