Paul McCartney

Since binning the hair dye and meeting Nancy Shevel, he is thriving and deserves to be celebrated.

Yes, Macca may be the cheesiest superstar, with a voice that is not what it once was, but he is not just surviving. McCartney has achieved the most difficult of all tricks in modern culture: he has become relevant again, despite decades of being dismissed as a “saddo”. He has made it “cool” to be 80. That period was emblematic of the “relevance” problem of being a middle-aged white man in contemporary culture – with a notable exception.

'He can do it all,' Bob Dylan said of the former Beatle who has been writing good-to-great songs since 1956.

He closed, as always, with The End, his simple valediction to the Beatles, Lennon’s favourite McCartney lyric, and the purest expression of his worldview: “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Rock stars are accustomed to receiving love: McCartney is just as good at giving it back. Standards such as Let It Be and Yesterday are almost too famous to appreciate as entities that a young man sat down and wrote rather than plucking out of the ether. Tom Doyle’s biography Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s makes a strong case for McCartney as a risk-taking adventurer whose efforts to reinvent himself were far from cosy. “It was going to be: John was the one.” He has another daughter, Beatrice, from his six-year marriage to Heather Mills and married American businesswoman Nancy Shevell in 2011. The Beatles became a global advertisement for youth and friendship – Paul and John wrote many of those early hits knee to knee, eyeball to eyeball – and their split was a generational trauma. His reputation has also benefited from a cultural swing away from troubled rock’n’roll mavericks and towards artists who manage to combine brilliance with decency. “He used to be the one to get things moving,” Starr said after the band’s break-up in 1970. He recently released a quasi-memoir, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and embarked on yet another stadium tour. He has said that he considers retiring a prelude to expiring. “I understood that now there was going to be revisionism,” he told Esquire in 2015. John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are at best semi-detached but McCartney is grafting away, writing from scratch songs good enough to make them believe in the band again.

Paul McCartney turned 80 on Saturday and a week later becomes the oldest headliner to play at the Glastonbury Festival.

SIR Paul McCartney has promised fans a pure gold set when he becomes Glastonbury's oldest solo headliner.

He wrote: “Love to dads everywhere.” Sir Paul has been finalising his set – drawing on the Beatles, Wings and his solo hits. He tops the bill on Saturday – his first return to the Pyramid Stage since 2004.