Fab

by Howard Sounes

  For treating you the way I did

  But something took hold of me

  and I acted like a dustbin lid

  (‘The Other Me’)

  One wonders why Paul didn’t abandon this, and similar weak songs, or make the effort to rework them - a thought that has troubled his friends. Film-maker David Puttnam asks whether there may be a fundamental shortcoming in Paul as an artist.

  I feel about Paul the way I feel about Ridley Scott: both men of immense, immense, immense talent who on their death bed are likely to look back on their career with some satisfaction, but with some dissatisfaction, in that I’m not sure that either of them - Ridley and Paul, both very wealthy and everything - I’m not sure either of them have absolutely delivered what was in them.

  Lord Puttnam believes that, in the years since the Beatles, Paul has not been able to summon the crucial extra effort - he quantifies this as an additional 15 per cent - required to transform good work into something exceptional.

  Was it that it was too hard, was it that it was too challenging? Or was it that he was a reasonably contented guy and he didn’t think it was worth putting himself through that amount of pain? But the difference between good and great is that last 15 per cent, and the really great artists aren’t artists who have one bright, brilliant moment in their lives.

  In Lord Puttnam’s film analogy, Ridley Scott made at least one classic, Blade Runner, but directors like Akira Kurosawa are a class apart because they found it within themselves to make many important films over a long period.

  Frank Capra is more like Paul - he didn’t ever really make a decent film by the time he reached 40, [and] if he’s the artist I think he is, if he’s as sensitive as I think he is, [Paul] will be absolutely aware [of this] and he will be troubled by the question. He won’t have any answer for it.

  THE WORST MUSICAL EVER MADE?

  The year George Orwell chose for his dystopian prophecy started well for Paul McCartney, then turned sour. After ringing in 1984 on Merseyside, Paul and Linda flew to Barbados for some winter sunshine, renting a beach house from friends in the Guinness family. Eric and Gloria Stewart were staying in a nearby house, so they spent time with the McCartneys. Paul received good news from home when he was informed that the Berlin judge had thrown out Bettina Hübers’ paternity claim, after Paul had passed both blood tests. He was not the father after all. Paul was magnanimous in victory, remarkably so considering how bothersome Bettina and her mother had been over the years, paying not only his own legal costs but also their £60,000 costs ($91,800), on the basis that mother and daughter would be ruined financially otherwise, and hoping they would now have the good grace to fall silent. On the contrary, Bettina took the view that Paul’s generosity proved his guilt, and continued to assert that he was her dad. ‘McCartney paid for everything, the tests, [his] legal costs, also my legal costs. No person does such a thing out of kindness,’ protests the woman who continues to argue to this day that Paul tricked the doctors.

  A few nights after hearing he’d won the German paternity case, Paul and Linda were sitting on the veranda of their rented beach house in Barbados, chatting with Eric and Gloria Stewart, when they heard a tap at the door. Linda went to see who it was. ‘Christ, it’s the police!’ she exclaimed. There was marijuana on the coffee table. ‘My wife grabbed the bag, stuffed it up her skirt,’ recalls Eric. Paul asked Gloria to give him the bag back, not wanting her to get into trouble for his sake. Then the police came in. ‘They said, “We believe you have some marijuana here.” Paul said, “Yeah, I’m having a smoke. I buy it on the beach here. What are you talking about? You must know about this.”’ He showed the police the grass, as a result of which the McCartneys were taken to the police station. It transpired that their butler had informed on them. When Paul and Linda were released on bail, they didn’t feel comfortable returning to the Guinness villa, taking sanctuary instead with the Stewarts. The following Monday, Paul and Linda appeared before a magistrate in Holetown, pleaded guilty to possession, and were fined a nominal $100 each. But Paul was furious: furious at the butler for going to the police in the first place, and angry with the police for busting him for something sold openly on the island, complaining to his friends that he and Linda had become targets for harassment. ‘We’re going back. This holiday is over,’ he told Eric, booking the next flight to London.

  The McCartneys arrived at Heathrow on Tuesday 17 January 1984, disembarking to go through customs before boarding a second, private plane. In the process, an item of luggage was held back. Linda was waiting for it on their private jet when a customs official came aboard.

  ‘Have you found my luggage?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, and that’s not all we found,’ came the reply. Linda was under arrest for bringing cannabis into the UK.

  Despite what had happened in Barbados, Linda had carelessly brought some grass back home, a tiny amount, less than 0.2 of an ounce, but enough to be charged. The following week Linda appeared before magistrates in Uxbridge to plead guilty to importing cannabis. It was explained in court that Linda assumed the Barbadian police cleaned out her stash when they searched her belongings, and didn’t realise she had a scraping of weed left in her bag. She accepted a £75 fine ($114), telling the press: ‘I am glad it is all over with. It is much ado about nothing … It is horrible to feel like a criminal when you know you are not.’ Be that as it may, the McCartneys had now been in trouble for drugs on six occasions in six countries, a record that casts doubt on their judgement and the example set to their children. Paul admitted this was a concern, saying he and Lin never smoked dope in front of the kids, or took hard drugs like heroin or cocaine,53 and that they had explained to the children their view that marijuana was less harmful than alcohol. British tabloid newspapers, staffed as they then were by journalists who drank heavily but took a moralistic view of other drugs, mocked the McCartneys with headlines such as THE PIPES OF POT (a pun on Paul’s new album Pipes of Peace). Then, much more damaging allegations were made by their old friend Denny Laine.

  In an unremittingly negative series of articles headlined ‘The Real McCartney’, Laine told Sun readers that Paul and Lin habitually smoked two ounces of grass a day when he knew them in Wings and routinely smuggled their stash through customs. Laine said that Paul and Linda got a thrill out of cheating authority like this, laughing at the police who escorted them. He further alleged that the McCartneys, in their same thrill-seeking way, routinely stole small items from hotels. Habitual dope smoking, he suggests, had a detrimental effect on Paul’s music. ‘That’s why Paul’s albums take ages and ages to make. He just cannot be decisive about anything.’ He also described Paul as a tight-fisted, inscrutable man, with few friends, who liked the sound of his own voice and patronised those around him, including his brother; while some MPL staff lived in fear of their boss. Finally, Denny mocked Paul’s complex about his mother. ‘He’s a mummy’s boy who didn’t have a mummy after his mother died when he was 14. He would be lost without Linda now.’

  These stories, published over four days in January/February 1984, constituted the most personal attack on Paul since John Lennon had savaged him in Rolling Stone in 1971. Like Lennon, Laine had been close enough to McCartney to speak with authority. Paul was furious, though he didn’t sue.

  All of this trouble and bad publicity forms the backdrop to the completion of Give My Regards to Broad Street, the project that had ballooned from a TV special into a multi-million dollar movie. In the early part of 1984 Paul was shuttling between his home in Sussex, the MPL office in Soho, and Elstree film studios, where Peter Webb was directing production numbers on three sound stages.54 As a release date approached, executives from 20th Century Fox jetted in for meetings with McCartney and Webb, who had found directing a non-acting leading man ‘a problem’. Further complications were caused by the fact that Paul was simultaneously working on a soundtrack album, with covers of Beatles songs, new versions of recent solo material, such as ‘Ballroom Dancing’ a
nd ‘Wanderlust’, and a terrific new theme song, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, which he’d written over a weekend in response to Webb telling him they needed an extra song to end the picture. Celebrity mates were roped in to play on these tracks, including Dave Gilmour, Ritchie and Eric Stewart, with the A-team of George Martin and Geoff Emerick in the control room. Such a gathering of talent created a soundtrack album far superior to the movie it rode piggy-back on.

  Peter Webb flew to Los Angeles to screen a rough cut of Broad Street for Fox. ‘They had paid $6.8 million for a Hollywood musical and they got Paul McCartney’s home movie, albeit nicely shot,’ says the director, who recalls Harvey Weinstein leaning over his shoulder at the end of the screening and saying, ‘Next time show me the script.’ Editing was done in London, Webb commuting to Sussex to show Paul and Linda the result. ‘Linda was quite involved in giving it quality control … we’d meet at this secret recording studio. It was a bit too secret because we could never find it.’

  The secret venue was Hog Hill Mill, a windmill Paul had bought a couple of years back, near the village of Icklesham, itself not far from Peasmarsh, subsequently having the mill restored and a recording studio, offices and living quarters built under its sails. The complex was surrounded by a dry moat so passers-by using the public footpaths over the hill could not see into the windows, and included a private museum of Beatles memorabilia, including the boys’ old Vox amps, Paul’s Höfner violin bass, the mellotron he played on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and other pieces of vintage Abbey Road equipment, displayed behind sliding glass doors.

  There was friction between the McCartneys and Webb at this late stage in the movie-making process. The director didn’t always feel his work was respected, ‘let alone appreciated’, by Paul, gaining the impression that the star wished he’d hired a name director; ‘we were in the big time, but we were the pub team [and I was] the pub director. I’m sure McCartney would have loved to have a Dick Lester.’55 Webb then suffered a serious personal setback. He says he was ‘hospitalised’, refusing to clarify whether this was for a mental or a physical problem, only going so far as to say guardedly that he was ‘removed from the frame’ and ‘hospitalised for a lengthy period’ towards the end of the production, with the result that Paul had to direct a final sequence of the picture himself. ‘I think he was concerned about “my health”. He must have been because there were [so many] flowers in my house,’ says Webb. ‘I thought somebody had died.’

  This unhappy episode was a precursor to the premières of Give My Regards to Broad Street in October 1984. There were four major premières, Paul and Linda travelling first to the USA to open the picture in New York and LA, followed by a Liverpool screening. Before the première at the Liverpool Odeon, Paul was honoured with the Freedom of the City, a ceremony in the Picton Library - where he’d received his Coronation prize in 1953 - and a civic luncheon, during which Paul was reunited with Ann Ventre, the Forthlin Road neighbour he’d taken to the pictures as a lad. Nowadays Ann worked as catering manager for Liverpool City Council (a new name for the old Corporation). Although they hadn’t seen each other since he left home, Paul recognised Ann instantly, and asked after their old neighbours. The première that evening went better than in New York and LA. ‘The [audience] were polite. There was applause at the end,’ recalls BBC Radio Merseyside broadcaster Spencer Leigh. ‘It was evident there wasn’t much story, but you hadn’t seen the musical sequences before and they were OK.’

  The London première was more important, drawing the national newspaper critics to the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square. The day started with a macabre ill omen when one of Paul’s Cavendish Avenue neighbours, a fellow musician named Wells Kelly, the drummer with the band Meatloaf, came home from a party, put his key in the front door of a house across the road from Paul’s, and choked to death on his own vomit before he could get inside. Neighbours passed by the house for hours the next day before anybody realised that the man standing rigidly at the front door was a corpse. That evening, the audience in the Empire watched another theatrical death.

  Broad Street featured Paul McCartney playing himself in an old-fashioned jukebox musical, the scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of a story. Unless he got the master tapes of his new record back by midnight, Paul stood to lose his company. The songs were strong, the musical sequences attractively filmed, and Paul was adequate as a leading man, but the dialogue was witless, the supporting characters ill-defined, the story bereft of interest. Eric Stewart sat aghast in the audience with fellow members of 10cc.

  I remember Kevin Godley turning round to me [at the end] and saying, ‘How could they spend that much money on a pile of crap like this? And why have they let it out?’ ‘Yes, well, are you going to tell Paul that?’ … There was a very embarrassing silence at the end.

  Paul had committed to an intensive publicity campaign for this turkey, speaking earnestly in the picture’s defence to anybody who would listen while critics gave him a unanimous thumbs down. On top of a sheaf of bad reviews in the USA, Quentin Falk told readers of the Daily Mail: ‘this is a truly terrible movie’, the blame for which had to rest with Paul. ‘His screenplay is relentlessly banal, formless and, most unforgivingly, humourless.’ Met with scorn and mockery, Paul became defensive, then gave up the film as a lost cause. For his director, Peter Webb, making the picture was ‘a damaging experience in every way’. After getting out of hospital, he went back to making commercials.

  There was a financial cost. Paul had struck deals with 20th Century Fox to the effect that the studio would lend MPL $5 million (£3.2m) to make the picture, secured on rights to the film. MPL was now obliged to pay this money back, as well as meeting a $1.8 million (£1.1m) shortfall. Consequently, MPL profits were significantly down for a couple of years. Some of the financial damage was offset by the success of the soundtrack album, Give My Regards to Broad Street, the rights to which Paul had wisely withheld. The album made number one in the UK, while the single ‘No More Lonely Nights’ was a top five hit in the USA and UK. The single might have done better still - it is one of his best post-Beatles songs - had it not been associated with such a bad film. All told, this celluloid adventure had been a calamitous mistake, one which Paul would excise from his CV, hardly ever referring to it, and, according to Webb, refusing permission for its DVD release in the UK. When Paul came to look back on the picture, he noted that Steven Spielberg required five drafts of every movie script. Paul acknowledged that he should have worked as hard: ‘you’ve got to have that fifth draft’. Unfortunately, as David Puttnam observed, Paul didn’t possess the will to make that extra effort, preferring to get by on talent. It is a character flaw that has marred his career.

  There was some consolation in the animation short that accompanied Broad Street on its theatrical release. Paired with the picture was Rupert and the Frog Song, co-written and executive produced by Paul, and directed by Geoff Dunbar, as a pilot for their Rupert Bear movie. It was well received, winning a BAFTA. The theme song ‘We All Stand Together’, though often mocked as an example of McCartney at his most lightweight, should be heard as a children’s song, in the same tradition as ‘Yellow Submarine’, in which context it is perfectly charming. Released as a single in November 1984, the song made number three in the UK charts and won Paul his 18th Ivor Novello.

  Paul felt encouraged to press on with the feature-length Rupert film. Then Geoff Dunbar received a call from the star. ‘I’ve got a bit of news,’ Paul told his animator. ‘We can’t do Rupert … He’s been stolen away from us.’ Having identified Paul’s interest in making a Rupert movie, another producer had acquired the option, informing Paul that he couldn’t proceed without his cooperation. So Paul pulled out. He and Linda had the animation bug, though, and continued to work with Dunbar on other short films, including one inspired by the squirrels they put food out for in their Sussex garden. To amuse his children, Paul made up stories about these engaging creatures, one of whom he named Squiggle, later becom
ing Wirral the Squirrel, in honour of Paul’s Merseyside home. We shall return to him later.

  PRESSING ON

  Having worked with George Martin since the Tokyo bust, Paul felt the need of a change of producer as he approached his next studio album. George wanted a rest from the demanding Paul, too. When everybody was sitting down at the annual Buddy Holly Week lunch in September 1984, George asked Eric Stewart if he would take the helm on the new record.

  George said to me at this Buddy Holly Day dinner, ‘I think you should help Paul with his next album. I’ve got other things to do. I need a break and I think Paul needs a break as well. We’ve got two great albums there, Tug of War/Pipes of Peace, but I think some new blood should come in.’ I said, ‘He’s not asked me.’ He said, ‘Would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’

  Having established that Eric would accept the challenge, Paul invited his friend to Sussex to co-write some songs. It was a winter’s day when Eric drove to Peasmarsh, the snow thick on the ground. Although Paul and Linda were now living in their new farmhouse, Paul had arranged to meet Eric at Waterfall, the little round house in the trees which he still owned. The house was looking pretty as a picture when Eric came up the drive.

  So I got there in the snow and I said, ‘It’s beautiful outside, it’s so beautiful, the sun’s out.’ He said, ‘That’s great, OK, [starts singing] It’s beautiful outside … Right, get it down, write it down.’ And we wrote the whole song within [minutes]. Simple as that.