AT THE risk of appearing heartless, I live in hope that the trauma Paul McCartney has been through lately may inspire him to turn back the years and produce a classic divorce album writes Frank McNally.
Dylan did it, after all. Springsteen too. Maybe it's too much to expect that a Blood on the Trackswill emerge from the McCartney-Mills saga, the climax of which was a jug of water on the defence lawyer. But I'd settle for something even half as good. As a starting point, perhaps Sir Paul could write a darker, pain-filled version of one of his old Beatles hits, entitled: "When I'm 65".
On the other hand, it's possible that the divorce settlement was just too much of a victory to benefit him artistically. He has escaped the marriage's train-crash with his public image intact (at least by comparison with his ex-wife's), not to mention his fortune. So he may, paradoxically, be happier now than he has been for some time.
This could be very bad news for music fans. A reprise of his 1980s hit, We All Stand Together- complete with the Frog Chorus - might well be in the offing. Indeed, if that song too were slightly re-written (perhaps as "We All Can't Stand Heather"), it would probably give him another Christmas No 1.
The link between domestic happiness and the death of creativity is no doubt overstated. But if it is a myth, the Beatles did more than any other band in pop history to perpetuate it. Looking back on a chronology of the group's career, the marriages of John and Paul - occurring within eight days of each other in 1969 - now have the ominous ring of other events from that era, such as the crushing of the Prague Spring, or the fall of Saigon.
True to form, the messy break-up of the great songwriting partnership inspired a few final high points. Once they were happily married to other people, however, the music went sharply downhill. Maybe it wasn't all bad. But listening to many of the Fab Two's post-Beatles records, one had the uncomfortable sensation of intruding on personal bliss.
Around the same time Lennon and McCartney were being diagnosed with terminal happiness, Bob Dylan was copper-fastening the perceived connection between suffering and high-quality songwriting. Never had so many music fans been so selfishly grateful for other people's pain.
Ending his decade-long decline, Dylan's divorce inspired a short golden era spanning the brilliant Blood on the Tracks, the very good Desire, and the more-than-decent Street Legal. By then, time had healed his wounds and he was about to find religion, leading to another artistic slump. But his misery had been good while it lasted.
The idea that turbulent lives are a requisite for creativity extends well beyond music. From Van Gogh to Dostoevsky, it covers most art forms, with the possible exception of clock-making (see below). It also extends beyond individuals and groups, to embrace whole countries.
Summing up the philosophy in The Third Man, Orson Welles as Harry Lime cast 15th-century Italy as a national version of the Beatles, with Switzerland - past and present - as Wings: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Even if the creative power of suffering is not a myth, of course, it may be too late in Paul McCartney's career for a messy divorce to save him. Besides, there is also the fact that his first wife remained the real love of his life, even during that short period of calm after he re-tied the knot in Castle Leslie.
Yes, his 2007 album, Memory Almost Full, included a love song dedicated to Heather. But fans with too much time on their hands quickly pointed out that Memory Almost Fullwas an anagram of the phrase "For My Soul-Mate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney, in case you didn't know). And although the song-writer denied this was deliberate, insisting the title was inspired by a message on his mobile phone, he was clearly not unhappy about the coincidence.
It is one of the misfortunes of the McCartney-Mills debacle, arguably, that he is the singer-songwriter, not she. Ms Mills is in the ideal creative place right now: hurt, angry, wanting to spill her guts out; while at the same she is insulated - by €31 million - from any pressure to produce a commercial record.
You can imagine her writing something like Dylan's Idiot Wind, with its ranting intro: "Someone's got it in for me/ They're planting stories in the press". It's slightly harder to envisage her running through the rest of BOTT's emotional gamut - such as the forgiving If You See Her, Say Helloor the jauntily wistful Buckets of Rain.
But with so much turbulence in her life, all she would have needed was a good voice and some songwriting talent. In which case, yet another wedding album - with its glossy smiles and perfect hair-dos - would now be undergoing transformation into an album of a different kind, for the greater glory of music.