Fab: The Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

By: Howard Sounes

Narrated by: David Thorpe

He is the proud torchbearer of the Beatles, the greatest band in the history of popular music, and one of the most closely-studied artists in show business, yet secrets and surprises remain in the life of Sir Paul McCartney. The full story is told in Fab.

Howard Sounes, author of the acclaimed Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, spent more than two years investigating every aspect of Sir Paul’s life and work, including interviewing over 200 people. The result is the richest, most detailed, and most comprehensive biography of McCartney yet written.

Unlike previous biographers, the author pays equal attention to the story of McCartney in the Beatles and the ongoing story of his post-Beatles career, creating an engrossing history that spans the long arc of this great artist’s life and work. Fab also includes the full, fascinating story of Sir Paul’s calamitous second marriage to Heather Mills. Sounes proves a judicious critic of the music, while also delivering a superb psychological portrait of the man behind some of the world’s most beloved songs.

Howard Sounes is known for writing detailed and revelatory biographies of a wide range of extraordinary personalities, including the murderers Fred and Rosemary West (Fred & Rose), the writer Charles Bukowski (Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life), and the musicians Bob Dylan (Down the Highway) and Lou Reed (Notes from the Velvet Underground). Each book is based on extensive original research. For more information, visit www.howardsounes.com

©2010 Howard Sounes (P)2014 Audible Studios

Critic reviews

"For fans willing to ponder their hero’s flaws, Fab delivers all you need to know." ( Rolling Stone)
"A McCartney biography that intrigues all the way through." ( The (London) Times)

gripping! intriguing start to finish.

loved it start to finish
narrators voice very easy to listen to.
highly recommend it

Nothing new here

Any additional comments?

If you're new to Paul McCartney, don't know much about him, this will be a very informative book. But if you've been following him for years, it's pretty much a rehash of everything else you've ever read. I didn't appreciate the author's critiques of McCartney's music. That's so subjective, and if he thought it made him seem unbiased, it didn't. I would rather have read an analysis of other professional criticism.

fascinating biography

As a follower of the Beatles since the 1960s I really enjoyed this biography of Paul. Howard Sounes' detailed research is impressive, and I learned a lot about Paul the man, his relationships with the other Beatles, with family and friends and with other musos. The early days centred on sex drugs and rock'n'roll which became a little tedious, but once Linda arrived on the scene the focus changed and a mature and more interesting Paul emerged. Naturally the length of the book means a lot of characters and a lot of detail, but it held my interest from start to finish. I ended up seeing Paul as a decent and caring man and liking him for the person he is rather than liking his music and admiring him as a star. At the end I had just one question - why didn't Paul learn to write music? With so much musical apptitude and talent, his life might have been easier if he'd been able to jot down music as it came to him instead of waiting for a professional to do it for him. The book is well written, and David Thorpe does a great job of narration - right voice for the job and good with accents.

Quite Long But Good..

This is quite strong on detail for his post Beatle years. Overall, it is an excellent account of rock music's most enduring star.

I can't believe how much Paul has done in his career. The story is actually is actually quite epic in its length, but it managed to hold my interest over the 26 hours.

Does what it says on the tin. Good performance too

I know a fair bit about the Beatles, but decided I didn't really know too much about Macca himself. If you've got the albums/watched the Anthology series, there'll be nothing that astounding about the years leading up to the end of the Fab Four, but, for a rather lengthy tome, it went by in a breeze for me.

As for the performance, generally speaking I'm not a fan of someone doing all the voices in a non-fictional tale; for instance, when a man lighten's his voice a little and puts on an American accent, I'm still a long way from believing they actually got Linda McCartney in to do her own parts. That all said, Thorpe does a pretty good Macca impression, and has a decent grasp on a range of British accents. The American ones were less convincing for me, and the non-native English languages seemed a bit...much. That all said, I started to find them all charming after a while. (This in contrast with Elton John's autobiography, which I found almost unlistenable because of Taron Egerton's wildly over the top performance, Or Louis Theroux's borderline offensive accents he adopted for his own book).

I tend to switch between audio and text when I can - a 26 hour audiobook is not something I often think I'll stick with. However, I made it all the way through this one, both performance and story complementing each other nicely. Would definitely read/listen to another by both Thorpe and Sounes.

Good balance of facts

Like most Beatles fans, there's a fine line about knowing too much and not enough. I think this book strikes a nice balance.

New Bits Aren't Good and Good Bits Aren't New

Well-written and well-researched, but there is little that won't be familiar to most fans of McCartney and that band he played bass for. There was greater detail of Linda's death, which was heartbreaking, and way too much detail about Paul's second marriage, but I guess both are part of McCartney's story. It's worth listening to, despite the author being an obvious devotee of John Lennon, like so many who have fallen for the Martin Luther Lennon image Yoko has created in place of what John Lennon was actually like.

True to the Title

What made the experience of listening to Fab: The Intimate Life of Paul McCartney the most enjoyable?

I just got done listening to the audiobook. This book is long which required a devotion to getting it done. If you are a big Paul McCartney fan, you will find this book is worth the listen. It's very good and gives good insight to the man and his character, some good and some not so good. The narrator did a good job of telling the story and doing imitations of Paul McCartney speaking.

I highly recommend this book.

you think you know someone.

In the end it's all about the music. 60 years later I learned who they really were, and I 'm not sure if knowing them intimately changes my admiration of their music!

Not a rehash!

Thoroughly enjoyed book. Learned a lot about all that I didn't know. Still loves his image.