REVOLVER:YOU REALLY have to wonder about Paul McCartney's timing in re-releasing Band on the Runand cropping up all over the place to promote it. October was supposed to be John Lennon month, what with all the reissues, commemorations and benefit concerts. Even a dispassionate look at this week's affairs can only suggest that one of the most competitive musical relationships still has a bit of life to it. Could McCartney still be resentful of Lennon's deification and John's media-anointed position as the "arty Beatle"?

Last Tuesday night McCartney cropped up on Later With Jools Hollandto perform two songs from the rebooted Band on the Run, and the day before he was also in front of the cameras – this time picking up a Classic Album award at the Q Magazine Awards show for the same album.

That awards show was distinguished by the criminal placing of Kasabian as “the best act in the world today”.

McCartney has always felt slighted that his side of the story has never really been told. There is so much received wisdom out there about The Beatles – Paul as the lovable, poppy one and John as the troubled artist one – and it still rankles with the man.

He has always felt that Lennon's Beatles songs such as Across the Universehave been taken as proof that John was the real creative dynamo in the group and that he, despite the likes of Eleanor Rigby, is seen as the perma-smiling, less naturally talented counterbalance.

Even when the band broke up, Lennon had the radical political- chic image going and was making music of profound introspective value, whereas McCartney was seen as wallowing in “I Love Linda”-type pop ballads.

Perhaps out of respect for Lennon or a fear of appearing mean-minded and churlish, he's never really contradicted the official story, but in Barry Miles's 1997 biography Many Years From Now– which McCartney collaborated on – he did make the pointed remark that "yes, John was great, but all I'm saying is that I have my side of the story as well which sometimes gets ignored. I don't want to be seen to be doing my own kind of revisionism."

The facts are that McCartney was the "avant-garde" Beatle. It was he who first turned the band on to "fields of consciousness- expanding drugs" and on to progressive recording techniques (from Revolveronwards).

There's a bit in Many Years From Nowwhere McCartney talks about how shocked Lennon was when McCartney lit up a hash pipe in a nightclub. Good friends with Bertrand Russell and Harold Pinter, Paul was a genuinely innovative and experimental figure within The Beatles, and it is a nonsense to suggest that he was the pop foil to Lennon.

His solo career has been unfairly judged – pilloried for The Frog Chorus(a song written for children) and other transgressions – people are quick to forget the great solo albums such as McCartney (which contains one of his best ever songs, Maybe I'm Amazed) and Red Rose Speedway; his impressive classical work ( Standing Stone) and his ongoing ambient work with The Fireman.

Band on the Run, though, remains his best-known and best-selling solo work. While in New York, Lennon was descending into musical psychobabble, McCartney produced an album that was reviewed on its release by Jon Landau (now Bruce Springsteen's manager) as "the finest record yet released by any of the four musicians who were once called The Beatles".

As more of his generally underrated solo work gets rolled out over the coming months, there should be an acceptance of his true and lasting worth. For every Mull of Kintyrethere was a Maybe I'm Amazed, for every Pipes of Peace(which really is brutal) there was a Flowers in the Dirt. And close to 50 years since he first picked up a Framus Zenith acoustic guitar, he can still produce work of outstanding quality such as 2008's Sing the Changes. Let the revisionism begin . . .

• Band on the Runis re-released as a special edition today