Fab

by Howard Sounes

  This was ‘Footprints’ on what would be the album Press to Play. Another song, ‘Angry’, came with similar ease a few days later in response to Paul reading an unflattering article about himself in a newspaper. Stewart can’t recall what the story was, but it may well have been a negative article about the Broad Street débâcle.

  I walked in another morning and I said, ‘You look a bit tense,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m fucking angry.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ He said, ‘The Press - look at this. [Holds up a paper]. What the Hell gives them the right to tell me what to do with my life?’ I said, ‘What? Hold it. Write it down,’ What the hell gives you the right to tell me what to do with my life? … And we’ve got ‘Angry’ started.

  Eric and Paul swiftly completed eight songs in this way, then went into Hog Hill Mill to record them.

  Although Eric had gained the impression Paul wanted him to produce the new album, McCartney had also hired the fashionable young producer Hugh Padgham, who’d enjoyed recent success with Phil Collins and the Police. Tensions soon developed between Padgham and Stewart, who seemed to be competing for the same job, with both men finding they had an even greater problem with McCartney himself.

  At first, Eric had been delighted with the songs he and Paul had written at Waterfall, songs which came easily and sounded fresh to his ears. Then he started to have misgivings about the quality of the tunes. ‘I thought, Are they really good enough. Are they finished? I always thought when we get them in the studio we’ll finish them, but as we got in the studio and we started to record, I said, “This is not good.”’ One day Eric clicked the talk-back button and said: ‘Paul, that vocal’s not right.’

  Paul asked Hugh Padgham his opinion. ‘Well, it’s OK, but I’m a sound man, Eric’s the musician.’

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Hugh agreed with Eric. Privately, Hugh had been worried that the material was on the weak side, but assumed an artist of Paul’s stature, working in tandem with someone as experienced as Eric, would improve the songs in the studio. Unfortunately, this wasn’t happening. ‘I don’t think it’s good enough,’ he said, suggesting some more writing might be required. Paul’s response shocked both Hugh and Eric.

  ‘Hugh, when did you write your last number one?’ McCartney asked, nastily.

  As Padgham says, ‘That one was a real kick in the balls, which you don’t forget.’ Eric switched off the talk-back and groaned, Oh shit! This is going wrong. ‘And it really did start to go wrong. There was this conflict there. And that was something that Paul could do. He could actually wither you with a sentence if he didn’t like what you’ve said.’ Eric later realised that he should have stood up to Paul at this point, and thrashed out whatever the problem was. But it was hard to argue with the man. ‘It’s difficult to tell Paul McCartney, isn’t it? He’s a great singer, he’s written the greatest songs of all time and you’re saying, “That’s not good enough”.’ John Lennon had been able to have those candid conversations; George Martin could tell Paul when he was wrong. ‘Could I do it? No.’ Despite the fact they had known each other since the Cavern, and had worked closely for five years, Eric was tongue-tied.

  We never discussed it afterwards. But after about another week of this, I said, ‘Hold it, this is not working for me.’ I said, ‘You carry on with it. I’m just going to come down and pick my guitars up … I’m not really adding anything here but conflict, because it’s not good enough.’ Let Padgham carry on with it.

  So Eric left, and Hugh found himself alone with Paul, renting a nearby beach house where he lived an increasingly miserable existence as work on this difficult album dragged on for an amazing 18 months, the producer becoming thoroughly fed up with Paul McCartney in the process.

  At first it felt like a great honour to be asked to produce Paul’s new album, and Padgham had hoped that, after Give My Regards to Broad Street and Rupert and the Frog Song, he could give Paul back some ‘cred’ (credibility), ‘cred’ being a vogue Eighties term people like him were using. As work on Press to Play stretched on month after month, Hugh discovered what other producers had before him: he couldn’t tell Paul anything. Also, Paul’s charm wore off. Years ago Paul hardly talked about the Beatles. Nowadays he told the same old Beatles stories again and again, until they were frankly boring, and nobody had the courage to tell him he was repeating himself. Also, he seemed obsessed with what the public thought of him in relation to John Lennon. Outside of music, Paul’s conversation was banal, often about what he’d seen on TV, as Padgham recalls:It was like he’d been up all night watching television, because he was like a walking version of the Radio Times. I think he would have literally gone home at six or seven o’clock and probably stayed up till one o’clock watching TV with a spliff, and a drink, and he probably didn’t really think anything of the album. He was just watching telly. He’d come in the mornings, ‘Did you see this last night?’

  The producer was invited up to Paul and Lin’s new house, Blossom Farm. Says Hugh: To start with I really thought he was this guy who was really normal, sent his children to the local comprehensive school, and lived in a pretty modest house, and seemed one of the lads, but by the end of 18 months I didn’t feel like that at all … It was either a façade, or he’s got many faces of which the charming one is maybe turned on when you’re new to the fold and impressionable. All the people who work for him, if he said jump they’d go, ‘From what floor? ’ … I’ve worked in this business for 30-something years with a lot of people just as famous as him and some are really nice and some are affected by it, and if you think that McCartney probably hasn’t been able to walk down a street without somebody wanting to kiss his arse from the age of 17, I imagine it would affect you, possibly in an insidious way as well where you don’t realise. But if he doesn’t get his own way, then he throws his toys out of the pram.

  Paul sometimes showed his bad temper in public, too. One day, before driving to Hog Hill Mill to work with Hugh, he and Linda took seven-year-old James to the village school in Peasmarsh. They arrived to find that teachers on strike over low pay were protesting at the school gates. One of the teachers, Brian Moses, offered Paul a leaflet explaining their action. ‘Are you striking teachers? ’ Paul asked Moses, clearly unimpressed.

  ‘Well, yes, we are at the moment, because our pay isn’t enough for us to live on.’

  ‘Take a good look,’ Paul told his son, as if showing James particularly wicked people. ‘They are striking teachers.’

  When he had taken James into school, Paul came outside and tore up the teachers’ leaflet ostentatiously, throwing the pieces in the road. ‘I just thought, You sod! If Lennon had been there, he would have been on the picket line with us!’ says Moses, who described the incident in a letter to his union newspaper, the Teacher, making the point that if Paul McCartney tried to support his four children on a teacher’s salary he’d be eligible for supplementary benefit. At the time an average teacher’s salary was £5,442 a year ($8,296). McCartney drew a basic salary from MPL of £200,000 a year ($306,000), which he used to cover his expenses. He received other, Beatles income above and beyond this, of course. Despite portraying himself as a normal bloke, Paul was therefore far removed from the lives of everyday people like Moses, whose school-gate confrontation with the star became national news. ‘I had always admired him for sending his children to state schools,’ the teacher told the Daily Mirror. ‘I expected more support.’

  Back at Hog Hill Mill, Paul’s relationship with Hugh Padgham hit rock bottom. When Paul’s 43rd birthday rolled around in June, the producer gave Paul the music edition of the popular board game Trivial Pursuit. Over the weekend, Paul evidently had the game out at home. When he came back into work on Monday he complained bitterly that one of the questions in the game was about the death of his own mother, something he took amiss.

  He really had a go at me as if it was my fault that it was in there, or my fault that I gave him this box of Trivial Pursuit questions that had this, a
s far as he was concerned, insensitive [question]. It was like, Fuckin’ hell, you know, it’s not my fault. Sorry! Ha!

  As the two men struggled to complete this unhappy album, Paul was asked to support a charity concert at Wembley Stadium. Towards the end of 1984, Bob Geldof, leader of the new-wave band the Boomtown Rats, had been shocked by news coverage of a famine in Ethiopia into corralling pop stars together to record a charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, which surpassed ‘Mull of Kintyre’ as the best-selling single in the history of the British charts. A US version followed in the spring of 1985, after which Geldof organised twin concerts to aid Africa, a British show at Wembley Stadium and a sister show at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, with an integrated live telecast. Geldof felt he had to have McCartney headline in London, and wrote to the star asking him to perform ‘Let It Be’, explaining that ‘Beatles’ music for some reason evokes more emotional response than any other’. Although he hadn’t performed live since 1979, Paul agreed to do the gig, letting Geldof know that he didn’t mind if George and Ritchie were invited to join him on stage. Geldof called George Harrison at his holiday home in Hawaii, asking if he would play ‘Let It Be’ with Paul. ‘He didn’t ask me to sing on it [16] years ago, so why does he want me now?’ Harrison retorted, his own relationship with Paul at a new low ebb. The men had recently had a ratty telephone conversation during which George accused Paul of boasting to the press about how much money he made, though the reported £20 million a year ($30.6m) figure was an exaggeration.

  The twin Live Aid concerts held on Saturday 13 July 1985 were the most significant live events in popular music since the Sixties. Not since the Woodstock Festival had so many first-class rock acts been assembled, the international telecast adding an extra dimension to what was a truly memorable day. David Bowie, Elton John, Queen, U2 and the Who all performed in London, highlights of the American show including performances by a re-formed Led Zeppelin, Madonna and Mick Jagger singing with Tina Turner. The weather in Philadelphia was muggy. In England it was cloudy with sunny spells and a short, hard shower in the evening before McCartney came on stage alone.

  It was obvious that there was a serious sound problem as soon as Paul began performing ‘Let It Be’ on a white grand piano on the Wembley stage. His voice was heard briefly at first, then disappeared for eight verses. Only the piano and intermittent shrieks of feedback were audible. Paul struggled on, hoping everything would work out, apparently willing the audience to help him. Although the stadium audience was made up of predominantly young people, a generation younger than those who’d followed the Beatles originally, the concert-goers recognised the tune Paul was playing and began singing the lyric in his place. When Paul’s voice finally came through loud and clear the crowd gave a huge cheer, and sang along with ‘Let It Be’ enthusiastically until the end, David Bowie, Bob Geldof, Alison Moyet and Pete Townshend adding ragged backing vocals on stage. It was a shambolic performance, not helped by an overwrought Geldof shouting at the audience, ‘Come on!’, but the moment was undoubtedly moving, the strong audience reaction demonstrating the enduring power of the Beatles’ songs, and showing that Paul - despite his advancing years and recent failures - was by common consensus the figurehead of British rock, which with Live Aid, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, was beginning to be assimilated into the Establishment. From now on, Paul’s presence would be requested at virtually every large, set-piece music event of the kind, and many such concerts followed.

  MIND THE GAP

  A few weeks after Live Aid there was another difficult scene at Hog Hill Mill when Paul heard that someone he had considered a friend, Michael Jackson, had invested $47.5 million (£31m) of his Thriller fortune in ATV Music, making him the new owner of Northern Songs. When Michael had mentioned that he might buy Paul’s songs, McCartney had dismissed the comment as a joke, still thinking that he might somehow buy the company back for himself one day. Now Jacko had beaten him to it. ‘He was absolutely furious,’ recalls Hugh Padgham, speaking in italics. ‘Oh my God, the air was blue.’

  The making of Press to Play dragged on into 1986, to the misery of the producer, who found that the lack of any financial concern about the cost of studio time (now Paul owned his own studio), twinned with Paul’s penchant for smoking dope, meant that recording a McCartney album could drift on almost indefinitely.

  Sometimes it would be really tedious, like McCartney would put his bass on one of the songs and he’d get himself in a tizz about it. Then we’d stop for lunch and we’d have sandwiches, and he would go upstairs and smoke a joint up there, and he thought that we didn’t know what was going on, then he’d come down and sit there for hours trying to play the bass and you could cut the air with a knife with the tension sometimes. And the tedium. Oh!

  To put the best gloss on weak material, Hugh called in crack session men and guest stars, including the New York guitarist Carlos Alomar, Phil Collins and Pete Townshend. Recalls Alomar, who is perhaps most famous for his work with David Bowie: ‘We sat down and talked, “How was your trip? ” Then he says, ‘“Let’s go upstairs.” We went upstairs. He rolled a joint. We smoked a nice big spliff, and then we started talking [music].’ The American stayed a week at the mill, eating with Paul, Linda and the kids, and visiting the local pub in the evening. One blustery day, he and Paul flew a kite on the hill. ‘It’s a simpler life than you would think of an ex-Beatle [living],’ says the musician, who felt like he was spending time with a farmer and his family, whereby the farmer’s daughter, Stella, would call for ‘Mr Alomar’ when Mum had dinner ready. ‘It’s like having a regular country dinner and then going to the local pub for a brew and coming back. It’s not a complicated life.’ Paul seemed confident he was making a good record. Indeed, he was so proud of the project he drew diagrammatic plans for the CD booklet to help the listener identify the musicians. ‘That’s pretty meticulous and it requires a certain amount of dedication and commitment, ’ comments Alomar. ‘I’ve looked at a lot of his albums and heard a lot of his music and I’ve never really [seen] things like that - I thought [he believed the album] was fantastic.’

  The day finally came in the spring of 1986 when work stopped. The record was finished, for better or worse. Hugh Padgham was just relieved it was all over. Up in London, Paul’s manager Stephen Shrimpton was concerned that he couldn’t hear a hit on Press to Play. It may not be a coincidence that Shrimpton left MPL around this time. In April, Paul appointed Robert Mercer as his new managing director. He lasted just six weeks, leaving the company before Press to Play was released in the September, indicating turmoil within McCartney’s office. For want of anything better, Paul finally chose ‘Press’ as the single to launch this troublesome album. Like so many of Paul’s songs, it is catchy - with the light, electronic sound fashionable in the Eighties - but, in common with the rest of the album, the number also sounds overworked.

  When he came to make the promotional video, Paul went for simplicity, taking a camera crew onto London’s Underground to film him miming to ‘Press’ as he rode the Jubilee Line. Looking happy and relaxed in light summer clothes, the star’s spontaneous interactions with the public had a natural, unforced charm that showed him at his best: shaking hands with an elderly lady, receiving a kiss from a girl, encouraging normally dour commuters to smile. At one stage a young man approached Paul on a platform. McCartney made wary eye contact, circumspect about people who came up on his blind side, even more so since John had been shot, only to realise the guy just wanted directions. Paul nodded him onto the right train with a Londoner’s insouciance. After all, the capital had been Paul’s home now for half his life. He knew the city as well as he did Liverpool. As he waved goodbye to his crew, and the audience, at St John’s Wood station, you had to like the man.

  A strong video wasn’t enough to save ‘Press’ from bombing, while a second single, ‘Only Love Remains’, did even less well, Press to Play itself selling fewer copies than any of McCartney’s previous studio al
bums. When Eric Stewart received a copy, he felt he knew why it had failed. Fragments of their original collaboration were audible, in songs like ‘Angry’ and ‘Footprints’, but the simplicity of the demos was buried under 18 months of overdubs, with the result that ‘the album became meaningless’. Eric wished he’d been strong enough to stand up to Paul when he’d snapped at Hugh Padgham in the studio: ‘When did you write your last number one?’ That was the key moment. John Lennon would have challenged Paul and resolved the problem; George Martin could have stood up to the star; but Eric had been cowed by Paul’s status as a former Beatle, a legacy so enormous it inhibited both the star and those around him. ‘Where do you go from there?’ asks Eric rhetorically. ‘What can you achieve from there?’ Paul’s answer, as we shall see next, was to celebrate that legacy.

  22

  THE NEXT BEST THING

  LINDA’SPEOPLE

  When Press to Play sold fewer than a million copies worldwide, poor by Paul’s standards, he hired a new manager to help revive his career, choosing a straight-talking former Polydor executive named Richard Ogden, who set out a three-year plan to get Paul back in the charts and back on the road, after almost a decade in which McCartney hadn’t toured.

  Part of Ogden’s job was managing Linda’s career, too, which meant enabling Mrs McCartney to realise her pet projects, mostly to do with photography or vegetarianism, for which she had become a zealot. Having given up eating meat and fish, and wearing leather, Linda expected everybody else to do the same. She even had the temerity to ask the Duke of Edinburgh how he, as the figurehead for the World Wildlife Fund, could defend shooting birds for sport. The Duke muttered in reply that his eldest son was almost a bloody veggie.