‘There’s a weird guy over there — keeps staring at us. Now he looks like a real Cavernite to me.’ On turning, I was to see Paul standing there, unshaven, with a denim jacket thrown over his shoulder and chewing on a toffee apple.”

“I’ve got an idea cook­ing,” [McCartney] says. “When I knew the title for the album would be New, I got this little vision – you know, like you get waking up in the morning – of me in front of a forest in a checked shirt, kind of lumber jack-y, just like I’m having my picture taken by a neighbor. Only right next to me, with his arm around me, was a robot, this very shiny guy. So I’m working on the idea, at the moment, of having this big guy on­stage. I like the idea that I’ve got a big mate who’s a robot.”

The best reference for how the robot looks, he says, is The Iron Giant – a fa­vorite of his and Beatrice’s. To design the robot, McCartney commissioned the same firm that made the elaborate pup­pets for the stage version of War Horse. “It’s a highly speculative idea,” he says. “Why would you build a robot? Just be­cause you imagined a picture of your­self with one? But that’s what you do: You have ideas and you try to bring them to fruition. You have an idea for a song and you try to bring it through.”

He thinks for a moment. “Well, this idea has to do with newness. I’m the outdoorsman, sort of a country guy, living out in the woods…” He smiles. “But I have this friend, and he’s the modern world. In fact, he’s the future.”

Paul Mccartney, ladies and gents. (x)

Many attendees had gone to some fuss with their clothes, not least Paul, who had stayed up all night applying psychedelic patterns to his shirt.

“Maharishi explained what he was going to do, he said, 'I'll just do a few little bits and pieces...' however he put it, of this and that, little incantations for himself, then he said, 'I will just lean towards you and I'll just whisper, very quietly, your mantra.' He gives you your mantra and he's only going to say it once and you repeat it once, just to check you've got it, and he says, 'Yes, that's it.' And he said, 'The idea is that you don't mention that to anyone ever again, because if you speak it, it will besmirch it to some degree; if you never speak it, then it's always something very special.'

But I must admit, I have spoken it, to Linda. At one point we decided that to reaffirm our faith in each other I would even tell her that, but that's the only time I've spoken it, once, to Linda. I know, I know, I've completely blown it, man! But I don't think you're really not allowed to. It's not like a chant, I think it's just generally a pretty good idea if you don't voice it, and I go along with that.

I asked Maharishi, 'Am I supposed to see this word? Or am I supposed to hear this word?' and it was hear it. But he said, 'You can repeat this at any speed, slow, fast, or anything. Try it at various speeds.' I remember one of the ways I could get into it was visually. Mind you, if you follow this through and look at Buddhism, they eventually imagine mandalas and the whole tantric thing. But I remember one of my little aids to meditation was imagining someone on a gate with a straw out of his mouth, just chewing, that feeling of being very very calm. You get nice peaceful images like this and, obviously, to spend twenty minutes out of your day doing that rather than sleeping or eating or shouting at someone was not a bad idea and that was basically all I thought of it all.”

“It is, he says, a city full of memories for him, from the moment he gets there. “I often arrive these days on an airplane at the John Lennon Airport,” McCartney begins to tell me, and I think that his point is going to be that even the airport has a Beatle-y name, but it’s something else, something far odder and less expected. “From the word go, there, I’m getting memories of me and John cycling to that airport to look at planes, me and George going to the Liverpool Air Show where some guy, birdman, flew out of an airplane and his parachute didn’t open,” he says. “And we watched him drop and went, ‘Uh-oh…I don’t think that was right.…’ We thought, ‘Any second now his parachute’s gonna open, and it never did. We went, ‘I don’t think he survived that.’ And he didn’t.” When McCartney tells me this, I wonder whether it’ll turn out to be one of those hazy, half-mythical recollections that don’t seem to have a real-life concordance, but it’s not. On May 21, 1956, a few weeks before McCartney’s 14th birthday, Léo Valentin, who was the most famous “birdman” of his time, and who billed himself as “Valentin, the Most Daring Man in the World,” was scheduled to fly using man-made wings in front of 100,000 spectators in Liverpool, but one of his wings hit the plane as he was exiting and was damaged, his backup parachute failed to deploy correctly, and Valentin fell to his death.”