Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  They reinstated the property’s original name, Blossom Wood Farm. Within its 159 acres there were stables, a windmill building that Paul earmarked for a recording studio and an old cottage that Linda turned into a pottery studio. Linda took a hippieish, Mother Nature’s daughter approach to owning so much green space. ‘I was lent all this for a little while,’ she told her friend Danny Fields. ‘And I have to take good care of it, so I can give it back just the way it is.’

  July found Paul alone, in his studios in Sussex and Scotland, messing around with the tracks for what was to become his second solo album, McCartney II. Without Wings, he began experimenting with synthesizers and sequencers, recapturing the freedom he’d enjoyed when making the first record. Once again he found himself at play, balancing a snare drum on the rim of a toilet and whacking it with a stick to see what kind of resonant sound it made.

  Almost all of the songs were entirely improvised, beginning with the bubbling synths of ‘Front Parlour’ and the bouncy falsetto dub reggae of ‘Check My Machine’. ‘Temporary Secretary’ was a letter song, in the style of ‘Paperback Writer’, directed at the head of the Alfred Marks Recruitment Agency, requiring the services of the typist of the title, delivered in a cartoon American accent over a clubby beat. It was frivolous and liberating stuff. ‘Check My Machine’ and the hypnotic electronic track ‘Secret Friend’ – which weren’t to make the original cut of the album, surfacing only on subsequent reissues – were long and unhurried. Other songs weren’t quite so forward-looking and experimental, however, with ‘On The Way’ and ‘Nobody Knows’ essentially being bluesy rock knock-offs.

  There was a real maturity evident elsewhere, though, Paul having just turned 38. ‘Waterfalls’, inspired by the natural feature at the Sussex estate, found McCartney plaintively fretting about the safety of his loved ones. ‘One Of These Days’ might have been lifted from The White Album and captured Paul peering into the future with a certain serenity, writing in the becalmed hours after a visit from an acquaintance who was devoted to Hare Krishna.

  The making of McCartney II, in isolation and in secret, was a real indication of the fact that Paul was tiring of the complications of working with other musicians. It was ten years since he’d last done the same, hiding himself away in Cavendish Avenue during the dark days of the end of The Beatles. It was a closing of the circle.

  Then, on 27 September 1979, Jimmy McCulloch died. In the two years since leaving Wings, the guitarist had continued his drinking and drugging around London, moving into a posh Maida Vale flat and ripping through the not insubstantial royalties that had followed his time with the band. The reformed Small Faces had, as McCartney predicted, been a short-lived enterprise. Jimmy had subsequently played in Wild Horses with similarly hard-edged, hard-living former Thin Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson, and an outfit called The Dukes, signed to Warner Brothers.

  McCulloch had gone AWOL for a couple of days in September, failing to show up at a rehearsal with The Dukes at Dingwalls nightclub in Camden. Phone calls to him went unanswered. Worried, his brother Jack made his way over to the flat in Maida Vale. When there was no reply to his knocks, and he noticed a strange, unpleasant smell emanating from inside, he took his shoulder to the door and burst it open.

  Jimmy was discovered sitting up in an armchair, with a burned-out spliff between his fingers, clearly dead. He was 26. There was some evidence that someone had been with him and absconded, likely scared. Cannabis, morphine and alcohol were found in the guitarist’s blood, but other than the joint roach, no drugs were found in the flat. The police concluded that the place had been tidied up in a hurry. The door-chain had been broken by someone other than Jack.

  Deputy coroner Dr Paul Knapman concluded, ‘There are certainly some odd circumstances and, because of this, I think an open verdict is the proper one.’ Jack McCulloch was quoted as saying, almost threateningly, ‘I’m sure somebody was in that apartment when my brother died and I’d like to find out who it was.’ The exact circumstances of Jimmy’s death remain a mystery.

  ‘I was shocked . . . it was crazy,’ says Dave Clarke, McCulloch’s former partner in White Line. ‘But I have to say there was always that thought at the back of your mind. Knowing Jim as I did and his personality . . . it wasn’t something that I thought couldn’t possibly happen. I never saw him near any heroin. I think it probably came later. It was all uppers and drinking and grass.’

  It was perhaps no surprise that Paul, who, of course, couldn’t bear funerals, didn’t attend McCulloch’s wake. But neither did Denny Laine. ‘I was pissed off with Jimmy over lots of things and I’d kind of fallen out with him,’ he admitted. ‘I know it sounds funny to say, but when somebody dies you can still be angry with them.’ Paul said of Jimmy’s death, ‘In the end, he was just too dangerous for his own good.’

  That autumn, the sales of Wings albums topped 100 million. At the same time, the people behind the Guinness Book of Records presented McCartney with an award to mark his landmark achievements, naming him the most successful recording artist of all time. The gong handed to him was a disc made of rhodium, a substance twice as expensive as platinum. The organisers had originally wanted to cast it in osmium, before discovering that the rarer metal was highly toxic.

  Still, this elevated status appeared to do little to firm up McCartney’s sagging self-belief. In once again trying to step away from his fame and downsize his ambitions, Paul had suggested that the new Wings, still untested live, should go out on a low-key tour of small British clubs, to refine their set and get closer to their audiences. The notion perhaps revealed McCartney’s inner doubts about the band. ‘At the moment, we don’t want a great big tour of the world with everything it entails,’ Paul announced in the pages of the Wings newsletter Club Sandwich, ‘so it looks as though we’ll just be turning up with our guitars and plugging them in wherever they want to listen to us’.

  In the end, promoter Harvey Goldsmith managed to up the scale, talking Paul into nineteen theatre dates. As it transpired, throughout the jaunt, Paul and Linda were there with the band, but somehow apart. Whenever possible, they would drive home after the shows to Sussex or London.

  McCartney had promised to launch his next tour back on hometown turf in Liverpool. Demand for tickets overwhelmed the box office of the Royal Court Theatre, forcing the line to be closed on more than a thousand fans who had queued outside overnight in the late autumn cold. These were scenes that were being repeated up and down the country.

  Standing waiting to go on stage at the Royal Court on 23 November, the first night of Wings’ British tour, saxophonist Howie Casey was amazed to see just how nervous McCartney was. Paul turned to him, minutes before showtime, and said, ‘Oh God, I hope this goes well.’ Casey, taken aback, replied, ‘Paul, this is like the Second Coming. You’re gonna go down well just walking on the stage.’

  The Royal Court, which Paul had frequented as a kid, was at the time struggling financially. McCartney had donated £5,000 to the cause, which was seen by its organisers as ‘a great boost to the theatre’, while attracting some criticism from local government. One of the city’s Labour councillors carped, ‘I don’t see why Paul McCartney should be singled out for special praise. The Beatles could have given a million and not missed it. They made their millions and we’ve not seen them since.’ He was a lone voice, and one that failed to be heard in the clamour caused by Paul’s arrival back in Liverpool. ‘I feel I’m not judged with the same harshness by the people here as elsewhere,’ McCartney said.

  On the afternoon of the opening night in the city, Paul played a free matinee show for pupils from his former school, the Liverpool Institute, organised by his former geography teacher and now headmaster, Bertram Parker, nicknamed Blip. He remembered Paul as ‘a bright and cheerful lad who did a reasonable amount of work’, before recalling with a smile that the last time he’d seen McCartney, in his pre-fame days, it had been when he repaid a small debt to the teacher’s wife. ‘A sixpence that he’d borrowed
to go to the cinema,’ Parker grinned. That afternoon, rocketing the headmaster’s cool, Paul started the show by saying, ‘Hello, Blip, nice to see you.’

  The media trailed after McCartney the whole day: the Liverpool Echo joined him for a trip on the Mersey on the Royal Iris ferry, the setting of some early Beatles performances; a camera crew from BBC tea-time magazine show Nationwide captured his every move for a twenty-minute documentary. Before the evening show, in a news item on local radio, one reporter frothed up the atmosphere in the city. ‘Theatre staff are predicting the greatest explosion since the Merseybeat mania of the 1960s and the police are taking no chances,’ he babbled. ‘They’re prepared to draft in extra men at the first signs of the hysteria McCartney attracted during the heyday of The Beatles.’

  In truth, despite the roaring responses, Paul felt the band was under-rehearsed, the performances phoned-in. Rolling Stone reviewer Mick Brown could tell that the singer’s heart wasn’t in it. ‘Everything seemed designed to take the spotlight off Paul McCartney and spread it among the rest of Wings,’ he noted. ‘The impression given was not that of a deity with a box of thunderbolts, but a band onstage for the hell of it.’ Howie Casey says he felt that, from his vantage point at the back of the stage, something had changed in the Wings set-up beyond the shake-up in personnel. They had turned even less rock’n’roll, effectively becoming a showband in some ways. ‘They gave us black suits and it became almost formal,’ he says.

  In Steve Holley’s view, despite the impression given to its audiences, McCartney hated the 1979 tour. After one underwhelming show in Brighton, Paul told the drummer backstage he thought it ‘stank’. Finding themselves back trying to juggle touring and family life again heaped more pressure on the McCartneys’ relationship. ‘It caused a lot of trouble between us,’ said Paul. ‘We both work at it and have a laugh or have an argument,’ said Linda. ‘But we always end up in the laugh.’

  In Edinburgh, part-way through the gig, the power failed, and, in the semi-darkness, the band turned into troupers and rallied the crowd. Denny performed a jokey striptease and unveiled some acrobatic skills; Linda and the horn section roused everyone into a singalong of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. Outside Manchester Apollo, fights broke out in the streets between desperate fans and greedy ticket touts. On the last night in Glasgow, Wings turned out in kilts and brought the Campbeltown Pipe Band on for a roof-lifting ‘Mull Of Kintyre’. ‘We did the encore and everybody went ballistic,’ says Jimmy McGeachy. Performing the rubbery funk of ‘Coming Up’, a song solo-recorded during the McCartney II sessions, Paul zoomed in on one particularly enthusiastic audience member. ‘This kid was bopping away,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, Oh, this is a hit.’ Luckily, the show was being recorded by a mobile studio unit that night, and this B-side live version was to be favoured by DJs in the US over Paul’s solo A-side version, reaching number 1.

  Rising up the British charts during this time was McCartney’s first attempt at a festive record, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, a bright, synthy concoction put together alone in the summer and destined to become a perennial. In the slightly muted aftermath of the British tour, he sat down with promoter Bill Graham to plot a US jaunt, due to follow a trip to Japan early the next year. Knowing how Linda might feel about this, it was possibly no coincidence that he presented his wife with a marriage-sweetening, grand-gesturing gift of a ranch in Arizona, a property she’d visited and adored back in her university days in the south-western state.

  Wings closed out the year with a show at Hammersmith Odeon in London on 29 December, set up following a plea from the UN’s secretary general Kurt Waldheim to reunite The Beatles for a benefit to raise funds for the victims of war in Kampuchea. The fact that this was always going to be highly unlikely did nothing to dampen the raging press speculation that, finally, nearly ten years on, the four were to reform. In fact, calls were indeed placed to Ringo and George, who agreed to appear, though not as part of The Beatles. John, in New York, wasn’t interested. Then, when the papers got wind of Harrison and Starr’s agreement to participate, the two pulled out. And so it was left to McCartney to tell Waldheim that Wings would play the show.

  It was a long, rambling night, and flat in its execution. Denny Laine was drunk, but not as spectacularly as Pete Townshend, who turned up for a live gathering of the Rockestra and proceeded to fuzz his way through ‘Let It Be’. The assembled cast – among them Robert Plant, John Bonham, ex-Faces bassist Ronnie Lane and James Honeyman-Scott of The Pretenders – all agreed to wear the requisite uniform for the evening, a silver suit and top hat. The Who’s guitarist, though, noisily refused to dress up, shouting, ‘I’m not wearing that fucking shit.’

  ‘Pete was breathing Rémy Martin fumes down my neck,’ Laurence Juber remembers. ‘I put the top hat on him at one point and he took it off and threw it into the audience.’

  The final Wings show of this difficult year proved both an anticlimax and an inauspicious end to the decade. ‘There was a growing sense from Paul that it was getting to the endgame of the band,’ says Juber.

  No one was to know that the group had just played their last gig.

  Japan, 1980: what was going through your mind?

  How the hell did that happen? But it did. Then it became just a film, y’know. A slow-motion film of Japan. The inside view of Tokyo. An insider’s view! Jesus! It was just unbelievable.

  13

  Stuck Inside These Four Walls

  Later, he was to wonder if it had been some strange act of self-sabotage.

  It was almost as if I wanted to get busted, he thought to himself.

  The first days of January 1980 saw Wings regroup at Hog Hill Mill Studios, McCartney’s newly completed facility at his Sussex estate. Maybe it was something to do with rehearsing at home. Maybe the dawning of the new year, and decade, only served to remind him of his waning passion for the band. But for Wings, rehearsing for merely a week in preparation for a major tour, the pall of lethargy was all too obvious.

  ‘We hadn’t really rehearsed enough,’ Paul admitted. ‘For the previous Wings tour we rehearsed a lot.’

  Steve Holley didn’t think the band were ready for the upcoming Japanese tour, either. ‘I didn’t feel at my best when we set off,’ says the drummer. ‘I remember the rehearsals being less than satisfactory. They hadn’t yielded enough security for Paul. So when we left, there was a cloud hanging over it.’

  Paul and Linda flew with the four kids on Concorde to New York on Saturday 12 January, booking into the Stanhope on Central Park. Once there, through an east coast connection, they bought half a pound of grass. Legend would later have it that McCartney then phoned Lennon at the Dakota, the call taken by Ono, to say he could come over with some ‘dynamite weed’. The offer was declined, but, in the aftermath, the rumour spread that Yoko – incensed that the McCartneys planned to stay in the Lennons’ favourite suite at the Okura Hotel in Tokyo – tipped off a cousin who worked in Japanese Customs that McCartney was coming in carrying a hefty bag of dope. Ono would dismiss the accusation, saying drugs hadn’t been mentioned in the conversation and she didn’t even have a cousin who worked at the airport.

  Puncturing another hole in this conspiracy theory, of course, is the fact that no one could have imagined Paul would ever have been stupid enough to try to smuggle dope into Japan, the country that just over four years earlier had banned him for his drug conviction.

  But, leaving for Japan, he couldn’t bring himself to flush the stuff down the toilet. It was to be the dumbest thing he’d ever done in his life. ‘I was,’ he says, ‘an idiot.’

  Paul hadn’t set foot in Japan since 1966 with The Beatles. Having had his visa turned down nine years later, forcing the cancellation of the 1975 tour, he was now to be allowed back into the country for eleven concert dates over eighteen days, the authorities having taken into consideration McCartney’s popularity with Japanese fans.

  Straight off the plane, 16 January 1980, Paul – with Linda and the kid
s and Laurence Juber, who had joined them on the flight from New York – grinned and capered around for the photographers and reporters. Once the storm of flashbulbs died down, the party moved through to an immigration holding area, where they spent two hours going through paperwork with officials. ‘It was tedious, to be honest,’ says the guitarist.

  From there, they made their way with their luggage through to Customs. Blue-uniformed, white-gloved Japanese officers began opening bags at random, performing standard spot checks, pulling an item or two, though not everything, from each. One unzipped a beige canvas suitcase. Inside, lying on top, was Paul’s folded jacket. The official reached inside it and pulled out the clear plastic bag of grass.

  Paul, recalls Juber, standing next to him, ‘turned kind of white’. The officer, visibly stunned and embarrassed, almost made to cover up the bag of weed again with the coat. Then he quickly realised that he couldn’t possibly ignore what he had just seen. He duly alerted his superior and Paul was hurriedly ushered into a back room.

  Juber was dumbstruck. Alan Crowder from MPL had warned the band that, prior to entering Japan, they had to take every precaution to ensure they weren’t carrying a crumb of dope. They were to vacuum their pockets, scrub their fingernails. Now, because of the foolishness of the boss, a stony-faced Japanese Customs man was handing him a screwdriver and ordering him to remove the panels from his guitars, to search for any other stashed packages.

  ‘All of us had been warned, whatever you do, don’t take stuff into Japan,’ says McCartney. ‘And there it was. The look on the Customs man’s face when he pulled a bag of pot out of my suitcase was priceless. I mean, it was just like a sort of mad movie.’