For years Paul McCartney was the “good” Beatle, the lovable moptop who never took to exotic drugs with quite the same enthusiasm as his bandmates.

But he admits for the first time today that he once took a hallucinogenic drug so potent that he was “immediately nailed to the sofa — and I saw God, this amazingly huge towering thing, and I was humbled”.

McCartney, 76, says he tends to “cherry-pick” his beliefs from different religions but adds: “I do think there is something higher.”

Paul McCartney, centre in black trousers, on a visit to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in northern India in 1968 HULTON ARCHIVE

He cites an occasion when he took a drug known as DMT (dimethyltryptamine), which became popular in the 1960s as a faster-working alternative to better-known hallucinogenics such as LSD or magic mushrooms.

McCartney was with a small group of people,