THIS IS SUPPOSEDLY LIZA MINELLI’S FAVOURITE OF MY songs. I expected her to go for something a bit more ballady. But she really likes this one. It dates from the time, the end of the 1960s, when Linda and I were first living together. In much the way that Linda wanted to flee from New York society – the constrictions of Park Avenue and Scarsdale – I wanted to flee from what The Beatles had become. I was hoping to escape, she was hoping to escape. So we had this feeling that we had each pulled the other ‘out of time’.

Though the song was written immediately after The Beatles’ breakup, it was somehow included under the Lennon-McCartney rubric, where it doesn’t belong. It was one of my first solo songs, but because of the deal, it got caught in the publishing net. That was very annoying.

Actually, Linda and I were probably already married, because I can now visualise sitting at the lovely black Steinway piano that we got after our wedding. I was playing on it one day, and this song came to me – the central idea being that there’s so often a split between the inner and outer. For example, I was in the gym this morning, looking at the girls on the TV, and I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I really shouldn’t be doing this, because I’m married. If people knew what was in my head, I’d be so busted.’ You can think anything, so you do think anything, and then your conscience has to check it and control it.

Linda. Antigua, 1969. Her photograph of the cherries to her right is later used for the cover of McCartney, 1970

I use this as an extreme example of the kind of intense, interior conversation that’s going on in the song. The elements of fear and loneliness are very much to the fore. ‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ is itself a troubling idea.

While it’s true that Linda is the person I’m addressing, it’s also true that I’m dealing in fiction. Starting with myself, the characters who appear in my songs are imagined. I can’t state that often enough. I know that in some quarters it’s felt you can’t write about gay people unless you’re gay, or about Asian Americans unless you’re an Asian American.

I think that’s silly. That’s like saying that because James Joyce wasn’t Jewish, he shouldn’t have written about Leopold Bloom. The whole point about being a writer is that you should be free to write about anything. In fact, it’s part of your job to go to the places where others might not feel comfortable.

In any event, this song isn’t the conventional way of presenting a relationship, or of some of the contradictions that can arise from being in love. That’s maybe why Liza Minnelli likes it so much. It shows the fragility of love.