In an excerpt from the book "Wings: The story of a band on the run", published in The Guardian, Paul McCartney talks about the time after the Beatles' breakup.
He describes how a rumor that he had died suddenly took hold among fans – and how today he feels they were partly right:
"In many ways, I was dead. I was a 27-year-old would-be ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal defeats that took all my energy, and I needed to change my life completely," he writes.
The solution was to move from London and start a new life with his family on a secluded sheep farm in Scotland.
"Could I ever move on from what had been a fantastic decade? Could I overcome all the crises that exploded around me daily?" he ponders in the text.
"Wings: The story of a band on the run" is about the band Wings, which was formed in 1971 by, among others, McCartney and his wife Linda McCartney.
