Fab

by Howard Sounes

  After operating out of rented rooms in Greek Street, Soho, for the past couple of years, in 1977 MPL moved around the corner to Soho Square, at the centre of which is a small park popular with office and shop workers. Soho Square is in the middle of a very busy area of Central London, the large clothes shops of Oxford Street a few strides away to the north, Charing Cross Road to the east, with its book and music shops, the bustling life of Soho - with its bars, restaurants and clubs - all around. Paul had bought 1 Soho Square, a five-storey Edwardian townhouse, the ground floor of which resembles a shop, with large, curved, plate-glass windows. Stairs lead up from the reception to four floors of offices, Paul taking as his private study the front office on the second floor. Sitting at his desk, speaking on the phone, he could watch people in the park below, an interesting view for a man always on the look-out for song ideas. Before MPL moved into 1 Soho Square, Paul had the building gutted and redecorated Art Deco-style by the people who designed the celebrated Biba shop in Kensington, commissioning expensive blue carpets, curtains and upholstery, all woven with a music note motif, which was repeated in the hand-carved oak door handles and as a stencil pattern around the windows. Other bespoke features included an antique Wurlitzer loaded with Paul’s favourite records, valuable art works and a restored pipe organ on the first-floor landing. There was a penthouse flat at the top of the building, and space in the basement for a recording studio.

  A small team of people worked full time for Paul at 1 Soho Square. The most senior role was personal manager to Paul. It is a reflection of how demanding Paul can be that there was a high turnover of people in this position. First came Vincent Romeo, then Brian Brolly, followed by an Australian named Stephen Shrimpton. Brolly stayed with MPL throughout the changes, looking after Paul’s money alongside accountant Paul Winn, both stalwart members of the MPL team. So too was the ebullient Alan ‘the Crowd’ Crowder, who served as office factotum. In addition there was a changing cast of receptionists and secretaries. Sue Cavanaugh ran the Wings Fun Club and oversaw its magazine, Club Sandwich, launched in February 1977 to ‘narrow the gap between the band and its audience’. Initially, Club Sandwich consisted of a single folded sheet of newspaper, printed in black and white like the music papers of the day, though it was less like Melody Maker in tone than a kids’ magazine, apparently designed principally for the amusement of the wee McCartneys, benevolent, informal and jokey, with room for fan drawings, a letters page (Sue’s Lettuce [sic]), and a crossword puzzle drawn by Paul’s cousin, Bert Danher, a professional crossword compiler.

  The MPL building was Paul’s own, better-organised version of the Apple operation at 3 Savile Row, another handsome townhouse building, and one which Apple finally got around to selling in 1976. Looking back from a time when stars, for security reasons, are usually concerned that the public don’t know where they live and do business, the Beatles had always been refreshingly public about their place of work. They put themselves on the high street with Apple in the Sixties, and Paul did the same with MPL now. Anybody who was interested could find his new office easily, and even if fans couldn’t get past the girls on reception they could sit in Soho Square watching the building for Paul who was often to be seen walking about the area, using local restaurants and popping into the Nellie Dean pub. He still uses 1 Soho Square as his business headquarters and can be seen occasionally in the neighbourhood.

  Likewise, Paul’s Cavendish Avenue address has always been well known to his fans, though the house has changed over the years. After his marriage to Linda, especially since they had children, Cavendish transformed from 1960s bachelor pad into family home, with a scruffy, lived-in feel, the kids hurtling about followed by their dogs, none of whom seemed house-trained, hand prints and crayon marks on the walls, often under valuable artwork, paw prints and dog mess on the rugs, while the McCartneys’ large back garden put the neighbours in mind of the TV sit-com The Good Life. In this popular Seventies’ comedy a middle-class couple turn their suburban garden into a small-holding complete with livestock. Similarly Linda had taken to growing vegetables in her back garden, which also included a small zoo of animals featuring rabbits, ducks and chickens, the latter roosting in Paul’s Rolls Royce after he carelessly left a window open. It cost £6,000 ($9,180) to have the Rolls re-upholstered.

  The McCartney cockerel woke the whole avenue at dawn. ‘It wouldn’t just crow, it would escape, and you would see all the kids running down the street after [it],’ laughs Adrian Grumi, who grew up in Cavendish Avenue with the McCartney children. Adrian’s mother was less than impressed when Paul and Linda stabled four horses in their garden. Granted, the houses had been built with stables, to pull the carriages of the Victorian gentry who originally lived here, but it was an incongruous sight in 1976/77 to see the McCartneys clip-clopping out of their gate on Sunday mornings, under the mistaken belief they could go riding in Regent’s Park. ‘They had their helmets and all sorts of things, and the jodhpurs, just to go along the bottom of the street to the top of the street. They used to poo, the horses, and the neighbours went mad,’ says Mrs Grumi.

  The McCartneys were in fact less often in St John’s Wood nowadays, spending more time at their Sussex bolthole, Waterfall, even though the house was too small for a family of five. As in Scotland, it was the privacy and simplicity of country life that appealed. ‘It was great [for Paul] to get away from being a superstar to being just a family man,’ notes Denny Laine. In September 1976, Paul began improving and expanding his Sussex property, making a planning application for the erection of a stable block and, unusually, for a 70ft observation tower, both of which were granted. The tower attracted a great deal of media attention, not least because it looked like something from a prisoner-of-war camp. Newspapers published pictures of the tower as part of fanciful stories about the high security at Paul’s Sussex home, which the neighbours were apparently calling Paulditz, a pun on another popular TV show of the day, the POW drama Colditz. In fact, Paul had little personal security and, rather than erecting the tower to watch for intruders, he wanted to be able to look out over the tree canopy. ‘You see, when you are right in the forest, there’s no views, no outlook, you were just in the trees,’ explains his neighbour Veronica Languish. ‘So when he had that tower built he could see further around.’ The Languishes were among the local farming families who had watched the arrival of the McCartneys with curiosity in the late Sixties, but grew to like the family. ‘He fits in. He is just like everybody else really to us now, he’s been here long enough,’ says Mrs Languish, having known Paul over 30 years. Like so many people, Mrs Languish was particularly fond of Linda, who made the biggest effort to meet and befriend local people. ‘She was a nice girl, Linda, she was a very friendly girl.’ And the McCartneys’ marriage was evidently solid. That Christmas, Linda bought Paul one of his best presents: the double bass Bill Black played on Elvis Presley’s Sun sessions, while there was further good news when a live triple album of their US tour, Wings Over America, went to number one in the United States.

  ALL ABOARD

  In the first week of December 1976, the Sex Pistols had burst upon the consciousness of the British public with an outrageous appearance on tea-time television, the band members cursing and baiting the presenter on the show to the extent that they made front-page news the next day. Punk rock had arrived, and many young Britons took it to their hearts, feeling themselves to have more in common with scruffs like Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious than a millionaire rock star like Paul McCartney. Even Paul’s daughter Heather, now 14, had turned punk. Paul tried to write a punk-style song to entertain her, named, hilariously, ‘Boil Crisis’, but at the age of 34 he was too long in the tooth to empathise with rebellious teens.

  In March, Paul had allowed the orchestral Thrillington album to be released, six years after he had recorded the curiosity, with a jokey promotional campaign that involved placing short, enigmatic items in the personal column of London’s Evening Standard, supposedly written by the fictional
band leader, Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington. Releasing an album of tea-dance instrumentals the same month as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ showed how out of step with youth culture Paul had become. But did it matter? He and Linda were rich and happy. They were expecting another baby- Paul hoped for a boy- and plans were being laid to make the next Wings album in the Caribbean. No wonder punks resented him.

  Ten years on from the summer of love, Great Britain was a much less attractive and confident place to be than in the mid-Sixties. As 1976 segued into ’77 high interest rates, strikes and mounting unemployment were all symptoms of an ailing economy, while the euphemistically termed ‘troubles’ of Northern Ireland continued to result in bloody murder both in the province and on mainland Britain, with bomb scares and actual blasts commonplace in the capital. In the music industry the talk was all about the Sex Pistols, the band having been sacked from EMI by its new chairman Sir John Read as too controversial for a firm that had built its reputation on making recordings of such great British composers as Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar and, well, Lennon & McCartney. Paul was a favourite son at EMI HQ, and continued to patronise Abbey Road Studios, which had become the most famous recording facility in the world thanks to the Beatles. The zebra crossing outside the studios had become a major tourist attraction in the few years since Abbey Road was released, fans coming from all over the world to have their picture taken walking across, to the annoyance of cab and bus drivers who were obliged to stop for them.

  In the grey days of February 1977, Paul took Wings back into the EMI studios on Abbey Road to work on their new London Town album, named after the title song, which sought to express the feel of the capital in winter. While there is a definite gloomy charm to London at this time of year, Paul soon tired of the dark, damp days of winter. He announced to his band that, after a break in proceedings, Wings would resume recording London Town in the Caribbean (again probably partly for tax reasons). What’s more they would do so on a boat.

  The McCartneys flew to Jamaica in April for a family holiday, before travelling to the US Virgin Islands where Wings’ advance party had hired three vessels, including the motor launch the Fair Carol, into the stern of which Geoff Emerick and Mark Vigars fitted a 24-track recording machine. Captain Tony Garton feared his vessel would sink under the weight. A trimaran, El Toro, was hired for the McCartney family, that is Paul and Linda, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, and the girls Heather, Mary and Stella; while a third vessel, Samala, accommodated Wings, the roadies and the engineers. The McCartney family came aboard at St Thomas, then sailed to St John to collect Denny, Jimmy and Joe.

  This eccentric Caribbean adventure began well, with the band and crew diving into the water to swim from one boat to another, delighting in the coral and brightly coloured fish. Fun was had shouting ‘Shark!’ when friends were bathing. One day a dolphin rose to the surface, cocking its head as if to listen to Paul playing guitar. As the sessions continued, however, there were numerous shipboard mishaps. Alan Crowder slipped and broke his foot, returning from hospital on crutches like Long John Silver; Denny Laine got sunstroke; Jimmy McCulloch temporarily lost his hearing; and Geoff Emerick electrocuted himself. At night, with the three boats moored together, everybody would meet for a long communal supper under the stars. One night, Paul entertained everybody with a production of a story called The Two Little Fairies , narrating and playing piano, while his daughters Mary and Stella acted out the parts of the fairies. Too old for this sort of childish nonsense, Heather was to be found skulking in a corner listening to the Damned.

  Drink and weed were part of the nightlife, and when the boats were moored in Watermelon Bay two US Park Rangers came aboard to remonstrate with Paul about the noise. The following day the Rangers delivered a letter, warning that if they came back and found drugs onboard arrests would follow. Spooked, Captain Garton tried to impose order on his rock star client, who told him he didn’t need the aggravation and hired a new boat, the Wanderlust. Later, a song of that name appeared on the Tug of War album, the lyrics making it clear that Paul considered hassles with the authorities over dope a petty matter.

  When summer came, the McCartneys headed back to Scotland. Denny Laine and his partner Jo Jo were living at the time in a cottage on Paul’s estate so that he and Paul could write together. One afternoon Paul came over to the house with an idea for a song about their holiday home. ‘He had the chorus. He already had the “Mull of Kintyre” title,’ remembers Laine, referring to the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. ‘He wanted to write a song that reminded him of the area.’ The men had a couple of glasses of whisky, then sat outside Laine’s cottage and finished the song, looking at the scenery: ‘that was the way that song came about, looking around and seeing what was there. You didn’t have to come up with anything. It was just in front of you.’ The finished song was a waltz with good, poetic lyrics. The words are in fact noticeably superior to all Paul’s solo work to date, which is explained by the fact that McCartney didn’t write them. At least not all of them. While Paul wrote the chorus, and already had the title, Laine says he wrote ‘quite a lot’ of the rest of ‘Mull of Kintyre’, meaning that Paul has to share the credit for what may be his best post-Beatles lyric. Laine says his input is strongly felt, for example, in the following romantic verse:Far have I travelled and much have I seen

  Dark distant mountains with valleys of green

  Past painted deserts, the sunsets on fire

  As he carries me home to the Mull of Kintyre

  The recording of the song was highly unusual, using the services of the Campbeltown Pipe Band, one member of which was Jimmy McGeachy, teenaged son of a piper of the same name. Aged 15 when ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was recorded, Jimmy was in his final year at Campbeltown Grammar School, after which he would become an apprentice fitter in the shipyard. In his spare time he played in the pipe band. The band members met at Castle Hill Church two evenings a week to practise, and when summer came they sallied forth in Royal Stewart tartan kilts, sporrans and feathered bonnets to perform in the streets of the town and at regional competitions. As with the Black Dyke Mills Band, there was considerable community pride in the band, with youngsters always eager to join. Jimmy saw no conflict between playing drums in the pipe band and drumming in his school punk band.

  The Pipe Major was a former Scots Guardsman named Tony Wilson, a larger-than-life character often to be found in the pub. One day Paul invited Wilson up to High Park to play him his new waltz, asking if the pipe band, whom he’d last had up to High Park when he was with Jane Asher, would like to play on a recording. Wilson put the idea to his colleagues at their next meeting at Castle Hill. ‘We thought it was a wind-up, obviously,’ notes Ian McKerral, then a young piper. ‘We knew Paul had a farm in Kintyre and we used to see him around the town, he was quite regular, but Tony was a bit of a character and we thought he was having us on.’ Tony was in earnest, however. He chalked Paul’s tune on the blackboard, and they started rehearsing it.

  On the evening of Tuesday 9 August 1977, Wilson took seven pipers and seven drummers, all dressed in tartan, to Low Ranachan Farm. Geoff Emerick and Mark Vigars were there to make the recording. ‘All of a sudden the dogs come on down, there’s the sheepdog Martha, and then the McCartneys. He’s there in front of us. “Hi, how are you going?” His family is all there, who were just kids at the time, Mary, Stella, and Heather was my age,’ recalls Jimmy McGeachy, who got to know Heather a little. ‘She was quite clingy, she was always at mother’s side …’ Denny Laine and Joe English were also present, but not Jimmy McCulloch. The volatile guitarist had parted company with Wings after a silly incident at the farm when, no doubt drunk, he’d thrown eggs against a wall. The eggs came from Linda’s pet chickens and she was upset. As a result, Jimmy left to join the Small Faces.

  Wings had already recorded the basics of ‘Mull of Kintyre’. Now the pipers recorded their part, priming their pipes by inflating the sheepskin bags, then unleashing the fierce, weird, a
lmost mechanical noise of the instruments. Paul counted them in, for the pipes aren’t heard until after the third verse. When this was done to his satisfaction, he went outside and recorded the drums, yelling ‘Whoo-hooo!’ at the end, as can be heard on the record. With the work done, Paul went away and reappeared with a wheelbarrow loaded with cans of McEwan’s Export beer, which the pipe band members drank while Paul tried on John McGeachy’s tartan and attempted to squeeze a tune out of the pipes, which was harder than it looked. Linda made sandwiches for the men. ‘She was a lovely woman,’ says John McGeachy, the town mechanic. ‘You could meet her in the streets of Campbeltown- I met her quite a bit-and she would always stop to chat …’ Young Jimmy McGeachy (no relation) wandered inside the barn and had a go on Joe English’s drums, Linda coming to join him for a jam session. ‘She makes you feel really welcome, you know. There [was] a warmth about her.’ Although eight months pregnant, Linda sneaked a cigarette from young Jimmy. ‘Don’t tell Paul,’ she whispered.