July 27, 2012. Copyright 2012, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Milestone year for former Beatle Paul McCartney, headline act at Olympics' Opening Ceremony
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, July 27, Graphic News:  The eyes of the world will again be on one of Britain's best-loved musicians -- Sir Paul McCartney -- when he takes to the stage for the climax of ceremonies marking the opening of the London 2012 Games on July 27. Just seven weeks after he closed the Queen's Jubilee Concert in spectacular fashion in front of Buckingham Palace, "Macca" -- who turned 70 on June 18 -- will reprise the role, bringing the three-hour Olympic spectacular, directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle, to a finish, watched by an anticipated global audience of more than a billion. It seems a fitting honour for the one-time Merseyside lad who, in the decades since the Fab Four took the pop world by storm, has achieved the status of a national treasure.

McCartney was the good-looking one, the heartthrob; the bright boy who won a scholarship at 11 to the Liverpool Institute -- where four decades later he would co-found one of the country's leading schools for the performing arts -- and met fellow pupil George Harrison on the school bus one day in 1954. McCartney was 14 when he traded in the trumpet his jazz-loving father, Jim, had given him for his birthday, for a guitar, turning it round and restringing it because it felt more comfortable to play left-handed. A well-behaved son who lost his midwife mother, Mary, to breast cancer in October 1956, he ran into John Lennon nine months later at a church fete, and joined Lennon's school band, The Quarrymen, shortly afterwards. After several changes of name and line-up -- during which he introduced Harrison to Lennon -- James Paul McCartney finally became the Beatle who wrote Yesterday, a defining anthem that spawned more than 2,000 cover versions.

It is 50 years since his first composition with Lennon -- Love Me Do -- was released in October 1962, and he still performs those hits (his own favourite is said to be Blackbird) to fans who have stuck with him in the intervening years -- through Wings, the band he formed with wife Linda after The Beatles' legendary break-up in 1970, and in his continuing solo career after her death, also from breast cancer, in 1998. Younger generations revere him for his particular place in pop history; his contribution was rewarded with a knighthood, announced in December 1996.

An animal rights activist who once declared "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian", McCartney took up farming on the Mull of Kintyre in the aftermath of Beatlemania. Scottish police once found cannabis plants growing on the estate and the singer-songwriter, whom Guinness World Records has described as the most successful recording artist of all time, famously spent 10 days in a Tokyo jail in 1980 after customs officers found cannabis in his luggage. The murder of Lennon in December that year led McCartney to withdraw from live performance for a while, amid fears he too would be a target. He later sang on Harrison's tribute to Lennon, All Those Years Ago, and wrote his own song for his former writing partner, Here Today. Despite their well-publicised differences, McCartney said they had remained "the best of mates", having spoken on the telephone only a few days before the killing. Last October, three years after an acrimonious divorce from former model Heather Mills, McCartney married for a third time, his bride the New York-born heiress, Nancy Shevell. Of his five children, fashion designer Stella is the best-known.
/ENDS