LONDON, Feb 22: Paul McCartney’s manuscript of the Beatles’ hit song “Hey Jude” goes up for auction in London in April when it is expected to fetch 80,000 pounds ($114,000).

The incomplete manuscript for the song, the Fab Four’s best selling single according to McCartney’s spokesman Geoff Baker, was found by a Beatles fan on a market stall in 1971, just three years after it was recorded.

The single sheet of unlined paper carries 19 lines of script in blue ink in McCartney’s neat handwriting.

But, as with the only previous sample of the handwritten lyrics to come to auction, the last lines are missing.

Auction house Christie’s, which will put the document up for sale on April 30, speculated the reason for the missing verse was McCartney’s difficulty in rounding off the song.

“To our knowledge a complete manuscript of the song has never come to auction,” Christie’s spokeswoman Jill Potterton told Reuters.

McCartney said he began to compose the song to console the infant Julian Lennon over the breakup of his father John’s marriage to Cynthia Lennon as Yoko Ono came on the scene.

“I thought as a friend of the family I would motor out to Weybridge and tell them that everything was all right,” McCartney said in notes in the auction catalogue.

“I started singing ‘Hey Jools, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better...’. It was optimistic, a hopeful message for Julian.

Come on man, your parents got divorced. I know you’re not happy, but you’ll be OK,” he wrote.

McCartney said he later changed the lyric to “Hey Jude” after a character in the hit musical Oklahoma! as it gave the song a more Country and Western feel.

John Lennon, who said he believed the song was a subconscious message from Paul encouraging him to continue with Ono, described it as one of McCartney’s masterpieces.

The song, released in August 1968, spent two weeks as number one in the British Record Retailer charts and nine weeks in the top spot in the US Billboard charts.

It was more than twice the length of normal singles at over seven minutes and included a 36-piece orchestra.

Julian Lennon, who said he only found out nearly 20 years later that the song was about him, said he still gets goosepimples whenever he hears it.

“It’s very strange to think that someone has written a song about you. It still touches me,” he said on the catalogue notes.—AFP