SIR Paul McCartney has revealed how he was so upset by the death of his first wife that he could not write or play music for two years, writes Maurice Chittenden.

He was composing a classical album for a choir and orchestra when Linda died of breast cancer in April 1998. The work, Ecce Cor Meum, Latin for Behold My Heart, is finally released tomorrow.

Speaking on a podcast made available this week exclusively to readers of The Sunday Times, McCartney, 64, says he eventually learnt how to “write my sadness out”.

“For a couple of years I couldn’t do anything, really. I was just grieving,” he says. “And when I eventually came back to it I started doing some particularly sad bits.

“There is a piece called Interlude. It still affects me. It is quite a sad thing. The chords are very sad and it is strange, really, how something with no words can affect you so deeply, can affect your emotions.”

The former Beatle, who is now putting the finishing touches to a new pop album, adds: “I gradually got back into it through that. I just sort of wrote my sadness out. I was able after a year or two to pick it up again and complete it.

“When I came round to thinking what do I want the words to say, I just wrote down a whole load of things that interested me, just about truth and love and honesty and kindness, just stuff that I thought was important in life.”

He does not mention the name of his second wife, Heather Mills McCartney, with whom he is locked in a divorce battle, either in the podcast or in an interview in the new music section of today’s Culture magazine.

When McCartney was invited to write the new work for the choir at Magdalen College, Oxford, he asked a scholar at the college to translate it into Latin.

“There were some words I loved but just couldn’t work in,” says the composer.

“Carminabundas [Latin for versifying] being one of them. Car and minibus in the same word. Fantastic. A new surreal vehicle.”

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