Sir Paul McCartney has revealed how the Beatles classic Hey Jude almost got him into trouble.

While he had originally thought of calling it Hey Jules after John Lennon’s son Julian. he had always liked the name Jude. But he recalled in a Youtube video about some of his iconic songs posted this week, “I didn’t realise it meant Jewish.”

When the band put a flier for the song in the window of the fashion store they owned, “I got a furious phone call from a guy called Mr Leon who was Jewish”.

The irate caller went into the origins of the term Judenraus! in the Nazi era and threatened, “I’m going to send round my son to beat you up.”

The bemused Beatle finally managed to persuade him Jude had nothing to do with history and was “just a name in a song — it’s all cool”. Hey Jude got played and, happily, Sir Paul did not get beaten up.