Fab

by Howard Sounes

  McCartney and Wonder continued their collaboration in England, going into Eric Stewart’s Strawberry South Studios to work on a co-written song, ‘What’s That You’re Doing?’ During the session Paul fell into a lugubrious mood. Recalls Stewart:He said, ‘I’ve just realised that John has gone. John’s gone. He’s dead and he’s not coming back.’ And he looked completely dismayed, like shocked at something that had just suddenly hit [him]. I said, ’Well, it’s been a few weeks now.’ He said, ‘I know, Eric, but I’ve just realised.’ It was one of those things maybe he wanted to say something to him, but it was too late to say it then. I think personally that Paul seriously missed John’s input, even when the songs were written by one or the other … You didn’t have John saying, ‘That’s not good enough,’ and I think on a lot of tracks Paul has lacked that brutal honesty.

  Paul had written a new song with John in mind, ‘Here Today’, in which he sang about no longer holding back the tears. George Martin graced the number with a Beatlesque string arrangement.

  A few weeks later, in April 1981, Ritchie married Barbara Bach at Marylebone Register Office, where Paul and Linda had married in 1969. The McCartneys were surprised to see that the registrar was the same Joe Jevans who’d married them. Anybody watching Paul and Linda at the ceremony would have to say they looked as happy together as they did on their wedding day 12 years before.

  The wedding reception was at Rags, a West End nightclub, with George and Olivia Harrison joining the Starkeys and McCartneys in a Beatles reunion. Other guests included Neil Aspinall and their former press officer Derek Taylor. The musicians gathered around the piano, Paul leading the company in a singsong. Everybody was having a great time, the kids digging into the star-shaped wedding cake. Paul’s four children had Beatle cousins to run around with in Ringo’s kids, Zak, Jason and Lee, aged 15, 13 and 10; while George’s son, Dhani, was still only two.

  Despite the warm family atmosphere at the reception, this proved a particularly challenging afternoon for Paul. Denny Laine chose the day to announce he was leaving Wings, which was not much of a surprise, but ended a chapter in Paul’s career on a not entirely happy note. Denny had been grumbling about tax problems that Paul’s office couldn’t seem to sort out for him, despite having offered to manage his affairs, and moaning about the tour revenue he’d lost because of Paul’s Japanese bust. He went off to concentrate on his solo career, which soon petered away into negligible record sales and melancholy guest appearances at Beatles conventions.

  More upsetting than Denny’s departure, Paul heard some home truths about himself at Ritchie’s wedding reception. He said some disagreeable things, too. Talking with his fellow guests Paul gave the impression he was unhappy about a memoir his brother Mike had recently published, the book Thank U Very Much. It included a lot of family history and many personal photographs that Paul apparently felt would have been best kept private. Looking at Derek Taylor, Paul made a critical comment equating Mike’s new book with Derek trading on his friendship with the Beatles for a radio interview back in the Sixties. ‘It’s always a bit funny when someone you know well does something like that,’ Paul remarked sharply, censuring Derek and Mike. Then Neil told Paul that Aunt Mimi was upset Paul hadn’t called her since John’s death. It hadn’t crossed Paul’s mind to do so. He had only known Mimi briefly when he was a kid, and she hadn’t been particularly welcoming towards him. It surprised Paul that Mimi wanted to hear from him now.

  Paul was also thrown into confusion by a conversation he had with Cilla Black, a friend since Cavern days who had gone on to have a successful career as a television personality. Paul told Cilla how much he liked her husband, Bobby Willis, who’d managed her since Brian died. ‘Bobby’s a nice bloke,’ he told Cilla.

  ‘Ah, but what do you really think, Paul? You don’t mean that, do you, you’re getting at something?’ replied Cilla quizzically. It was as if everybody believed Paul spoke with forked tongue.

  The weirdest conversation of the day took place in the gents’ toilet at Rags, when Paul found himself standing at the urinals next to Ritchie himself.

  He said there were two times in his life in which I had done him in. Then he said that he’d done himself in three times. I happened to be spitting something out, and by chance the spit fell on his jacket. I said, ‘There you go, now I’ve done you three times. We’re equal.’ I laughed it off. It was affectionate. It wasn’t a row … But now, I keep thinking all the time, what are the two times that Ringo thinks I put him down …?

  Paul asked this question in a peevish telephone call to the writer Hunter Davies shortly after Ritchie’s wedding reception. He also complained to Davies about Philip Norman’s new book, Shout!, a lively history of the Beatles which left the reader with the impression that Paul was a shallow young man compared to the more substantial figure of Lennon. This was all part of the problem of how the public perceived Paul vis-à-vis John. Paul reminded Hunter grumpily that John had hurt his feelings many times, noting that Lennon could be a ‘manoeuvring swine, which no one seemed to realise. Now, since his death, he’s become Martin Luther Lennon.’ When Hunter put these injudicious comments into print, they served to do Paul’s image further damage. The mainstream press in Britain still liked Macca - they always would - but there was a sizeable minority of the nation’s media and public that had an increasingly low opinion of Paul.

  There was more bad publicity for the star that summer when Angie McCartney sold the story of her relationship with her stepson to the Sun - a three-part serial headlined ‘The mean side of Paul McCartney’. Angie described how she tried to make a living as a theatrical agent after Jim died, but soon got into debt. When she wrote to Paul to say she would have to sell her home in Gayton and her possessions to clear the debts, he showed little sympathy, and when she tried to get him involved in a charity concert she was promoting in 1978 they had a heck of a row, Paul accusing her of using his name and interfering in his career, a conversation that ended with Angie putting the phone down on him. As she sank deeper into financial difficulties there were further unpleasant conversations with Paul, who advised Angie, then almost 50, to pull herself together and make a fresh start. ‘I was tempted to remind Paul that Jim McCartney had told me in the past that Ruth and I would be looked after for the rest of our lives.’ When Angie sold Paul’s birth certificate to a Beatles collector some years later, Paul washed his hands of his stepmother. ‘I consider that she married my dad for money. There are some people you just don’t bother with,’ he said coldly.

  Many friends knew a different Paul to the controlling, penny-pinching character described by Angie, someone capable of spontaneous acts of generosity - helping Howie Casey buy his house, for example, giving Eric Stewart an expensive drum machine for his birthday - and indeed Paul had been generous with Angie and Ruth McCartney, as he continued to be with other family members. If he suspected he was being taken advantage of, however, he could become implacable. An instance came in the summer of 1981 when a former member of the Quarry Men tried to sell the first record Paul ever made.

  The reader will recall that back in 1958 Paul, John and George, together with their drummer Colin Hanton and occasional pianist John Duff Lowe, chipped in their pocket money to cut a 78 rpm shellac disc, making a recording of Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and Paul’s ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. This disc was passed between the boys so each had a chance to play and enjoy it at home. As Paul recalled for the Beatles’ Anthology, John had the disc for one week. ‘I had it for a week, and passed it on to George, who had it for a week. Then Colin had it for a week and passed it to Duff Lowe - who kept it for twenty-three years.’

  As John Duff Lowe moved from job to job, got married, divorced and married again, he took the shellac disc with him. For almost a quarter of a century the record languished in a succession of drawers. In 1981 John contacted Sotheby’s, who offered to put ‘his’ shellac disc into an auction of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. In advance of the sale, a
story about the disc appeared in the Sunday Times, upon which Paul telephoned John Duff Lowe’s mum, who still lived in Liverpool, asking John to ring him. Guessing what McCartney wanted, Duff Lowe didn’t respond immediately. The next thing he knew he received a hand-delivered letter from the London law firm Clintons to inform him that Paul could take legal action to prevent the sale of the disc, urging him instead to contact Paul personally ‘so that the matter can be discussed and settled in a friendly way’. Duff Lowe called the Sussex number he’d been given. ‘I ring and Linda’s there. She says, “He’s not in. He’ll be in about 7:30.” So then Paul rings me and we have a long discussion about the record, and about old times …’ Paul said John would probably receive letters from his lawyers, but he should ignore them. ‘It’s just the way these guys write. It’s not me!’ John took this with a grain of salt, gaining the impression Paul was trying to charm him into giving him the disc for free, asking if he’d like to come to London and go out on the town. No. The disc was for sale, and John wanted to know what Paul was willing to pay for it.

  The former friends negotiated over the shellac disc, the price soon reaching into the thousands. John Duff Lowe could hear McCartney becoming annoyed at the other end of the line. At one point it sounded like he’d snapped his pencil in frustration. Finally they agreed a price. Duff Lowe won’t say how much; he promised Paul he wouldn’t, but it seems to have been in the low five figures, which is to say the price of an average family home in 1981. A couple of days later, Stephen Shrimpton of MPL, accompanied by a lawyer from Clintons, came to meet John Duff Lowe in Worcester. He took the men to his bank, where he had the disc in a briefcase in a safe deposit box. ‘I opened the case, showed them the record, and obviously they saw it was in one piece. It was all that it was expected to be. The deal was done and they went off to London.’ The next day John rang Paul to ask what he thought of the record. ‘But the phone had been cut off.’ Having got what he wanted, Paul clearly didn’t want his old friend to contact him again.

  That summer Paul applied for planning permission to knock down the derelict farmhouse he’d acquired in Sussex, and build a new five-bedroom family home. At present the McCartneys were squeezed into a two-bedroom cottage, which was far from ideal considering they had four children, aged between three and 18, a slightly mad arrangement bearing in mind how rich Paul was, but illustrative of his desire to maintain a tight family unit away from public life. Paul had tried as far as possible to bring the kids up in the way that Jim and Mary McCartney had raised him and Mike. In fact, he’d modelled the new house on 20 Forthlin Road: drawing up plans for a much larger but nonetheless modestly proportioned brick dwelling, the hub of which was the kitchen. Paul then handed his drawings to a firm of architects to create detailed plans. The proposed house was by no means extravagant, and notably lacking in rock star accoutrements. It included a master bedroom and sundeck upstairs for Paul and Lin, behind which were four bedrooms for the children. Downstairs there would be a series of interconnecting living rooms, leading to a large kitchen, with a semi-circular wall of windows overlooking the fields. There were no guest rooms, interestingly. Although a sociable man, outside of family and work Paul and Linda didn’t have many close friends, and in any event there were other properties on the estate where guests could be accommodated. Built in red brick, with a steep-pitched tile roof and two tall chimneys, the house was slightly ugly, especially from the back, which most resembled a corpy house. In this sense the new home was an expression of Paul’s nostalgia for his Liverpool childhood, a time that had become golden in his mind. It was therefore especially disturbing for him to see news coverage of riots in Liverpool in 1981.

  Urban riots occurred across England that summer, during a period of industrial unrest and rising unemployment, with the young and disaffected attacking property and the police in London, Bristol, Birmingham and Chester. Some of the worst scenes were in the Toxteth district of Liverpool, not far from Paul’s old school. Long-term unemployment and racial tensions in the inner city contributed to two intense weeks of trouble resulting in many injuries, one fatality, and £11 million worth of damage ($16.8m). In the aftermath, Paul resolved to do something to help the regeneration of the city, though he was not sure what. In time his philanthropy was channelled into the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), an institution that would cater to talented young people, such as Paul and John had been, who wanted to make a career in show business.

  At the same time the old issue of who owned the songs Paul and John had written together re-emerged, with McCartney given a rare opportunity to regain control of the Beatles’ catalogue. For the past few years Northern Songs had been in the hands of the mogul Lew Grade, who’d struck up a friendly rapport with Paul, giving him to understand that he would have first refusal if Grade ever wanted to sell. In the autumn of 1981, the recently ennobled Lord Grade offered Northern Songs to Paul for £20 million ($30.6m). Paul suggested to Yoko Ono that they put up half the money each. John’s widow thought the price too high and tried to get the company for £ 5 million ($7.6m). Lord Grade considered the offer insufficient and decided to include Northern Songs in the sale of his much larger organisation, Associated Communications Corps (ACC), which made acquiring the songs much more expensive. Even at this stage, Paul would have been wise to enter the bidding for ACC. Instead he conflated business with justice and complained publicly about the unfairness of what was happening. ‘[Lord Grade] should not screw me for what he could get from somebody else,’ Paul moaned to The Times. ‘I’m not interested in buying his whole company. I just want my songs. Give me back my babies, Lew!’ Grade subsequently sold ACC to the Australian businessman Robert Holmes A’Court for £45 million ($68.8m), making him the owner of ATV Music in which Northern Songs was held. In the years to come the value of the song catalogue would multiply, making even £45 million look a bargain. It was a missed opportunity.

  This problem was on Paul’s mind when, on Christmas Day 1981, as he was unwrapping presents at home with the family, the telephone rang. An unfamiliar, high-pitched voice asked for Paul. ‘Who is this?’ asked McCartney gruffly, suspecting a female fan had got his number.

  ‘It’s Michael Jackson.’

  ‘Come on, who is it really?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t believe me?’

  Although Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney were 15 years apart in age, and totally different in almost every respect, the artists stood shoulder-to-shoulder in their careers in 1981-2. Both were prodigiously talented stars who’d enjoyed huge success in their youth. Both were now working with favourite producers on solo albums: Jackson with Quincy Jones on Off the Wall; McCartney with George Martin on the soon-to-be released Tug of War ; and they intended to repeat the formula with their next albums, Jackson working with Jones again on Thriller, McCartney with Martin on Pipes of Peace. It made sense for the musicians to do one another a good turn by co-writing and duetting on songs for their respective LPs, creating the funky ‘Say Say Say’ (and less significantly ‘The Man’) for Pipes of Peace, while ‘The Girl is Mine’ would find a home on Thriller, the most successful album in pop history. By associating himself with a hip young star, Paul also hoped to reach a younger audience, while working with an ex-Beatle flattered the American’s vanity.

  Jackson came to England in the spring of 1981 to meet Paul, checking into a fancy Central London hotel. Paul invited his young friend to the country for the weekend, asking Michael if he would like to go riding with him and Linda in the Sussex woods. The American said he couldn’t.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to get dirty,’ replied Jackson, a peculiar reply which rang alarm bells with the McCartneys. Jackson was clearly strange. Paul did get Michael down to Sussex, and delivered him back to his hotel after the weekend safe and sound, save some Sussex mud on his shoes, the American proclaiming that he’d had a great time. During his visit, Michael asked Paul disingenuously if he had any career advice for him. Paul suggested Jackson
might invest in song publishing, as he had done so successfully. ‘I’m going to buy your songs one day,’ Michael told the older man cheekily.

  ‘Great, good joke,’ Paul replied, little thinking this might actually happen.

  Paul brought Jackson into AIR Studios in London, telling Eric Stewart and his other sidemen that they would have to clear out while Michael recorded. Jacko didn’t want to see or talk to anybody bar Paul and Lin and their four-year-old son James. Between takes Jackson played on the floor with Dee Dee. The guy was weird, but he sang like an angel.

  Paul’s other collaboration with an American star, the Stevie Wonder duet ‘Ebony and Ivory’, proved a massive hit in the spring of 1982, reaching number one in both the UK and USA where it held the top spot for seven weeks, partly thanks to a well-produced video in what was now the video age, MTV having been launched the previous year. Tug of War proceeded to the top of the album charts in both territories. This was in fact the high-water mark in Paul’s post-Beatles career. Though he had enjoyed simultaneous number ones in the UK and US many times, Tug of War was his last post-Beatles album (to date) to achieve the double. All successful show business careers have a golden period, and Paul had been doubly fortunate in reaching the top with the Beatles in the Sixties and again with Wings in the Seventies. Paul would remain a great star during the decades ahead, but he would never sell as many new albums again.

  With clear evidence that a duet with a major American artist was a winning formula Paul and Linda went to LA to work further with Michael Jackson on ‘The Girl is Mine’, which led to a reunion with Peggy Lipton, the actress who’d set her cap at Paul in the Sixties. Peggy ultimately lost out to Linda McCartney at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fourteen years on, Peggy was married by coincidence to Michael Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones who, knowing of his wife’s history, insisted they all meet to show no hard feelings. McCartney was relaxed about it, greeting ‘Mrs Jones’ with a friendly peck on the cheek, Linda saying how nice it was to see her again, all of which Peggy found so overwhelming she went home and cried.