Discover the most scandalous stories of The Beatles that could be included in upcoming biopics featuring new actors as the iconic band members.

One stripped naked with his new lover for an explicit full-frontal photo he then slapped uncensored on the front cover of his latest album.

His songwriting partner was caught by his famous actress girlfriend in bed with another woman just around the corner from their legendary studios.

And their lead guitarist lost his virginity to applause from his pals in a dingy backroom behind a porn cinema – before years later having an affair with a bandmate’s wife.

Plenty perhaps, then, to feature for the makers of the four new Fab Four biopics promised by Oscar winner Sir Sam Mendes – as it was revealed just which actors have been cast to portray each Beatle.

In the first flush of Beatlemania, the ‘toppermost of the poppermost’ Liverpudlians were hailed as family-friendly moptops you could welcome home to your parents – before the Rolling Stones were deliberately marketed as their edgier rivals.

Yet as the Sixties wore on and John, Paul, George and Ringo set new standards in rock music and culture they also became increasingly unafraid to defy cosy stereotypes, provoking shocked headlines and bans by the BBC. 

Even the late Queen Elizabeth, who had awarded them MBEs in 1965, was said to have remarked two years later to their record label EMI’s boss Sir Joseph Lockwood: ‘The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?’

And John Lennon himself bridled at the clean-cut image presented at first – telling Rolling Stone magazine in 1970: ‘F***in’ big b*****ds, that’s what The Beatles were. You have to be a b*****d to make it, that’s a fact, and The Beatles are the biggest b*****ds on earth.’

The actors lined up to play The Beatles in four separate films singling in on one apiece and due for release in 2028 were last week revealed on stage at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas.

Gladiator II star Paul Mescal has been cast as Sir Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Sir Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.

Few further details have been released yet, prompting plenty of speculation about how the separate biopics might pan out.

The series has the official thumbs-up from Sir Paul and Sir Ringo, as well as the estates of their late bandmates Lennon and Harrison – but fans might be hoping that their rougher edges and racier antics are not glossed over.

The Beatles were certainly no angels – nor prudes – when honing their sound during pill-fuelled all-night performances in Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn district between 1960 and 1962.

George Harrison later recalled losing his virginity to a woman there as a teenager in one of their grotty backstage bedrooms behind a porn cinema, applauded by his bandmates John Lennon, Paul McCartney and then-drummer Pete Best.

He later recalled of his coming-of-age experience as a 17-year-old in the cramped room beside toilets at the Bambi-Kino: ‘We were in bunkbeds. They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers.

‘After I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.’

McCartney himself has been a little vaguer about his bandmate’s big moment: ‘I think that’s true.

‘The thing is, these stories, particularly Beatles stories, they get to be legendary, and I do have to check: Wait a minute.

‘I know we had one bed and two sets of bunks, and if one of the guys brought a girl back, they could just be in the bed with a blanket over them, and you wouldn’t really notice much except a little bit of movement.

‘I don’t know whether that was George losing his virginity – it might have been. I mean, I think in the end this was one of the strengths of the Beatles, this enforced closeness which I always liken to army buddies.

‘Because you’re all in the same barracks – we were always very close and on top of each other, which meant you could totally read each other.’

Sir Paul has also said: ‘That was the intimacy we had … I’d walked in on John and seen a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him.

‘It was perfectly normal. You’d go, “Oh, sorry”, and back out the room.’

It was also as a 17-year-old that Harrison was deported from Hamburg after authorities discovered he was too young to legally work there.

There have been suggestions made that officials were tipped off by a resentful nightclub owner Bruno Koschmider, at whose Kaiserkeller the band had been playing before moonlighting at a nearby rival called the Top Ten Club.

He terminated their Kaiserkeller contract, prompting McCartney and Best to move their belongings out of the Bambi-Kino digs and into an attic above the Top Ten – John Lennon and then-bass player Stuart Sutcliffe having already moved elsewhere.

Yet McCartney and Best instead ended up in a nearby police cell, spending the night in custody on suspicion of arson after another Koschmider complaint.

The pair had tried to illimunate their desolate room to gather their possessions and lit something they attached to the wall – many reports including McCartney’s account have suggested it was a condom, though rags or a wall tapestry have also been mentioned.

There was only a minor burn mark left on the damp wall, as the blaze extinguished itself – but Koschmider claimed they had tried to set fire to the attached cinema which he also owned.

Neither McCartney nor Best were prosecuted but they too were very shortly following Harrison on a journey back to Liverpool – with Lennon soon opting to return too.

They did go back and enjoy three more spells in Hamburg, where their audiences of drunken sailors, prostitutes and gangsters would often erupt in violence. 

The Beatles, urged by nightclub bosses to ‘Mak schau’ and compelled to perform into the early hours, kept themselves fuelled by a hefty intake of a stimulant drug named Preludin – which was originally marketed as an appetite suppressant.

McCartney later recalled how Lennon would down four or five to his own one at a time – and John would often be the rowdiest and most provocative performer, regularly taunting the locals about how they had lost the Second World War within relatively recent memory, referring to them as ‘Krauts’ and holding a comb under his nose.

The formidable bouncer at the Top Ten was a former boxer named Horst Fascher, who had previously served time behind bars for manslaughter after killing a man in a street fight.

Fascher got on well with the band, helping protect them from trouble-makers – but on one occasion was infuriated, when Lennon was due on stage, to find him in nearby toilet with a woman – before dousing them both with a bucket of cold water.

Lennon dutifully made his way to join the rest of the band – only for Fascher to become suspicious of an uproar and discover John on stage wearing only a pair of underpants and a toilet seat around his neck. 

Harrison later recalled their time in Hamburg as among the best places they had seen, adding: ‘The whole area was full of transvestites and prostitutes and gangsters, but I couldn’t say that they were the audience.

‘Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.’

And McCartney described the northern German coastal city as ‘a sort of blown-up Blackpool but with strip clubs instead of waxworks – thousands of strip clubs, bars and pick-up joints’.

He has said: ‘We were kids let off the leash. We were used to these little Liverpool girls, but by the time you got to Hamburg if you got a girlfriend there she’s likely to be a stripper.

‘For someone who’d not really had too much sex in their lives before, which none of us really had, to be suddenly involved in these hardcore striptease artists, who obviously knew a thing or two about sex, was quite an eye opener.’

But he has also reflected: ‘Hamburg was certainly a great childhood memory. But I think all things are enhanced by time. 

‘It was very exciting, though I think it felt better to me a little later in our career, once we’d started to get a bit of success with the records.’

McCartney was certainly a fan of the new opportunities opened up to the group by their burgeoning and then all-encompassing success worldwide especially after their first US tour in February 1964 – when they were greeted at JFK Airport in New York by frenetic crowds and 73million people tuned in to their debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

From their first stay in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, they had their pick of any women they wanted invited up to their rooms.

Beatles historian Kenneth Womack wrote in the book he published in 2023 about their long-serving roadie Mal Evans, Living The Beatles Legend, how Evans and fellow Fab Four fixer Neil Aspinall would also sleep with eager young enthusiasts.

The Beatles’ childhood friend and aide Tony Bramwell told in his 2006 book Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With The Beatles, written with Rosemary Kingsland, how such scenes were as prevalent across the UK as in the US. 

He said: ‘As if attacked by a virus that changed their moral standards, teenage girls wanted sex with The Beatles and they didn’t care how they got it.

‘When I tried to grab a live one, crawl through the windows or hide in wardrobes, they were sorted out by Mal and Neil Aspinall like M&Ms, to be sampled and tasted first.

‘Brian [Epstein, The Beatles’ manager] – who was puritanical where his proteges were concerned – would have had a fit had he only known, but he was kept totally in the dark.’

In more reminiscences, this time in 1991 on Australian TV, McCartney said of their US and world tours at the eye of the Beatlemania hurricane: ‘How wild? Um, on a scale of one to 10, about 11.

‘It was the beginning of the sexual revolution, whatever they call it. Girls suddenly were all on the Pill. So it was quite the time.

‘So it was as if Moses opened up all the water and sort of said: “Go on, lads. Have a good time.”‘

But he stopped short of ‘orgies’, he has insisted – saying: ‘There were sexual encounters of the celestial kind, and there were groupies.

‘The nearest it got – see, this is my experience, because I’m just not into orgies. I don’t want anyone else there, personally. It ruins it. Didn’t appeal to me, the idea.

‘There was once when we were in Vegas where the tour guy, a fixer, said, “You’re going to Vegas, guys – you want a hooker?” We were all, “Yeah!”

‘And I requested two, and I had them, and it was a wonderful experience. But that’s the closest I ever came to an orgy.’

He has also, however, been open about other shared experiences from before his rise to fame – telling GQ in 2019 of unusual masturbation activities alongside Lennon and other friends back in Liverpool as they were growing up.

McCartney told the magazine: ‘What it was was over at John’s house, and it was just a group of us.

‘And instead of just getting roaring drunk and partying – I don’t even know if we were staying over or anything – we were all just in these chairs, and the lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did.

‘We were just, “Brigitte Bardot!” – “Whoo!” And then everyone would thrash a bit more. I think it was John sort of said, ‘Winston Churchill!’

‘I think it was a one-off. Or maybe it was like a two-off. It wasn’t a big thing. But, you know, it was just the kind of thing you didn’t think much of. It was just a group. Yeah, it’s quite raunchy when you think about it.’

McCartney would go on to be an especially prolific womaniser in the mid-1960s, as the only Beatle to keep a main home in the capital – close to their cherished Abbey Road Studios in St John’s Wood, north-west London.

The other three had all moved out to palatial Surrey estates as the big money first began rolling in  – and also had wives, with Lennon having married Cynthia Powell in August 1962 before the weddings of Starr to hairdresser Maureen Cox in February 1965 and Harrison to model Pattie Boyd the following January.

McCartney did have a girlfriend, a star in her own right at that – the actress Jane Asher, who the band had met backstage at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1963.

The pair announced their engagement on Boxing Day 1967 yet by the middle of the following year the relationship was over – with many reports revealing how she had come back home earlier than he expected from a theatre spell in Bristol.

At that St John’s Wood home, she found McCartney in bed with New York scriptwriter Francie Schwartz, one of his favoured mistresses of the time and who had begun working at The Beatles’ Apple HQ.

Some of the young fans who would habitually gather outside McCartney’s home – offering him gifts and hoping for the occasional kind word – later described pressing the buzzer and trying to alert their favourite to Jane’s unexpectedly early arrival. 

Schwartz later wrote about their trysts in her 1972 memoir Body Count, including allegedly once having sex in the open on Primrose Hill in north London.

She said: ‘The relationship had begun on the “save me” lament, not on a rush of sexual flashes.

‘He hadn’t formally dumped Jane and so at first I was a secret. I stayed in the house for weeks, cleaning, reading, calling the dope dealer. I was to score for my old man. You’d think he could have taken care of it, but he didn’t.’

McCartney himself later matter-of-factly told his friend and official biographer Barry Miles: ‘I had a girlfriend, and I would go with other girls. It was a perfectly open relationship.’

And in the 1997 authorised biography penned by Miles, Many Years From Now, with co-operation and detailed quotes from McCartney throughout, the break-up with Jane was succinctly dealt with.

Miles wrote: ‘She and Paul had been together for five years, during which time they had both grown and changed dramatically.

‘In the end the relationship came to an abrupt halt. Jane came home unexpectedly from Bristol and found Paul in bed with someone else.

‘A frosty Margaret Asher [Jane’s mother, whose family had previously welcomed Paul into their Wimpole Street home] came over and took away her clothes, cooking pots and ornaments.’

Such antics were not mentioned in the band’s official biography published in 1968, written by Hunter Davies who was allowed substantial access.

Davies later wrote in the New Statesman magazine in 2012: ‘I didn’t mention groupies in the book or make any references to what happened in dressing rooms and hotel bedrooms in the UK and around the world. 

‘Should I have done? No one asked me at the time to omit such things. It was my decision. 

‘Three of the Beatles were married, happily as far as I could see, while Paul was engaged to Jane Asher. It seemed unfair to embarrass them by going into what had happened while they were touring.

‘Most people over the age of 25 in the 1960s were aware of what happened between rock stars and groupies.’

Lennon had complained in that 1970 Rolling Stone interview that the official versions were too sanitised, saying: ‘There was nothing about orgies and the s*** that happened on tour. The Beatles tours were like the Fellini film Satyricon.’

He would provide perhaps the most outrageously racy public moment in Beatles history, with the deliberately provocative cover of his and new love Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins album, released in November 1968.

The front showed a full frontal nude image of the couple taken at the Beatle’s home in Weybridge, Surrey, at a time when Lennon’s wife Cynthia was on holiday in Greece.

The back sleeve showed the couple naked from behind, with the pictures taken using a time delay shutter camera – and Lennon later claiming this was because they were ‘both a bit embarrassed when we peeled off’.

The band’s horrified record label EMI refused to distribute it – with the firm’s chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood reportedly commenting: ‘Why don’t you use Paul instead? He’s much better looking.’ It was ultimately released and sold in many stores within brown paper bags. 

John and Yoko went on to marry in Gibraltar in March 1969 before spending their honeymoon in Amsterdam staging the first of their ‘bed-ins’ campaigning for peace.

They appeared a constant presence together, with John not only evangelising on behalf of Yoko’s art and music but also justly defending her against sexist and especially racist taunts.

The couple moved to New York in 1971, where he had to fight a long battle against threatened deportation and for a US Green Card which he finally won in 1976.

But despite being so firmly entwined in public eyes, their marriage was said to be foundering through 1972 and 1973 – and ultimately Yoko ordered him out.

Among the humiliations he is said to have inflicted upon her was going into the next room at a Manhattan apartment party and loudly having sex with another woman – obviously audible to fellow guests including his wife.

In 1973 Yoko banished her husband from their home – and sent him off with May Pang, who had joined the pair as their personal assistant in 1971 aged 21.

Lennon’s wife made it clear they were to become a couple instead, at the start of what the singer would later dub his ‘Lost Weekend’ as he boozed it up in Los Angeles for a year and a half with the rowdy fellow likes of Ringo and Harry Nilsson.

At one point Lennon was thrown out of trendy LA club the Troubadour for drunkenly heckling comedy act the Smothers Brothers.

On another occasion he emerged from the toilets there with a sanitary towel attached to his forehead – and when he asked a passing waitress whether she knew who he was, the unimpressed employee retorted: ‘Sure. You’re some a**hole with a Kotex on his head.’

John and Yoko ultimately reunited backstage at Madison Square Garden in November 1974, after what McCartney has described as his own little help for his sometime friends.

Lennon that night performed a short set on-stage alongside Elton John, in which he dedicated one of the earliest Beatles songs I Saw Her Standing There to the old bandmate he described as ‘an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul’.

May Pang has told how she and Lennon remained close in the years after his reunion with Yoko, saying in 2023 in new documentary called The Lost Weekend: ”He’d secretly come over to see me. He would say, “You know, I still love you”.

‘He said things to me that were really very intimate, and you could sense there was something still. It was gnawing at him. It was not a finished situation.’

Lennon notably stepped back from music-making in the late Seventies, becoming a ‘house-husband’ after Yoko gave birth to their son Sean on his own birthday of October 9 1975.

But he was inspired to return in 1980 – partly by hearing McCartney’s new single Coming Up on the radio – and released new album Double Fantasy in November 1980, just a month before his murder by crazed former fan Mark Chapman on December 8. 

As part of the publicity rounds for the LP, John and Yoko were filmed stripping off and passionately embracing on a table in a video later shared to the accompaniment of his song Woman in the Yoko-produced 1988 film documentary Imagine: John Lennon.

Famed photographer Annie Leibowitz was hired by Rolling Stone to capture the pair for a special cover and expected them to strip off again – but this time only Lennon obliged, wrapping himself around a fully-clothed Yoko in a photo published on the front of the magazine following his death.

McCartney received some criticism for his terse response on camera when asked about Lennon’s death, having gone to the recording studio to work on some tracks as a distraction from his trauma.

When asked for a response by journalists, he remarked: ‘It’s a drag, isn’t it?’

But in 1982 he would record a tender acoustic tribute Here Today on his solo album Tug Of War which he these days performs at every concert, often brought to tears.

Another record was brought out honouring Lennon, George Harrison’s counter-intuitively jaunty-sounding All Those Years Ago – on which McCartney played.

The lyrics included: ‘You point the way to the truth when you say, all you need is love.’

Harrison, whose first youthful love-making had earned applause from John and co, would go on to be dubbed ‘The Quiet Beatle’ – yet hardly appeared to lack confidence coming forward when it came to the opposite sex, even or especially when married.

He and Pattie first met on the set of group’s first film A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, when she played one of various schoolgirls serenaded by The Beatles in an early train carriage scene.

After their marriage in 1966 they, like Paul and Jane, were among Swinging London’s most dazzling and fashionable couples – only to form two parts of one of rock music’s most famous love triangles.

Pattie, now 81, mused last week on X, formerly Twitter, on which she regularly shared fond memories and photos of George: ‘I wonder who will be cast to play me? That’s assuming that I get to feature in any of the movies.’

She famously was the inspiration for not one, nor even two, but three songs which have gone down as rock classics – Something, which first husband George wrote for The Beatles’ album Abbey Road, and second husband Eric Clapton’s Layla and Wonderful Tonight.

Harrison and Clapton remained friends from first socialising and touring together in the late 1960s to the ex-Beatle’s death aged 58 in November 2001.

This was despite their shared love for the same woman, with George and Pattie married between 1966 and 1977 while she and Clapton were wed from 1979 to 1989.

Harrison was frequently cheating on Pattie as their marriage struggled in the late 1960s, at a time when his friend Clapton was sending her letters of love – as his song Layla would put it: ‘Tried to give you consolation, when your old man had let you down.’

During one spell, Harrison set his sights on Pattie’s younger sister Paula while encouraging Clapton in favour of his wife – yet it was the former Cream guitarist who would initially date Paula, despite already having a girlfriend in aristocrat Alice Ormsby-Gore.

As recounted by Beatles historian Philip Norman in his 2023 book George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle and also in the Mail last month, the tangled relationships culminated in Clapton confessing to his friend at a party: ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.’

Norman wrote on the occasion of Clapton’s recent 80th birthday: ‘George’s weird macho response was to challenge Clapton to a guitar duel, with Pattie as the prize.

‘He tried to rig it in his favour by handing Clapton an inferior instrument and dosing him heavily with brandy while himself drinking only tea. But even under those handicaps, Slowhand was unbeatable.’

Harrison would himself offer a similar admission, this time to his old bandmate Ringo after suspicions – especially Pattie’s – mounted over his interest in the drummer’s wife Maureen in the early 1970s and her regular visits to the guitarist’s Surrey home.

On one occasion Pattie found Maureen lying on a mattress beside her husband’s bed – only for Harrison to insist: ‘Oh, she’s a bit tired. She’s having a rest.’

But George would soon go on to say not only to Starr but in front of both Pattie and Maureen over dinner around Christmas 1973: ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ 

Ringo is said to have responded after a prolonged silence: ‘Better you than someone we don’t know.’

He himself had been a negligent husband, frequently having an affairs while also beginning the descent into alcoholism that would dog him through the 1970s and 1980s.

He and Maureen divorced in 1975 and she tragically died of cancer aged just 48 in December 1994, with each of her hands reportedly held at the end by her first husband Ringo and her second Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe.

Starr remains happily married to his second wife, former ‘Bond Girl’ Barbara Bach, the pair having met on the set of the 1980 film Caveman – though both struggled with drink before finally resolving to go into rehab together in 1988. 

That was prompted by drinking binges and blackouts including one occasion of which he later said: ‘I came to one Friday afternoon, and was told by the staff that I had trashed the house so badly they thought there had been burglars, and I’d trashed Barbara so badly they thought she was dead.’

The couple contributed to a book about alcoholism edited by former Beatles press officer Derek Taylor and his wife Joan, in which Ringo and Barbara remembered: ‘We used to go on long plane journeys, rent huge villas, stock up the bars, hide and get deranged.’

The pair remain together and the trim and energetic 84-year-old, who was knighted in 2018, has only had far more minor brushes with controversies in recent years.

These included appearing to be dismissive of his old home city in 2008 while promoting a new album called Liverpool 8 – said to have spurred vandals to lop down the head of his tree figure in a topiary tribute to The Beatles.

He also that same year issued a widely-shared online video declaring he would no longer respond to letters requesting an autograph – sonorously delivering a twist on his favourite three-word phrase: ‘I’m warning you with peace and love.’

His fellow Fab Four knight Sir Paul is also thriving, continuing to pack venues and occasionally welcoming Ringo on stage as he did at London’s O2 last year and 2018. 

After losing his beloved wife Linda to breast cancer, aged 56, in April 1998, Paul married former model and campaigner Heather Mills in 2002 before an acrimonious divorce six years later – which saw Heather, aggrieved at the settlement announced, pour a jug of water in court over the head of his lawyer Fiona Shackleton. 

Since 2011, Sir Paul has been married to US lawyer Nancy Shevell – and at concerts he will invariably dedicate Wings ballad My Love to Linda and 2012 song My Valentine to his third wife.

The venerated rock veteran McCartney does still seem charged with certain passions, judging by some of his more recent songs as he continues to record.

The BBC banned Wings single Hi Hi Hi in 1972 for such lyrics as were deemed to ‘I want you to lie on the bed, get you ready for my body gun’ – though he insisted he was actually singing ‘polygon’.

Four and a half decades later, the then-76-year-old led the release of his 2018 album Egypt Station with singles including one about a nightclub pick-up, called Come On To Me, and another named Fuh You – the title preceded by the words ‘I just wanna’.

Neither will be played so often as the feverish classics he and his fellow Beatles gave to the world back in the 1960s – more often than not penned by one or other or both of that dominant John and Paul duo with a shared desire for Brigitte Bardot.

Lennon’s I Want You (She’s So Heavy) on 1969 LP Abbey Road is minimal and repetitive in his sparse while erotically-charged lyrics.

To an ominously rising background of chiming guitar, Lennon repeats the title phrases in an ode to new wife Yoko – who by that point was a regular presence at Beatles recording sessions, to the occasional chagrin of his bandmates.

Another tribute to her around the same time was Don’t Let Me Down, which would be the B-side to February 1969 single Get Back and was in the group’s final live performance on a rooftop in Savile Row, central London.

Lennon’s delivery of the track would include the words, ‘And from the first time that she really done me – ooh, she done me, she done me good’.

Also on Abbey Road, forming part of the second side’s acclaimed medley, are brief Lennon curios such as Mean Mr Mustard – a character described as ‘such a dirty old man’.

This is followed a ditty about Mean Mr Mustard’s sister Polythene Pam, described as dressing in ‘jackboots and kilt’, while being ‘killer-diller when she’s dressed to the hilt’ and ‘the kind of a girl that makes the News of the World’ – with Lennon adding in an exaggerated Liverpudlian accent: ‘Yes, you could say she was attractively built.’

Lennon recalled in 1980 how that track was inspired by ‘a little event with a woman in Jersey’ and a man he met there during a Beatles tour.

He recalled: ‘I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did.

‘She didn’t wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about.’

Lennon could himself be dismissive of some of McCartney’s ‘story songs’ songs, deriding them as ‘granny music’ – with particular scorn for Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Yet he was not only keen on McCartney’s 1968 White Album back-to-basics offering Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, but also disappointed by the fact his bandmate along with Ringo recorded it without him.

The bluesy piano track which lasts just 102 seconds features merely the repeated phrases ‘Why don’t we do it in the road’ and ‘No one will be watching us’.

McCartney later told of being prompted by the sight of two monkeys having sex in the street during The Beatles’ time in India – recalling: ‘A male just hopped on the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular.

‘And I thought, that’s how simple the act of procreation is – we have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t.’

If McCartney and his fellow Beatles themselves felt any ‘horrendous problems’ that way, they took keen and wide-ranging efforts to overcome such concerns.

As the band that Mick Jagger once dubbed ‘the four-headed monster’, now set for four new film portrayals, almost put it themselves: All you need is … lust?