The Beatles star Paul McCartney was determined to build up his next band "brick by brick" - even if that meant shunning songs from the boy band which had made him a millionaire. The Beatles split up in 1970 following incendiary comments made by frontman John Lennon about the group becoming "bigger than Jesus". 

Crowds of furious fans burnt their records publicly, while they received death threats and even reportedly had bullets hurled at them while they were on stage. After a dramatic final show in San Francisco in 1966, the plug was pulled - and despite subsequent recording sessions - the fab four never performed live together again. Prior to the split, nostalgic Paul had been desperate to take the band back to its roots as a live act and start popping up unannounced at smaller venues for impromptu shows. 

However, his desire to take their sound back to basics was never quite compatible with a band which had achieved such huge fame across the globe. The silver lining of the Beatles' split was that Paul was able to experiment with his grassroots sounds again, as he'd always wanted.

After releasing two solo albums, titled McCartney and Ram, he formed the band Wings in 1971 and went back on tour with his debut album Wild Life for the first time in several years. He teamed up with wife Linda McCartney, guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell and began on a new musical journey.

In an online Q&A to celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of their albums, 82-year-old Paul finally let slip why he'd shied away from including any Beatles tracks up until then. He admitted: "We were kind of refusing to do Beatles stuff.

"It was the justification of the way we'd done it, with the world's craziest idea - that after you've been a Beatle, you go down to little clubs or places you don’t even have bookings like on the university tour. It was very daring."

However, it was their 1975 album Venus and Mars which would achieve the most fame, seeing them bring 65 shows to locations across the globe as part of their Wings Around The World tour. Talking about its success, he gushed: "In 1976 we did the big American tour and it was like, ‘Wow, this is it!’ That was the payoff, after all that work.

"This crazy idea of just getting a few friends together and doing little clubs and building it and learning how to be a group - it worked. That was the great thing about Wings.

"After The Beatles, we had this tiny little band that didn't have any hits and didn't even know each other, except for me and Linda obviously - and Denny Laine, who I knew a little. We were almost an amateur outfit, but we knew we would work at it and we did. We built it brick-by-brick!"

Paul felt part of the fun was building up gradually, even if it meant disassociating himself from the millions of records sold during his 1960s stint in the Beatles - and, of course, he remains a musical legend to this day.