Sir Paul McCartney has given his thoughts on music courses that focus on the Beatles.

The pop group are one of the biggest acts in the history of music and a number of university and college courses study their impact.

Bassist and vocalist McCartney was asked in a fan Q&A by a student on a Popular Music MA degree about his thoughts on those types of courses.

He said: "For me it’s ridiculous, and yet very flattering. Ridiculous because we never studied anything, we just loved our popular music: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc. And it wasn’t a case of ‘studying’ it.

"I think for us, we’d have felt it would have ruined it to study it. We wanted to make our own minds up just by listening to it. So our study was listening. But to be told - as I was years ago now - that The Beatles were in my kid’s history books? That was like ‘What?! Unbelievable, man!’ Can you imagine when we were at school, finding yourself in a history book?!

"So it’s very flattering, and I think it’s a kind of cool idea really, you know, like in LIPA [Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts]. So yeah, it’s very flattering. At the same time, I don’t think that by studying popular music you can become a great popular musician; it may be that you use it to teach other people about the history, that’s all valuable.

"But to think that you can go to a college and come out like Bob Dylan? Someone like Bob Dylan, you can’t make. It was an early decision when we were thinking of our policies for LIPA, we said: ‘We want to train people to be all rounders. Give them as much info as we can. But you can’t tell them how to become a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon, because you know, nobody knows how that happens’."

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Watch the Beatles perform live below: