Born on 18th June: Paul McCartney is still young at heart...

Born in 1942 in Liverpool, UK, the bassist and principal songwriter of the Beatles (alongside his alter-ego John Lennon) celebrates his 83rd birthday today.

He has composed dozens of memorable songs over his career and continues, tirelessly, to release albums which may be less remarkable but always with the same childlike joy. The most recent, titled "McCartney III" (2020), doesn’t hesitate to flirt with gently electro sounds – something quite unexpected from the venerable grandfather of rock.

It's always tricky, if not impossible, to capture a legend in just a few lines. So I’ll settle for a few anecdotes, sometimes personal, sometimes more universal.

The Beatles' songs have always been part of my life, as they have for most of you, but I didn’t buy my first album by the Wings until 1978. It was "London Town," picked up in a sale at the HMV (a record shop chain) in Richmond, on the outskirts of London where I was getting to know the English language at a college in Twickenham, not too far from the home of Pete Townshend of the Who. To keep up appearances and maintain my "street credibility" at a time when punk was sweeping England, I also snapped up "Life On The Line" by Eddie & The Hot Rods. Both records bore a giant sticker advertising their bargain price: 50 pence, about 50 cents in Euros. On the way home, in the sluggish car boot, "With A Little Luck" soundtracked our teenage hopes for slow dances – with little success!

Since concerts in Rio moved to Copacabana Beach, attendance numbers have soared, but Macca still holds the record at the Maracanã stadium with, officially, 184,000 spectators on 21 April 1990.

When the Beatles recorded "Back In The U.S.S.R." in November 1968, Paul McCartney wanted to take advantage of a slight opening of the Soviet Union by offering them, exclusively, his seventh solo album "Choba B CCCP" (the Russian translation of 'Back To USSR') on the state label Melodyia. Recorded in two days, live-style, it features eleven covers of rock’n’roll classics such as "Lucille" (Little Richard) and "Ain’t That A Shame" (Fats Domino). On a trip to Moscow in November 1989, I was lucky enough to find two copies in the GUM department store on Red Square, opposite the Kremlin.

The latest masterstroke from the mischievous Macca came at the end of 2023, when the Rolling Stones released "Hackney Diamonds," their first studio album since 2016. McCartney managed to outdo them with the voice of John Lennon—from beyond the grave—on the song "Now And Then" and its 66 billion streams on Spotify…

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo: © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Paul McCartney on stage at Bercy in Paris (France) in September 1989