Paul McCartney looks back at the infamous rumors that he’d died in the 1960s in his upcoming new book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.
As the story went, conspiracy theorists alleged that the Beatles member had actually died in the mid-’60s and had been replaced by a lookalike. As a piece of evidence, they claimed that John Lennon said the phrase “I buried Paul” in the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” though Lennon maintained he was actually singing “cranberry sauce.”
In an excerpt from Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run published in The Guardian, McCartney writes, “The strangest rumor 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,” McCartney continues.
While certainly not dead, McCartney writes that he’s now come to realize that he’d indeed lost a part of himself at the time.
“Now that over a half century has passed since those truly crazy times, I’m beginning to think that the rumors were more accurate than one might have thought at the time,” McCartney writes. “In so many ways, I was dead … A 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows that were sapping my energy, in need of a complete life makeover.”
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is due out Tuesday.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.