"Daddy, tell us how it all began, how the walls of Pepperland crumbled, how the Blue Meanies with their lawyers and chartered accounts came and despoiled the land and how you and Mummy, the Lovely Linda, rescued what you could from the ruins and rebuilt the kingdom."

Why was it that while watching Wingspan, the Paulumentary about Wings the other night, I had the feeling I was listening to a fairy tale? This impression was induced in part by the fact that Paul was telling the story to his daughter Heather. By fairy tale I’m not implying that Paul’s version of the story is an out-and-out lie, just that the group’s genesis and history seems too much like a Just-So Story, that, through sleight of hand, omits a number of essential points, such as Daddy is the biggest rock star in the world type of thing. Don’t you think children should be told that the hero is actually the king of the castle before going on with the story of his adventures?

The Wings saga, like everything else Paul has been involved in, is seen by him–even conceived by him–through the pastel past-tense lens of musicals and family movies.

One of the smartest things Paul did was to get out of London town when the walls came tumbling down. On his Scottish sheep farm he could build the ark that would carry him triumphantly over the troubled waters of the seventies and eighties. Linda was the perfect partner for him, raised on Disney fantasies and brought up to marry a successful executive, she fitted effortlessly into Paul’s idyllic diorama, an enthusiastic first mate in Captain McCartney’s Paulonization of the world. (For my personal recollection of Linda click here).

I’m sure that while living in a lumber yard (with a film crew, no less) Paul, fixing a hole where the rain gets in, probably did shout down to Linda, playing a reggae record on the turntable, "Why don’t we start a band together?" I’m sure the roadies–eh, where’d they come from, then?–did know of this bloke, Denny Lane, who could play great guitar, and so on and so on.

In order to make the band-on-the-run, rags-to-riches story work, a few things have to be omitted from the Paulist account of Wings, which goes something like this: a bloke, let down by his best mate and his demonic Japanese concubine, picks himself up with the help of the plucky Linda, forms a happy-go-lucky band that travels through Europe in a quaintly-painted double-decker bus, stopping and playing wherever people will have them, gets a few lucky breaks, and lo-and-behold, what happens next–a hit record, by crikey! Followed by a million-selling album-will wonders never cease!–and before you can say George Martin, they’re playing to packed stadiums–at this point Linda pulls the Paulist taffy a wee bit too thin by chiming in that she finds stadiums "oddly intimate" (especially if you’re up there on stage with your hubby). It’s a musical about how a band (uncannily creating their own soundtrack as they go) manages to overcome all obstacles to become a worldwide success.

What’s left out of course is that the lead singer and bass player in this band happens to be Paul McCartney, the most famous pop singer in the world (along with his dark twin, Evil John) and one part of the most successful writing team in rock history.

Part of the triumph of Wings came from the wish on the part of any number of fans to prolong the Beatles by other means, and, initially at least, Paul was writing what were essentially late-Beatle songs such as "Teddy Boy" and "Maybe I’m Amazed." But what really propelled the group was their reanimation not of the hairy, magical mysterians, but of the early, good-vibrations Beatles, the Fab Four who’d been buried under scandals and acrimony. Older fans wanted them back and those too young to have seen them wanted a taste of that Hard-Day’s-Night magic, too.

This was a stroke of impudence on Paul’s part–that cheeky Paul!–who, being more conservative than his pal the avant-garde-mad walrus, was never entirely at ease with the experimental and radical direction of the Götterdamerung Beatles. There was always a soft-shoe, straw-hat-and-cane side to Paul who loved all the old sing-along pub songs and music-hall turns, so it was easy for him go back to all that, to resuscitate the show-biz side of the Beatles.

As far as sixties groups went, the Beatles were on the cusp. One spat-attired leg was still tap-dancing to the old music hall, pantomime tradition while the other Chelsea booted one was stomping in the new rocky, rhythm and blurs of Swinging London.

To a certain extent the Beatles have become what show tunes used to be, their songs endlessly recycled. "Eleanor Rigby" and "Penny Lane," for those of us who don’t go to musicals, are like songs from South Pacific and My Fair Lady were to our parents–or grandparents, or great-grandparents.

The Beatles are everywhere, on commercials, on Sesame Street, through the ceaseless background radiation of classic rock radio. To our children and grandchildren the Beatles have become a sort of imprinted sonic presence, the very innocuousness of their ballads beamed into cribs, the jaunty rockers and "Yellow Submarine" sing-alongs become activity music for pre-schoolers.

But why are the Beatles, almost forty years on, still so ubiquitous? This would be the equivalent, in the sixties, of kids still listening to the "Charleston." My Grand Unifying Theory is that the Beatles shifted the paradigm. Thus, the way we relate to them is determined by the universe they created. "Every author as far as he is great and at the same time original," wrote Wordsworth–and he was surely thinking of the Beatles when he wrote it–"has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed."

The Beatles were the big bang in pop music, the liquid hydrogen in-rushing sound of a new era coming into being, when the red giant of fifties conformism and repression collapsed and let the sun shine in (so to speak). The Beatles are the sonic equivalent of a culture joyously breaking through the Berlin wall of the old regime, and several spindly-legged, Spanish-booted feet leaping into the future. With that cosmogonic act they set in motion our current stop-time, pop-culture bubble, in which everything created in its own image exists in a cultural vacuum. No past, no future, only sampling–where the dragons of postmodernism prowl outside the moated walls of the virtual kingdom.