There’s nothing here even a casual admirer hasn’t heard about the writing of Yesterday or Let It Be, and the 154 songs he’s chosen to dissect will be hotly debated.

But fans will thrill to the autobiographical nuggets sprinkled along the way (he gently acknowledges keyboards weren’t Linda McCartney’s strength), as well as the surprising names who pop up (Jane Asher, a talking point he’s mostly steered clear of since 1968, when they ended their engagement).

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“Towards the end of 1969, John had quite gleefully told us it was over,” McCartney says, recalling Dear Friend, a track from his 1971 Wild Life album that addressed the demise of their friendship.

“I can remember him saying, ‘Oh, this is quite exciting.’ … All of us could see what he meant, [but] it was not quite so exciting for those left on the other side.” Still, “we didn’t seriously consider” moving forward as a trio.

The business of being Beatles ended unpleasantly (“I sued my friends from Liverpool, my lifetime friends, in court”), though the relationships would heal.

“I was very glad of how we got along in those last few years, that I had some really good times with [John] before he was murdered,” says McCartney, who remembers their last meeting as very friendly: “We talked about how to bake bread.”

In the book McCartney also reveals another source that inspired Eleanor Rigby. “Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies – partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling,” he says.

McCartney got along well with one elderly woman in particular and often popped into her kitchen for a visit. “Just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.”

The singer confesses that, in his boyhood, he fancied the Queen. He says: “She was a good-looking woman, like a Hollywood film star,” McCartney recalls of Queen Elizabeth II, 95, who inspired the 25-second song fragment Her Majesty, part of the epic medley that closes 1969’s Abbey Road.

“I think part of the secret behind her popularity, at least for my generation, was that she was quite a babe. … In our boyish ways, we rather fancied her.”

He shares that he did once perform the song for the monarch: “I don’t know how to break this to you, but she didn’t have a lot to say.”

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Another interesting anecdote is how Ringo Starr took a bathroom break while The Beatles recorded Hey Jude.

As the tape rolled on the seven-minute track, “I felt him tiptoe back in behind me,” says McCartney, and the drummer managed to “hit his intro without missing a beat. So even as we’re recording it, I’m thinking, ‘This is the take’.”

Lennon famously insisted that McCartney retain the temporary lyric, “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, and the two are inextricably linked in Paul’s mind. “He was so firm about keeping it in that when I sing Hey Jude now, I often think of John, and it becomes this emotional point in the song for me.”

McCartney says one of his favourites is Waterfalls, though he doesn’t think the recording has aged well. He wrote the 1980 single while still with Wings, but left it off the band’s final album because “I wasn’t happy with the lyrics”.

Recording it on the fly for his experimental McCartney II album meant Waterfalls “didn’t get the arrangement that perhaps it deserved. In the early days of synthesisers, you got fooled into thinking the synth strings always sounded good, which they didn’t.”