THE FACT THAT MY MOTHER MARY DIED WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN is something I never got over. A song that portrays a very present, nurturing mother has got to be influenced by that terrible sense of loss. The question about how Lady Madonna manages ‘to feed the rest’ is particularly poignant to me, since you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to figure out that I myself was one of ‘the rest’. I must have felt left out. It’s really a tribute to the mother figure, a tribute to women.

My single favourite aspect of the song is the recurring phrase ‘See how they run’. It comes from the nursery rhyme ‘Three Blind Mice’, with that rather less-than-nurturing farmer’s wife who cuts off their tails with a carving knife. That reference lends a slightly dark aspect to the song. In any case, the word ‘run’ also refers to stockings. One of my abiding memories of growing up was that, in addition to the other rather more important problems women faced, they were always laddering their stockings – ‘Thursday night, your stockings needed mending’.

Mum, Mary McCartney

This repetition in ‘See how they run’ is one of the most powerful components in songwriting. The technical term for that repeated phrase is ‘refrain’. We’re having a little fun with that idea in another song from this same period, ‘Hey Jude’, with its exhortation ‘And anytime you feel the pain / Hey Jude, refrain’.

With The Beatles, we were always operating on the cusp between being conscious of how a ‘refrain’ contributed to a song and basically having no idea what we were doing. One of the things I always thought was the secret of The Beatles was that our music was self-taught. We were never consciously thinking of what we were doing. Anything we did came naturally. A breathtaking chord change wouldn’t happen because we knew how that chord related to another chord. We weren’t able to read music or write it down, so we just made it up. My dad was exactly the same. And there’s a certain joy that comes into your stuff if you didn’t mean it, if you didn’t try to make it happen and it happens of its own accord. There’s a certain magic about that. So much of what we did came from a deep sense of wonder rather than study. We didn’t really study music at all.