Paul McCartney says he ‘would have been a teacher’ had he not been successful with The Beatles

Veteran songwriter Paul McCartney has confirmed he “would have been a teacher” had he not made it big with The Beatles.

McCartney, who would later front Wings and find success as a solo performer in the 1980s, shared the career he would have chosen had his music not become so popular. Though McCartney has topped the charts and sold out stadiums across the globe, he still feels an “impostor syndrome,” a feeling he confirmed in The Lyrics, a book collecting the inspirations behind the lyrics to every song he wrote. McCartney credits the Fab Four as a reason for his continued success as a performer, noting he would have ended up as an English teacher had the group not garnered the acclaim they soon found. The legendary performer also suggested writing songs was “a side project” for the band at first, rather than their focus.

McCartney wrote: “Had I not got into a group that was as successful as The Beatles – a group that had a long life as groups go – then I might have had to find some other work. I would almost certainly have become an English teacher, that ‘other me’.”

The songwriter behind hits like Band on the Run, Let it Be, and Coming Up, also shared he felt he was just “playing at” being a performer still. He added: “I have a little bit of ‘impostor syndrome’ – same as, I suppose, many ‘successful people’ do. This life I’ve led is something I brought on myself because of the fascination of it, because of the love of some puzzle that can never quite be solved. Every song, then, is part of a solution to it.”

His now legendary songwriting partnership with John Lennon seems to have come on naturally, too, with McCartney sharing he and his fellow Beatles band member had written a song or two which “gave us something in common.”

McCartney shared he and Lennon bonded first over covering the likes of Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley, and then writing music. He said: “When John and I met, the first year of our friendship was spent talking about these cover versions, the records we loved, and then playing them again and again.

“As we got to know each other, we practised these various covers until one day the conversation went, ‘You know, I’ve written one or two songs.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, so have I.’ The rest, judging by the series of number one hits both men achieved as part of The Beatles and as solo artists, is history.

Though the pair would write together frequently, following the break-up of The Beatles, they had a few barbed words for one another. Cult Following previously reported the back-and-forth between the former bandmates, where McCartney and Lennon wrote songs for their solo albums, which criticised one another.