Background to the Study: The Systems Approach to Creativity

In Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond, we place Paul McCartney’s story and his creativity against a broad cultural domain and social field. We look at the interactions between the domain and field, his long-term musical activity, his songwriting, record production and live performance, against the evidence-based research about creativity. Moving beyond Western and Romantic beliefs of creativity, we draw on rational explanations of creativity to synthesise a sociological approach, combined with a psychological one, to illustrate a system of creativity in action. It is this system that results in a comprehensive account of creative practice. There are a limited set of scholarly works focused on the broader area of creativity and there are even fewer of these accounting for both creativity and The Beatles. Scholarly material on Paul McCartney is decidedly limited too so we draw from a varied range of biographies, magazine interviews, recordings of his work, transcribed sheet music of those songs, as well as film and TV interviews, performances and documentaries that show McCartney at work in the studio, and on tour, to provide the background and point of departure for the following chapters in this book on Paul McCartney and his creative practice.