Credit: Dangerous Minds / YouTube Stills

Without knowing the full provenance of this footage featuring golden couple Linda and Paul McCartney larking about in front of a camera, it’s a wee bit difficult to know if it is outtakes from a music promo or indeed, as claimed by the man who transferred and uploaded it to You Tube, Larry Jamieson, a “lost” home movie made by the McCartneys while holidaying in New Zealand sometime during 1997.

Jamieson said: “This is a damaged Super 8 film of Paul and Linda having some fun making a home movie. I restored what was left of this film many years ago and forgot about it. It is overexposed and out of focus in parts, but it is a personal treasure”.

But the clip’s provenance doesn’t really matter, as what we have here is the Mozart of pop music: Paul and photographer, activist, and musician Linda McCartney making a sweet little film that is all the more moving because we know how this particular story ends.

You don’t need to know the full story to feel what’s going on here. It’s grainy, washed out, shaky – like every Super 8 home movie your parents ever made. But instead of your mum and dad mucking about on holiday, it’s the great Paul and Linda McCartney. He’s playing to the camera, as always, pulling silly faces, hamming it up like he’s still got an audience of screaming teenagers just offscreen. Linda’s close behind him, smiling, quietly amused, letting him have his moment but fully present.

What’s hard to ignore, of course, is the subtext. Linda’s hair is cropped close, a quiet but unmistakable sign that this isn’t just another holiday film. The cancer was back. They both knew it. But there’s not a trace of that weight here. No grand sadness, no heavy-handed reflection. Just the two of them, messing around, as if to say: not yet. There’s still time to laugh. For all of Paul’s worldwide fame, this little scrappy home movie feels more intimate than any official Beatles documentary ever could.

And that’s what makes it hit you right in the gut. This isn’t “rock history”. This is just a married couple who genuinely liked being around each other, captured in a few stolen minutes of ordinary joy. No legend, no narrative. Just Paul and Linda, exactly as they were. That’s the part we rarely get to see.

Linda McCartney’s usual long, blonde, flowing locks have been cropped short as she was then undergoing treatment for breast cancer, which had spread to her liver. Sadly, McCartney died in Tucson on April 17th, 1998. As a grieving Macca suggested at the time, perhaps the best way to remember Linda is to donate to a breast cancer charity – one that doesn’t support animal testing – or better still, “go veggie.”

See the clip below.