Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Jim had plenty to occupy himself with at Rembrandt, which had large gardens front and back, surrounded by mature trees. He planted laurel and lavender by the front door and kept himself busy mowing the lawns and raking the leaves. Still, there was more to life than gardening. There had been no woman of significance in Jim’s life since Mary died, but with the boys grown up Jim had a twinkle in his eye again. ‘He was looking for a young, smart bird,’ confides cousin Mike Robbins, who became match-maker when he introduced Jim to his friend Angela Williams, a former Butlin’s Holiday [camp] Princess who’d lost her first husband in a car crash, leaving her a widow at 35 with a young daughter, Ruth, to look after. The child was now five. Angie was working as a secretary for Littlewood’s, the football pools company, when Mike and Liz Robbins went round to her flat for dinner. ‘Will you ever marry again, Ange?’ Mike asked the widow.

  ‘No. Unless it’s a rich old man who loves music,’ replied Angie, who was an accomplished pianist. Mike and Liz looked at each other. ‘Who are you thinking of?’ Angie asked them.

  ‘Uncle Jim.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Have you heard of Paul McCartney? His father.’

  ‘Ooo, really?’

  Jim and Angela went on a date. Four more followed. One night at Rembrandt Jim put a proposition to Angela.

  While I sat playing the piano, Jim put his hands firmly on my shoulders and said, ‘You’re costing me a fortune in taxis. I want to ask you something … Do you want to get married? Do you want to be my housekeeper? Or do you just want to live with me?’

  Angela replied that, for Ruth’s sake, they should marry. They rang Paul immediately, and he drove up from London in his new Aston Martin sports car. The initial meeting between the star and his prospective stepmother was friendly. Always good with children, Paul bonded with Ruth, who became his stepsister when, on 24 November 1964, Jim and Angela were married by the McCartneys’ clergyman relative Buddy Bevan in North Wales. However, relations between Paul and Angie would deteriorate considerably.

  Three days after Jim McCartney married, the Beatles released their new single, ‘I Feel Fine’, which opened with a wow of feedback, the first time such a sound had been used deliberately as an effect on a pop record. ‘I Feel Fine’ was a John song. ‘There was a little competition between Paul and me as to who got the A-side, who got the singles,’ John said of this period of their partnership. ‘If you notice, in the early days the majority of the singles - in the movies and everything - were mine …’ Gradually, this would change. The B-side of the new single, ‘She’s a Woman’, was a Paul song and it’s an excellent composition, into the lyrics of which he sneaked a crafty drug reference about turning on, a nod to his recent meeting with Bob Dylan. The single went to number one in the US and Britain in December, where it stayed into the new year.

  A new LP, Beatles for Sale, was released a few days later, packaged slightly differently in the USA as Beatles ’65. Because the Beatles’ British career predated their success in the United States, Parlophone and Capitol were out of sync with album releases, the Americans releasing Beatles recordings under different titles with slightly different tracks initially. To catch up with the UK, Capitol put out no less than four Beatles albums in 1964 - Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles’ Second Album, Beatles ’65 and Something New - without consulting the band about titles, cover art or song selection. Capitol included singles on these LPs, whereas at home a Beatles single was often released as an extra treat, with an exclusive and often equally delicious B-side, neither of which would be on the LP. The new single, ‘I Feel Fine’, was not on Beatles for Sale, for example, but did feature on Beatles ’65 in the USA.15

  Beatles for Sale had been recorded by George Martin on the fly between the Beatles’ engagements, and Martin rates it as one of their lesser works. ‘They were rather weary during Beatles for Sale,’ he has commented. ‘One must remember they’d been battered like mad throughout 1964 …’ As with previous albums, the LP was comprised of original compositions and cover songs including the rock ’n’ roll warhorse ‘Kansas City’, but there was still much of interest. Dylan’s influence is heard on John’s ‘I’m a Loser’, while Paul’s ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ was pretty. The inspiration for ‘Eight Days a Week’ came from a casual conversation Paul had with his chauffeur on the drive to Kenwood. ‘How’ve you been?’ Paul asked as they headed out of town.

  ‘Oh, working hard,’ grumbled the chauffeur, ‘eight days a week.’

  When Paul arrived at John’s country mansion, he told his friend what the driver had said. ‘John said, “Right - ‘Ooh, I need your love babe …’” and we wrote it. We were always quite quick to write.’ When they finished a new song like this, Lennon and McCartney would usually perform it for Cynthia Lennon, or whoever else was around, to see what sort of reaction they got, making sure to write down the chords and lyrics. ‘We couldn’t put it down on a cassette because there weren’t cassettes then,’ notes Paul. ‘We’d have to remember it, which was always a good discipline, and if it was a rubbish song we’d forget it.’

  The first full year of Beatlemania ended in December with Another Beatles Christmas Show, staged at the Hammersmith Odeon, a huge West London cinema that was becoming one of the capital’s premier music venues. Once again the Beatles were obliged to act the fool as well as perform, and again there were a host of support acts, including the Yardbirds, featuring Eric Clapton who became an important friend. ‘Paul played the ambassador, coming out to meet us and saying hello,’ recalls Clapton, who also remembers Paul playing a new tune backstage. It had come to him in a dream at Wimpole Street, and he wasn’t sure whether it was an original composition or an old melody that had lodged in his unconscious. Neither Clapton nor his band mates recognised it.

  The Christmas show compère this year was Jimmy Savile, night-club owner and DJ. One of Jim’s business interests was the Three Coins club in Manchester, which the Beatles played twice, in 1961 and 1963. ‘The first time, they travelled over from Liverpool and got a fiver for the whole gig, and they went down well. So they came back [and] got £15 [$23],’ recalls Savile, who was best known as a Radio Luxembourg disc jockey. As such, Jim had helped promote the Beatles’ career. They rewarded the DJ with what he calls ‘the greatest non-job’ he ever had.

  Because first of all you couldn’t hear yourself think, at all. And the audience, when they saw me come on, knew that I was coming on to introduce the lads, and you could actually taste the noise. The noise was just quite unbelievable! And for the whole of the [20] days I never, ever uttered a word. All I did was just mime all sorts of things, and sort of dived about the stage, and suddenly I would look over to the wings and put my hands on my head as though I can’t believe what I’m seeing, and then I’d run off the other side, and the Beatles would run on this side, and that was it. That’s how I’d introduce [them].

  The DJ also appeared in skits with the boys in Hammersmith.

  I was a yeti, and what I did I appeared, having climbed up a ladder with a yeti outfit on, looking at the Beatles who were standing about down there doing bits of things, and of course all the crowd is shouting ‘Behind you! Behind you!’ It was real pantomime stuff.

  After a break in which Paul took Jane to Tunisia, and Ritchie married Maureen Cox, the Beatles went back into the studio to record songs for their second United Artists movie, Help! Despite having had little time to prepare, John and Paul were able to write strong new material for the film and its soundtrack album, much of which has a Dylanesque quality. There is a new introspection in ‘Ticket to Ride’, for example, the title of which is also a punning reference to Paul’s Uncle Mike and Aunt Bett, who were now running the Bow Bars pub in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. To visit Uncle Mike, Paul was obliged to buy a ferry ticket from Portsmouth - literally a ticket to Ryde.

  John later claimed the title song ‘Help!’ was a cry of anguish at a time when he had lost direction in life, though this wasn’t apparent to his band mates. The only si
gn John may have been unhappy was that he had put on weight, which altered his appearance markedly. One of the curious things about John was how much his looks changed over the course of a relatively short life. His original boyish face fattened and widened around the time of Help!, giving him the full face of Henry VIII. As he lost weight in the latter druggy stages of the Beatles’ career, his face became thin, pinched and bony, making him look like a different person entirely, which was appropriate for a man of many moods. In contrast, one could always see the happy boy Paul had been in the confident man he became.

  George Martin kept the tape running continuously when the band was in the studio, to capture every precious second of Beatles’ sound, with John and Paul’s between-songs chatter preserved for posterity as a result. The boys were working on one of John’s songs, ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’, on Thursday 18 February 1965, when Paul broke a glass in the studio. ‘Paul’s broken a glass, broken a glass …’ Lennon chanted like a child, before asking: ‘You ready … Macca?’ using his friend’s schoolboy nickname. They were still making music together much as they had when Paul sagged off from the Inny to hang out with John at Forthlin Road, but now the friends were partners in business, too - big business. This very day Northern Songs was floated on the London stock exchange.

  The flotation of Northern Songs was tax efficient for John and Paul. High earners were taxed excessively under Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70, those earning over £20,000 a year ($30,600) suffering a 50 per cent surtax on their income, rising to 55 per cent in 1965, meaning that most of the Beatles’ money went to the taxman. By floating the company in which their songs were held - 56 titles so far - Paul and John created shares that could be sold tax-free. Northern Songs was divided into five million ordinary shares, two and a quarter million of which were offered to the public at seven shillings and nine pence each in pre-decimal money (39 new pence, or 59 cents). The prospectus revealed that the Beatles were contracted to the company until 1966, with Northern Songs having an option to renew for a further three years, with John and Paul obliged to write at least six new songs per year. In reality they were writing many more, and figures showed that Northern Songs was a rapidly growing business. In its first two years, the company reported six-monthly profits rising from £17,294 ($26,459) to almost a quarter of a million pounds. The flotation was oversubscribed, giving Northern Songs an initial paper value of £1.9 million ($2.9 m). The share value then fell below offer price, as speculators took a quick profit. Thinking this might happen, the Beatles bought shares back, a shrewd move as the shares recovered and doubled in value over 12 months, during which time they added another 35 songs to the catalogue. Paul had initially been allotted one million shares in Northern Songs, to which he added bought-back shares, giving him just over a fifth of the public company, worth approximately £300,000 ($459,000), a vast sum at the time. John had the same, with Brian, George and Ritchie all holding smaller stakes. Over half the limited company was still owned by Dick James, though.

  At this stage in his career, Paul left business decisions to others, more interested in making music and having fun than reading contracts. Having been introduced to marijuana, grass had become part of the Beatles’ quotidian lives, creating a problem for director Richard Lester when he came to shoot Help! in February 1965. ‘We showed up a bit stoned, smiled a lot and hoped we’d get through it,’ admits Paul. ‘We giggled a lot.’ Like their first film, Help! was a musical in which the Beatles played themselves and performed their songs, while a slightly larger budget meant Lester could shoot in colour, which helped him decide to make Help! a Pop Art fantasy poking fun at ‘the state of Britain in 1965 and Harold Wilson’s white-hot, modern society’.16 At the start of the picture, the Beatles are seen returning home to four adjoining terrace houses in an ordinary British street. ‘Lovely lads, and so natural,’ comments a neighbour approvingly. When the camera cuts to the interior we see that the Beatles actually inhabit one huge open-plan bachelor pad fitted with every mod con. There was a surprising personal connection between this outlandish set and Paul’s Liverpool family. Aunt Ginny and Uncle Harry had recently moved into a terrace house in Mersey View on the Wirral. When Ginny’s widowed sister Milly moved into the house next door, Harry knocked a secret door through the partition wall so the sisters could come and go as they pleased without anybody knowing the cottages were connected. The plot of Help! is ‘nutty’, as actor Victor Spinetti has observed. Ringo owns a ring coveted by an Indian Thug sect led by the homicidal Clang, who pursues Ringo and his fellow Beatles across Britain, Austria and the Bahamas. If the boys were going to make a movie, they figured they might as well go somewhere nice, and their accountant had recently established a tax shelter for them in the Bahamas. They flew to Nassau on 23 February, staying on the island two weeks. Jim McCartney decided to surprise his son by taking Angie to the Bahamas for a belated honeymoon at the same time, which displeased Paul. ‘The Beatles arrived several days before our holiday ended,’ Angie later recalled. ‘Jim said, “Let’s go to their press conference and surprise them.” But all Paul said was, “What are you doing here?” I felt that Paul was angry that we had turned up when he was there to work.’

  After the Bahamas, the Beatles travelled to Austria. Neither Paul nor any of the other Beatles had skied before and there was a great deal of falling over and general mucking about in the snow, again partly due to pot-smoking. Dick Lester’s patience was tested to the limit. Unlike their first film, in which the boys appeared determined to do their best, they seemed less interested in being actors now than in getting high and having a laugh. For Paul, though, the trip was memorable for John paying him a cherished, virtually unique compliment. ‘I remember one time when we were making Help! in Austria. We’d been out skiing all day for the film and so we were all tired,’ he reminisced in the 1980s. ‘I usually shared a room with George. But on this particular occasion I was in with John.’ The Beatles could have had a suite each, of course, but they preferred to share rooms on the road, taking comfort in each others’ company. John and Paul were listening to one of their albums as they changed out of their ski clothes.

  There were three of my songs and three of John’s songs on the side we were listening to. And for the first time ever, he just tossed it off, without saying anything definite, ‘Oh, I probably like your songs better than mine.’ And that was it. That was the height of praise I ever got off him… There was no one looking, so he could say it.

  THE SMASH OF THE CENTURY

  It was a fine time to be in London, which started to ‘swing’ at least a year before Time identified the phenomenon with its famous April 1966 cover story, ‘London: The Swinging City’. The death of Sir Winston Churchill in January 1965 can be seen as a watershed, marking the end of the drab post-war period, after which the nation seemed to embrace colour and change. Most British people were much the same, of course, but a creative and cultural renaissance was taking place in the heart of the capital, one that caught the attention of the world, and Paul was at the centre of it.

  The Beatles may have been the premier British pop band of the day, but they were not the only ones making exciting new music. As other Mersey Sound acts fell by the wayside, new, mostly London-based bands, such as the Stones, the Who and Pink Floyd came to the fore, remaking rock ’n’ roll into a more elaborate form of popular music. Rock, as it was becoming known, would be one of Britain’s great exports, something the country could do as well as America, with the success of the Beatles in the USA paving the way for these new British bands. It was also partly thanks to the success of the Beatles that talented, young, working-class people from diverse walks of life were accepted as celebrities, the likes of photographer David Bailey, actor Michael Caine and Bradford-born painter David Hockney, who along with his friend Peter Blake became a leading light in modern art. Writers grouped together as the Angry Young Men had also paved the way for this cultural change with their plays and novels. A working-class accent, whic
h had hitherto been a disadvantage in British life, was now very much in vogue. The snobby Chelsea Set wanted to mix with such people. ‘Anybody who had any sort of character or creativity or charisma was welcome,’ notes Lord St Germans, one of the dandies involved in Beatles merchandising, adding that ‘it helped to be good-looking’. The young started to dress differently, women wearing bright make-up and short skirts, pioneered by the designer Mary Quant; while men grew their hair and affected an eclectic mixture of modish, foppish and antique clothing. The trend-setters shopped in boutiques in the King’s Road and on Carnaby Street in Soho. They met up at night in such fashionable clubs as the Ad Lib, a penthouse above Leicester Square from which one could observe the futuristic Post Office Tower-an icon of the new, white-hot Britain - being erected in Fitzrovia.

  How wonderful it was to be young, good-looking and successful in London at this time, moreover to be loved and admired by people all over the world, the money absolutely pouring in. Paul was in this happy position. Despite the niggardly royalty deal the Beatles had with EMI, and the unfavourable terms of the publishing agreement with Dick James, the star was informed by his accountant in 1965 that he was a millionaire. He was earning so much he kept fat envelopes of spare cash in his sock drawer at Wimpole Street. He’d done the right thing by his nearest and dearest, buying Dad a house on the Wirral, and giving his kid brother an allowance; he’d treated himself to some boys’ toys, notably his Aston Martin and Radford Mini de Ville (a souped-up Mini with a luxurious interior); and he’d given Jane some nice gifts, too, bits of jewellery and other fripperies. Now he proved how serious he was about their relationship by taking Jane shopping for a house.