Paul McCartney is given a trumpet for his 14th birthday

Keen for his son to follow his interest in music, Jim McCartney bought his son Paul a trumpet for his 14th birthday.

My dad bought me a trumpet for my birthday, at Rushworth & Draper’s (the other music store in town), and I loved it. There was a big hero-thing at the time. There had been Harry James – The Man With The Golden Trumpet – and now, in the Fifties, it was Eddie Calvert, a big British star who played ‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White’ – all those gimmicky trumpet records. There were a lot of them around back then, so we all wanted to be trumpeters.

I persevered with the trumpet for a while. I learnt ‘The Saints’, which I can still play in C. I learnt my C scale, and a couple of things. Then I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to sing with this thing stuck in my mouth, so I asked my dad if he’d mind if I swapped it for a guitar, which also fascinated me. He didn’t, and I traded my trumpet in for an acoustic guitar, a Zenith, which I still have.