by Tom Doyle
Summer 1977 found the McCartneys spending a lot of their time back in Scotland. This arrangement didn’t please either Jimmy McCulloch or Jo Jo Patrie, though Denny Laine and Joe English seemed happy enough to rough it in the countryside. The barn at Low Ranachan had by now been professionally converted into a rehearsal and recording studio and basic living quarters for the musicians. McCulloch sneeringly nicknamed it The Bunker. Patrie turned her nose up at the small cottage she was given to share with Denny and their two kids, Laine and Heidi, with its cement walls and bare furnishings comprising, as she saw it, ‘a couple of old chairs and some ragged, pee-stained mattresses’.
Those who couldn’t take to rural life found the existence in Scotland hard going. In a surreal protest, the bored, stoned roadies drew the image of a television on their cottage wall and pretended to watch it. Stuck out there on the farm, Jimmy McCulloch, his drinking and drugging beginning to intensify, started to crack up. Jo Jo Patrie later wildly stated that this led to the guitarist sneaking into the High Park cottage in the middle of the night and pointing a gun at the McCartneys while they slept, before suffering a breakdown and attempting to shoot himself. No one else, though, has ever backed up her story.
The truth appears to have been far less melodramatic, and a touch more daft. Revealing the depth of their devotion to their chickens, left home alone in London, the McCartneys arranged to have their brood driven in a taxi from St John’s Wood to Argyll, at a cost of over £100. Then, one evening on the farm after a binge, a drink-maddened Jimmy took a couple of dozen of the eggs produced by the hens, carefully collected each day by Linda and Paul, and angrily splattered them on the interior walls of the roadies’ cottage.
As trivial as this might have appeared to outsiders, it was seen by the McCartneys as a final act of abuse. Linda cried when she saw the mess. Paul, for the last time, went wild at Jimmy, grabbing him by his skinny neck and telling him to get the fuck off his farm. ‘It got a bit fraught up in Scotland,’ McCartney later admitted, with no little amount of understatement.
One morning not long after, Paul took a call from Steve Marriott, the increasingly wayward singer and guitarist of the Small Faces, who was putting the band back together. McCartney remembers that Marriott said, ‘Oh, hi mate. Er, me and Jimmy have been up all night and he’s decided he wants to leave your group and join mine.’ Feeling miffed, but stuck for an answer, Paul replied, ‘Hey, good luck to you guys, I hope it works out,’ knowing in his own mind that it wouldn’t. Then McCulloch came to the phone and said, ‘Look, thanks a lot. See you around.’
When the rift went public, both Paul and Jimmy offered anodyne quotes to the press. ‘It is a pity he’s leaving,’ said McCartney, ‘but problems have been building up for quite a while now and so the rest of us are happy to carry on without him.’
‘I enjoyed playing with Wings and I learned a lot from Paul,’ remarked a butter-wouldn’t-melt McCulloch. ‘But I felt it was time for a change and the ideal change for me was the Small Faces. They’re old friends of mine whose music I’ve always enjoyed.’
Only later would either publicly reveal his true feelings about the whole messy affair. ‘I don’t think anyone was too upset about the parting,’ said Jimmy. ‘We had some very good times together. Although Linda doesn’t know much about music, she’s a really nice chick.’
For McCartney, the break-up had been a long time coming. In hindsight, there had been two unspoken options: either the group could have struggled through the making of another record, suffering the likely agonies and arguments, or McCulloch would have had to knuckle down and do what McCartney asked of him. ‘Jimmy decided to leave,’ Paul said to one reporter. Then he added, sounding a touch self-serving, ‘Luckily, he’d done all the required stuff on the album that we wanted him to do, so it worked out quite well for us.’
Behind this front, Paul was becoming increasingly infuriated by his inability to maintain a lasting line-up of Wings. Having tried to loosen up and allow the musicians more creative freedom, he was now attempting to shield the carefully tended normality of his family life from the rock-piggery happening only a short distance away on his farm. As ever, he painted a face on the situation. Asked about the various trials of keeping a group together, he vaguely reasoned, ‘You get all sorts of weird little problems that you can’t do much about.’
Along with the ever reliable Denny Laine, McCartney got his head back down into songwriting. The chorus for the soon-to-be-ubiquitous ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ had been kicking around since 1975. In the mornings on the farm, Denny would wander over from his cottage to High Park to have breakfast with the McCartneys. One day this unhurried routine slipped into the afternoon, when Paul suggested that they climb up the hill with a bottle of whisky and a couple of acoustic guitars. There the pair shared ideas for the verses of ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ and completed the misty-eyed anthem.
Realising that it needed a suitably rousing climax, McCartney invited Tony Wilson, the leader of the local Campbeltown Pipe Band, up to the farm to play him the freshly written song and ask him if he could score an arrangement for bagpipes. At first, the two sat in the small kitchen at High Park working through the tune, before Wilson suggested that they perhaps step outside since the bagpipes were piercingly loud. It quickly became clear that the song naturally suited the sound of the ancient drone. A plan was made to add an accompaniment of massed pipes and drums to the upcoming recording.
When Wilson broke the news to the other pipers at the band’s next meeting at the local church hall, it met with a mixed response. Some of them were thrilled by the notion; others felt that they were selling out their traditionalism by agreeing to play on a pop single. The youngest member, Jimmy McGeachy, only fifteen, at first suspected it was a wind-up, even though he often spotted the McCartneys in the town. ‘You’d see Paul walking about in his welly boots,’ he remembers. ‘Mary and Stella, you’d see them with Linda. And Heather was there quite a bit, ’cause she used to hang about with the young farmers set. She would take the mickey out of us, about the Bay City Rollers and all that. She was an early punk, the first time we’d seen a spiky haircut. It was all happening down in London, so for us boys on the west coast of Scotland, it was the first time we’d seen somebody come up from London who looked pretty cool.’
In the early evening of Tuesday, 9 August 1977, the members of the Campbeltown Pipe Band – by day joiners and electricians, farmers and schoolboys – all piled into a minibus, wearing their full kilted regalia, and headed up to the McCartneys’ estate. Waiting for them at Low Ranachan were Paul, Linda, Denny Laine, Joe English (whose drumming contribution was in this instance redundant), GeoffEmerick, John Hammel and, most welcomingly, tour manager Trevor Jones with a wheelbarrow full of cans of McEwan’s Export. Clearly well rehearsed, the pipers’ stirring contribution was nailed in one take, and the beer flowed. The drums were added next, recorded al fresco beside the barn. Listening to a playback in the studio, the now merry local musicians suggested that the song was a definite single, one that would likely appeal to expat Scots the world over.
Paul wasn’t so sure about ‘Mull Of Kintyre’. Photographer Robert Ellis remembers McCartney playing an acetate of the single – counterbalanced with the relatively rocking ‘Girls School’ – to him and various members of ELO in London soon after. ‘He was going, “Ooh, which is the A-side, what do you think?” I was going, “Well, what are you talking about? It’s ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, isn’t it?” He was saying, “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s a bit too twee and sugary.” Of course, the vote round the room was quite clearly for “Mull Of Kintyre”. But he still wasn’t convinced. He was definitely not that secure about that song.’ In the end, hedging his bets, McCartney released ‘Mull Of Kintyre/Girls School’ as a double A-side on 11 November 1977, the same week that the iconoclastic, game-changing Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols was sitting at number 1 in the UK albums chart. The cover of the single revealed another truth: Wings were once again reduced to a t
rio, after the departure of Joe English. The official reason given was that the American drummer had found it hard to acclimatise to life in Britain. But, still hiding his addictions, English was suffering from a lot more than homesickness. He later admitted that his life was a wreck and that in his heart he knew he had to leave the situation. In addition, in a now all too familiar complaint, he said he was becoming dispirited with his lack of creative input within the band. English returned to the States and duly became a born-again Christian, enduring more years of drug problems before finally becoming clean due to his renewed faith.
Meanwhile, it was a heavily pregnant Linda who added her harmonies to ‘Mull Of Kintyre’. Secretly, the McCartneys were hoping that their fourth child would be a boy, and to Paul one strange omen suggested as much. For the past few months he had taken to wearing an old tweed coat that he had thriftily picked up second-hand at Oxfam. Reaching into a pocket one day, he pulled out a baby bootie that, spooking him, was blue. ‘It was like a Twilight Zone moment,’ he marvelled. On 12 September 1977, James Louis McCartney was born at the Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood in London.
A month later, a promo clip for ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was filmed, featuring McCartney perched on a wooden fence gate strumming his acoustic guitar, as in the background Linda emerged carrying baby James in a shawl. McCartney was joined by Denny, and the pair strolled towards Saddell beach, where in the distance the Campbeltown pipers could be seen striking up and stridently marching over the sands. In the final scenes, locals gathered around a towering bonfire on the beach at night, singing along with the closing refrain.
It was a cosy picture that was bound to vex the punk-fed critics. But, once released, ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ assumed a life entirely of its own, selling half a million copies within three weeks of its release and hitting number 1 in December for the start of a nine-week run. It seemed to reach out to the kind of record buyers who never really bought records, while confirming McCartney’s fears that the song would cement his image as a comfy, middle-aged balladeer. At the same time, the single’s inexorable success far surpassed any expectations he might have had for it, which clearly tickled him. It was the monumental hit record that he never anticipated or, deep in his rocker heart, necessarily wanted. ‘The song touched me,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t sure it was everyone’s cup of tea.’
As demand ramped up, other video performances of ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ were filmed: one featuring the three members of the band sitting on a grassy mound in a wobbly-looking pastoral studio set at Elstree; another for the Christmas TV special of comedian and impressionist Mike Yarwood, where they were arranged on high stools, a carpet of dry ice billowing around their feet, as the Campbeltown pipers filed in from behind. In a sketch later in the show, Yarwood, dressed as Chunky Punky – a spiky-haired and safety-pin-wearing incarnation of then Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey – visited the McCartneys in their pretend living-room. Paul was seen quickly stuffing a wad of banknotes under the lid of a piano, playing up his stingy image, forever the beloved light entertainer.
Some members of the Campbeltown Pipe Band, meanwhile, were becoming disgruntled about where exactly the humongous profits from the song were going. They aired their grievances in the papers, moaning that they’d only been paid flat session fees for their arguably crucial contribution to the record. This wasn’t entirely true. After recording the song, Jimmy McGeachy remembers, the musicians were given ‘an envelope with some cash in it, ready to get spread around. We thought, Oh, this is alright.’ They were given £30 each for the recording session itself, plus another £300 each for their appearance in the video, with around £300 each following in royalties. ‘To me, it wasn’t an issue,’ says McGeachy. ‘Some of the older guys . . . it was a bit of a hindsight thing that some of them thought about it.’
Wings’ performance of ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ on Mike Yarwood in Persons was, staggeringly, watched by more than 21 million people, almost 40 per cent of the British population. ‘From there on,’ says Denny, ‘whoosh, up it went.’ For those who had perhaps let The Beatles slip to the back of their minds, Paul McCartney was once again a household name.
When the millionth copy of the single, containing a hidden certificate, was bought by a fan named David Ackroyd, EMI gave him a gold disc. But the Campbeltown pipers had been wrong about the support of the expatriates in one key territory – the record flopped in America, where bewildered DJs focused on ‘Girls School’, which struggled to number 33 in the Billboard chart. Back home, however, ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was to top 2.5 million sales, nudging past The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ and, for a time, becoming the biggest-selling UK single ever. Effectively, in terms of his sales power, McCartney had lapped himself.
It was to be a commercial blip, however. The singles subsequently pulled from the album recorded in the Virgin Islands, now entitled London Town, showed diminishing returns in Britain: the gliding synth pop of ‘With A Little Luck’ made it to number 5, while the stomping, mock-pissed-off rocker ‘I’ve Had Enough’ faltered just outside the Top 40.
There were signs that Paul was touchy about the completed London Town. Playing the record to Tony Bramwell, who had worked for The Beatles at both Brian Epstein’s NEMS and Apple, McCartney casually canvassed his opinion. ‘Well, it’ll be alright when it’s finished,’ said Bramwell. At this, McCartney lost the plot, apparently shouting at his former associate, ‘What the fuck do you know? I fucking brought you down from Liverpool.’
After a run of years characterised by self-assurance and validation, doubt was beginning to creep back into Paul’s mind. ‘We didn’t seem to be writing any real hard rockers,’ he admitted in the wake of the album’s release. ‘Next time around we’ll go for a bit more sweat.’
This mood of uncertainty was reflected by the press launch of London Town, held on a miserable, wet and windy day in March 1978, on a boat sailing up and down the Thames. The McCartneys and Laine were hustled around by photographers, before they tried to adopt a cheerful demeanour while eating fish and chips from newspapers in the rain. It was another boat, but this time in a very different climate. After the splash of sun, the outlook had returned to cloudy.
Making McCartney II, back on your own again. Was this a conscious move away from Wings?
Y’know, it was really ’cause synthesizers and sequencers came in and I was intrigued. Since leaving The Beatles, I’ve done that, working on my own thing. Which I always think of as sort of being a nutty professor. You’re just holed up in this little laboratory, experimenting with sounds.
12
Take These Broken Wings
There were signs that McCartney was growing tired, and more specifically tired of Wings. ‘It was getting a bit boring, to tell the truth,’ he was later to admit. ‘I was getting a bit fed up with yet another line-up.’ But, of course, given his determined work ethic, at times bordering on the obsessive, he found himself putting together yet another line-up.
Amusingly, he first met the guitarist who was to replace Jimmy McCulloch in Wings in a toilet at CTS Studios in Wembley, during the marathon mixing sessions for Wings Over America. Laurence Juber was a 24-year-old session musician who was hawking his skills around London. His recent gigs had included various TV shows and the qualifying rounds for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was Herbie Flowers, the bassist responsible for the elastic low-end riff on Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, who introduced him to Paul over the urinals. The pair awkwardly shook hands in the Gents and weren’t to see one another again for eighteen months.
Juber subsequently met Denny Laine when he played a version of The Moody Blues’ ‘Go Now’ in the house band on the David Essex TV show, impressing Laine by perfectly mimicking the guitar solo from the live Wings version of the song. Six months later, he got a call from Laine asking him if he’d like to come for a jam in the basement of the MPL offices.
The guitarist, who didn’t own a Wings record, borrowed a couple of their albums from his brother in order to s
wot up. ‘I can’t say that I had been a huge fan of the band,’ he confesses, ‘because at that point I was busy trying to be a hot-shot studio guitar player.’ When Juber arrived at the audition, Paul introduced him to Chris Thomas, the producer who had started his engineering career with The Beatles at Abbey Road on The White Album and gone on to work with Pink Floyd and, most recently and intriguingly, the Sex Pistols. Having laughed at the idea of punking up his sound, Paul was now clearly serious about wanting to toughen up the band. Thomas was someone from McCartney’s past who might help guide him into the uncertain post-punk future. Juber picked up on this, even as he was being offered the gig: ‘There was a sense that there was a desire to take things more in a rock direction.’
The calm, polite, softly spoken guitarist, born in the east end of London and a graduate of the music course at Goldsmiths College, where he’d even studied lute, was the polar opposite of the tempestuous Jimmy McCulloch. This very likely endeared him to the worn-out Paul and Linda, along with the fact that he was a strict vegetarian, which interested the couple, at the time nearing the end of their long transition into forever forgoing meat.
At the same time, a new drummer arrived on the scene, also via Denny. Steve Holley had recently played with Elton John, so he wasn’t unnerved by the idea of working with a famous face. Introduced to Laine by a mutual friend, he turned up at a housewarming party at Denny’s place and within minutes was sitting behind a drum kit jamming with Paul and Linda. ‘I just sat down and started playing,’ he says. ‘I think they saw an easy way to get a replacement drummer, as opposed to going through a long audition process.’