It has been a long and winding road, but academics may have finally solved the dispute over who wrote the melody for The Beatles’ song ‘In My Life.’

The track has always been attributed to John Lennon on the sleeve notes of The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul.

Yet Sir Paul McCartney has long claimed that he actually penned the melody, telling the music writer and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini in the 1970s: ‘Those were the words John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one.’

Now US and Canadian researchers have concluded that Sir Paul probably ‘misremembers’, because the song bears all the musical hallmarks of Lennon.

Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard University, and Jason Brown, Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University, created a computer model which broke down Lennon and McCartney songs into 149 different components to determine the musical fingerprints of each songwriter.