“That’s the Casino—Paul bought it while they were recording Revolver,” John continues, taking the next one off the rack with the air of a sommelier bringing out impossibly precious vintages from the cellar. “He played the solo to ‘Taxman’ on that. And wrote ‘Paperback Writer’ on it. That ukelele’s from George. That Les Paul is from Linda—that’s probably around £400,000. And this—is the Hofner bass.”
We both fall momentarily silent as we look at it. This is one that looks like a gum-chewing, back-combing violin—the one that Paul got for the 1963 Royal Variety: “Rattle your jewellery,” and neat bows to the Queen. The bass that started off making mono rock’n’pop’n’roll, and ended up on the roof at Apple. The McCartney Hofner bass.
“That is irreplaceable,” John says, needlessly. “There was only one other like it and it was stolen to order—it’ll be sitting in a private collection somewhere. It would never have been stolen on my watch,” John says, with the quiet certainty of a man who would leave any potential thief crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his severed legs under a chair. “I sleep with the Hofner in my bedroom. I put it in the wardrobe. I carry that, personally, with me everywhere.”
“Paul uses them because they’re the best,” John says, simply. “He wants that sound on stage. He’s not precious about them. He likes to throw them at me, headstock first, like an arrow. I’ve never dropped one yet.” He pauses. “Yet.”
I touch the Hofner bass with my forefinger. I imagine it left, carelessly, on the floor of Abbey Road as Paul and John sit next to it—smoking ciggies over it, scribbling the lyrics on a sheet of notebook paper. That’s when I start crying.
In a way, I’m not really surprised I’m crying. As a godless hippy, The Beatles are the grid by which I understand the universe. When I was ten and I heard my nanna had died, I ate a whole Soreen malt loaf, in misery, and then vomited it out of the landing window, on the shed roof, while singing “Yesterday” in a mournful manner. Paul’s words were the only thing I could turn to in that moment of childish sorrow.
In the next half hour, I could now, finally, be in a position where I could tell Paul McCartney this fact.
I must not tell Paul McCartney this fact.
I palm the tears off my face with my sleeve.
“He’s coming. Stage left.”
The radios crackle into action. A couple of phones beep. The attention of the entire arena is pulled to the access entrance, stage left, where a huge pair of double doors are opened up, and fog swirls up the ramp.
As this is lit up gold by car headlights, a half-joyful, half-mournful cry of “PAUL! PAUL!” comes from the serried Diplodoci outside. A car comes up the ramp, security opens the doors, and, there, now, here: McCartney emerges. McCartney. Straight-backed, swagged in a beautiful, long, mid-blue coat.
He looks like a straight line—a straight line that always moves in a straight line, unimpeded in his intended trajectory for decades. He walks into the arena. He greets his crew. He comes to me.
“What’s your name?” he asks me. I tell him.
“I’m Paul,” he says. He tells it like a joke. The idea of no one knowing who he is is absurd. Paul hasn’t needed to give the actual information “I am Paul” since 1963.
“Being backstage at a McCartney gig is amazing,” Stuart Bell, his PR, had been saying, earlier. “Because you’ll find, say, Bill Clinton sitting in the corridor. Waiting! Waiting for Paul. They’ll all wait for Paul.”
Taking his coat off as he walks, McCartney walks straight onstage, where the band is waiting. Handed his guitar, he goes straight into soundchecking Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t.”
For the next half hour, he plays to an audience of thirty Italian competition winners with a set that most people would pull out to headline a festival. “Something.” “Penny Lane.” “Things We Said Today.”
Halfway through “Penny Lane” I think about how genuinely upset the world will be when Paul dies, and start crying again. We all want to believe in something we can regard with the awe and trust of a child. A Beatle is a man-made thing you can regard with the same astonishment you would the Moon.
“Oh, Paul!” I think, mournfully, as a perfectly hale and hearty McCartney bounds offstage, bidding the Italian competition winners “Ciao!” with a cheery wave, and exuding the energy of a man in his late-twenties. “Paul! I will vigil hard for you when you die.”
And, so, to Paul’s dressing room. Here is his wardrobe, including six handmade, collarless Nehru jackets—the classic Beatle-suit—and six pairs of jet black, handmade Beatle boots. A brand new pair of Giorgio Armani socks sit next to them. A Beatle does not go on stage in pre-used socks. This is what we have learned today.
The room is in no way lavish—the walls are swagged with a few bright, Indian throws, a Diptyque Oyedo candle burns on the coffee-table. Four bamboo trees, in pots, add what I’m sure interior designers refer to as “room veg.” A Pilates mat and ball sit under the gigantic TV, which is showing the Grand Prix. And that’s it. The general vibe is “London middle-class comfort.” We’re basically in Islington.
“Hello!” Paul says, shaking my hand, and ushering us onto the sofa. He eats handfuls of chocolate-covered raisins, and occasionally glances up at the Grand Prix—“Who’s winning?”—as I settle in to ask him the main thing that puzzles me. After playing over 3,000 gigs in your life (2,523 with the Beatles, 140 with Wings, 325 solo): What’s still in this for you, Paul McCartney?
“I like . . . displaying the stuff,” McCartney says, eating another chocolate-covered raisin. “I want to give people a good night out. I heard this story about Bob Dylan once—one of the guys in his band told me they were in the dressing room, going, ‘That version of “Tambourine Man”—we’re doing great, Bob!’ and Bob said, ‘Right, we’re changing it tomorrow night.’ Well I can see that, and that’s cool, but I’m not like that.
“If I go to see Prince—I mean, I love his guitar playing, but I want him to play ‘Purple Rain.’ I’m probably going to be disappointed if he doesn’t do it. If I went to see the Stones, I’d want them to do ‘Ruby Tuesday,’ ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Satisfaction.’ So I’m basically talking hits. Why are hits hits? It’s because we like them. They’re the best ones.”
McCartney explains that his soundchecks—attended only by competition winners—are where “I get to play the more obscure stuff; jam a bit. But I try to think about how I’d feel if I’d paid to see me jamming away. I think I’d think, ‘You miserable sod,’ and wouldn’t want to see me again.”
Paul then goes onto tell three stories that suggest—in marked contrast to the disconcerting, alpha, tribal elder of Earth vibe he emits—that he is still insecure, after all these years.
The first about how he only announces the first two dates of any tour, “to see how they sell,” so that—when they sell out in six minutes, as happened with this week’s 02 gig—he can sigh and say, “Well, people do still want to see me, after all.” He pauses, then adds, in the interest of balance, “Although some of those would be to touts [scalpers], obviously.”
The second is how he’s only recently started playing a lot of lead guitar, “Because the first time we ever played—pre-Beatles—I totally screwed up on the first night. The Co-op Reform, Liverpool Broadway,” he clarifies. “Above a shop. I totally blew it—the nerves got the better of me. So I never played lead guitar again.”
“It’s taken you this long to get your nerve back?” I ask, incredulously.
“Yeah,” he replies. “I mean, I’m not really nervous now, but it was a big thing: when the Beatles did Wembley for the first time, I remember sitting on the Town Hall steps feeling physically sick. I thought, ‘I’ve got to give this up.’ ”
He then goes to talk about how even Paul McCartney gets the occasional “tough gig.”
“Occasionally there will be a corporate gig you have to play. W
e did a corporate gig for Lexus, and we thought, ‘Oh my god, they’re just standing there. They’re so reserved.’ So I turned to everyone and said, ‘Hold your nerve! It’s okay! Don’t worry! We’re good!’ And we’ve learned to hold our nerve for the first few numbers because we get them. We always get them in the end. They always come back.”
People need to go to the toilet, I say. They might have just been going to the toilet. Paul looks horrified.
“My recurring nightmare is that people are leaving. It always has been. I still dream I’m with the Beatles, and we’re going [sings]: ‘If there’s anything that you want,’ it’s going great—and then people start getting up and leaving. And I turn to the others, and go, ‘Oh God! “Long Tall Sally”! I always call out that one, in my dreams. ‘Long Tall Sally’—that’ll get them back.”
Having established that Paul is still quite a nervous performer, I decide that this is the time to give him some friendly advice for his forthcoming UK dates. He’s recently added “The Word” and “Give Peace a Chance” to his setlist, but there is still a glaring omission in a two-hour show that takes in “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Blackbird,” “A Day In The Life,” “Let It Be,” “Live And Let Die,” “Jet,” “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” “Day Tripper,” “Get Back,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane,” “Yesterday,” “Helter Skelter” and “Golden Slumbers.”
“Paul,” I say. “Do you know what I think people would go apeshit for now? The Frog Chorus. ‘We All Stand Together’ by the Frog Chorus.”
He looks at me suspiciously.
“Seriously,” I say. “There is a whole generation that will have a massive Proustian rush when they hear it.”
“Oh my God,” McCartney says, looking thoughtful. “Wow. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Go frog! Go frog!” I encourage him. “Imagine when everyone starts singing ‘Boom boom boom/Biya!’ ”
I am singing the Frog Chorus’s “We All Stand Together” at Paul McCartney, in case he has forgotten it.
“You’ve planted a very dangerous idea there,” he says, still looking unsure as to how serious I am. But I am in deadly earnest.
From the Frog Chorus we move on to McCartney’s recent wedding, to businesswoman Nancy Shevell. The newspapers widely reported that McCartney had played at the wedding-reception at his house—“I didn’t”—and that neighbors had complained to the police about the noise.
“Well our immediate neighbors were at the party,” McCartney says, “and they loved it. But we did go on until 3 AM; it was Mark Ronson DJing loud rock ’n’ roll music, and, if I’d been someone further down the street, I probably would have complained. Three in the morning? I would have been Aggrieved of Ealing.”
I’ve only got three minutes left with McCartney, from my allotted twenty—I wasted five minutes trying to get his position on the current economic situtation (“When the banks go bust, and we bail them out—okay, I can see that. But here’s the bit I feel is missing—they didn’t pay us back. I think everyone is like, ‘Wait a minute—did I miss something?’ I am with all those people [protestors] in that respect. Pay it back.”) and whether the rumors of a forthcoming McCartney autobiography, or autobiographical documentary, are true (“Britney Spears has written hers aged, what, three? I’ve had Hewlett Packard digitize and index my entire collection of film and photographs, so I can find anything in seconds. Maybe I should, before I forget.”)
“The other big news story of the year has been hacking,” I remind him. “You were hacked?”
“Yes,” McCartney says, looking serious. “There would be stories about how I was going on holiday to the Bahamas, or whatever—and I would know I hadn’t told anyone. And the worst thing is that then, you suspect everyone. Your PA, who you thought was a great girl—‘What if?’ At the time of the divorce, I realized there was quite a possibility of many people hacking me, for various reasons . . .”
Paul raises his eyebrows here. Clearly he means Heather.
“So I just used to talk on the phone, and say, ‘If you’re taking this down, get a life.’ It is a pity not to be able to talk freely on a private phone call. I tend not to say much on the phone now. If I leave a message, it’s quite benign. You edit yourself according to the new circumstances of the new world. I think it really would be quite good to get some sort of laws. Actually,” McCartney continues, lightening, “do you know what really annoys me? I’d like to be able to go on holiday and not have to hold my belly in for two whole weeks [in case of paparazzi]. I saw some guy on the beach the other week, playing in the sand, belly hanging out over his shorts, and I was so envious.”
McCartney goes back to musing on hacking. “You know, I wouldn’t mind a tabloid journalist’s job. Obviously I’ve got the better job—but I like the idea of just . . . making up crap. David Beckham. You could go anywhere with David Beckham.”
With McCartney’s PR telling me my time is up, this the point where I ask Paul McCartney the question about what he’d do if his face got mashed up in an horrific accident.
“Paul. If you had a terrible accident and your face got all smashed up—heaven forbid, obviously—would you rebuild it to look like yourself: or would you change it, so you could finally become anonymous again?”
I think it’s quite a good question. It touches on fame, beauty, identity, ego, and the idea of living two lives in one lifetime. But Paul’s actual, current face suggests he doesn’t think so.
“I would rebuild it to look like David Cameron,” McCartney says, clearly thinking this is a shit question.
“Why?”
“Because I’m kidding. Silly girl.”
“Sorry—it’s just, Cameron? It seems like a uniquely horrible idea.”
“I know. That’s why it’s funnier,” McCartney says, patiently. “Imagine me singing ‘Yesterday,’ then people going ‘Who is it? Cameron?’ But, seriously, I’m from the ‘Don’t go there school.’ I don’t like visualizing stuff like that. I like to visualize myself living a wonderful life, being very happy, and all my family making a wonderful old age. I don’t imagine things like that.”
And that’s it—my time is up with Paul McCartney, which I managed to end by bumming him out with visions of his face being mashed into a pulp. We have our picture taken together, then I go out into the corridor, where I make a low, sad roaring sound, such as Chewbacca makes in Star Wars when things have gone wrong. Why did I ask McCartney about his face being mashed up? Why? Why? I am the worst Beatles fan since Mark David Chapman.
An hour before showtime, and the unmistakeable sound of an American tour manager balling someone out comes from just outside the catering area. Anyone who has seen Spinal Tap will know what this sounds like.
“I’ve told you before—if they don’t have a laminate, you KICK THEIR ASSES OUT!”
It appears that someone has been sneaking local chancers into the venue. It’s not clear who, exactly, is responsible for this—but it’s notable the Chief of Police and his sidekick are standing there, in their shiny boots and slightly-too-large hats, with faces like smacked arses. No one in McCartney’s entourage is talking to them.
“There’s no reason for them to be here—but you just can’t keep the local police out if they insist they want to come,” someone explains.
When the shouting ends, the Chief of Police and his sidekick sit alone, in catering, and eat McCartney’s tiramisu with that look on their faces which is specifically the face angry Italian policemen pull while eating creamy puddings on their own.
Showtime, and, on stage, McCartney looks twenty years younger than he did in his dressing room. It’s not the lighting—it’s the music. Singing “Penny Lane” is more effective than Botox or a facelift, if you are the person who wrote it in the first place. He piles into a two-and-a-half hour set with all the attack of a man in his late teens. This is a ferocious gig. There’s a moment in “Jet” where he’s pla
ying that heavy, strobing, fuzz-edged bass with one hand, staring out at the crowd with a look that, for a moment, I can’t place.
Then I recall an interview where he’s asked, “Does going to see other bands make you feel competitive?”
And McCartney replies, “Actually, it works the other way. Without being too immodest, I tend to see shows and think, ‘Well, we rock out pretty well.’ ”
And suddenly I know the answer to the question, “What’s in this for Paul McCartney?” All that stuff about being an insecure performer—yes, that probably is one part of the motivation. But the combustion comes from combining insecurity with the fact that McCartney is the best in the world at this, he knows it, and the quietly aggressive part of him wants to go out there and, in the most elegant way possible, smash his competition to bits.
At root, McCartney is still the quiffed-up rock ’n’ roll kid in the incongruous combination of black leather and cowboy boots in Hamburg in 1961, off his tits on speed at 4 AM, playing to sailors and whores. We might be in an arena that has spent all day waiting for a knighted global dignitary to turn up—but the set he blasts through is like the Death Star of rock’n’pop. Nothing can touch its fire power. This old man is in the middle of the greatest pop show on Earth. Just with the opening “Aaaah” of “Eleanor Rigby,” he acclerates away from anyone who might come close.
As the gig comes to the end, I am confused as to why, joining us at the side of stage, is a whooping, dancing Kate Middleton, freaking out to “Helter Skelter.” One always presumes everyone in the world is a McCartney fan—but I’m amazed at how little security the future Queen has. Then I realize this is, actually, Nancy Shevell—Lady McCartney—still-new wedding ring catching in the light. She has the extremely cheerful air of someone who came off honeymoon three weeks ago, and is really enjoying unwrapping all the diamonds off her John Lewis wedding list.
As Paul comes to the end of the “Golden Slumbers” medley, Shevell fetches a red terry cloth robe and, when he comes offstage, sweating, she wraps it around him, with a kiss.
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