‘The world said I was dead - in so many ways I was’: Paul McCartney on the lost years after the Beatles

In 1969, as the band imploded, the singer was 27, depressed and drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows. He hadn’t died, as rumour had it, but he was struggling. He introduces an oral history of how his family’s escape to a remote Scottish farm helped him move on from John, George and Ringo

The strangest rumour started floating around just as the Beatles were breaking up – that I was dead. We had heard it long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone.

At one point, I turned to my new wife and asked, “Linda, how can I possibly be dead?” She smiled as she held our new baby, Mary, as aware of the power of gossip and the absurdity of these ridiculous newspaper headlines as I was. But she did point out that we had beaten a hasty retreat from London to our remote farm up in Scotland, precisely to get away from the kind of malevolent talk that was bringing the Beatles down.