Do we like Paul McCartney?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of speaking up on climate, animals and artists' rights, no harmful words found, but little on LGBTQ+ issues in what we could open.
The short version of the backstory is Liverpool. His new album is a trip back to working-class Speke, with a tribute to his mum and memories from before the fame, and NME's reviewer says it doesn't quite deliver the deep, revealing stuff it promises. It's a nostalgic record from a bloke who has been on the world stage for over sixty years.
On the harm check, we went looking and came up fairly empty, which is the good news. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, no conspiracy-theory slide and no culture-war grifting in what we could read. His most recent LGBTQ-adjacent headline is a 2026 interview about John Lennon in which he recalled being sceptical when Yoko Ono suggested Lennon might have been gay, which is a story about an old friend rather than a position on anyone's rights.
He also put his name to the artists' side of the AI fight. Last November he contributed a near-silent recording of an empty studio to the Is This What We Want? protest album, which opposes UK moves to let AI train on copyrighted music without a licence. He said we have to be careful about AI's risks to emerging musicians.
The gaps are worth admitting. We couldn't open a source on his past court cases, including his 2008 divorce, so nothing from that era is in the file. We also found little from him on trans rights or the Gaza war. Based on what we could read, he is a good bet, and a pointer on trans rights from him wouldn't hurt.