Linda’s vegetarianism was not so much to do with health as a horror of the slaughterhouse. In this regard, Linda found a like-minded friend in Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, another American in the British rock industry. Although the two women became close, Linda was capable of telling off even Chrissie if she felt her friend was insufficiently committed to the animal cause, as happened at a gathering of celebrities at Chrissie’s London home. ‘We’re here because we are going to talk about what we can do for animals,’ Hynde told her guests, ‘because we have some influence.’
‘Well, if I were you I’d start by not wearing a leather skirt,’ Linda replied sharply.
It was at this gathering that Linda met the television writer Carla Lane, who became another ally in the cause of animal rights. Carla was a Liverpudlian, slightly older than Paul. She’d been to the Cavern in her youth, but was never a Beatles fan, being more interested in the beetles she could scoop up in her hands and put in her animal hospital. Carla made her name and fortune in the 1970s as the creator of the Liver Birds, a popular television sit-com about two young female Liverpool flat-mates, following this with the equally successful Eighties sit-com Bread, about a working-class Liverpool family. It was Carla’s devotion to animals, though, rather than her Merseyside links, that endeared her to Linda, making two women who were not especially sociable close. ‘We were each lonely people, really,’ observes Carla, noting that although Linda was friendly with Chrissie Hynde and Twiggy, and one or two other women, she was not over-endowed with friends. Similarly, Paul didn’t have many pals. ‘I never saw Paul with mates. He was always surrounded by people, but he was usually in charge of them.’
Though not as rich as the McCartneys, Carla had made very good money in television, investing her wealth in an animal sanctuary at her large country home, Broadhurst Manor, 60 miles from the McCartney estate in West Sussex. Broadhurst Manor was a veritable Noah’s Ark of rescue animals, with Carla always grateful to Paul and Linda for taking on the care of some of her surplus stock. They had the space at Blossom Farm, and already maintained a considerable menagerie of their own. The McCartneys kept approximately nine horses these days, including Linda’s beloved appaloosa stallion Blankit (sired by Lucky Spot, the horse she’d brought back from Texas in 1976); there were numerous cats and dogs, including sheepdog descendants of the late Martha, who’d died in the early 1980s. They also had sheep, a herd of deer, and a pet bullock named Ferdinand that Paul had found loose in the lanes one day, having escaped from its farmer. When Paul discovered the bullock was on its way to slaughter he bought the animal and made a pet of it. The McCartneys also kept numerous small creatures, including rabbits, fish, a turtle that lived in a spacious aquarium adjacent to Linda’s kitchen, and a parrot named Sparky, which resided in an outdoor aviary, saying repeatedly, ‘Ello Sparky. Come ’ere and say somethink,’ mimicking the passing farmhands.
In addition, Carla gave the McCartneys chickens, a blue-grey kitten (upon request from the children) and numerous additional deer, which she frequently found injured in lanes, having been hit by vehicles. Carla would pick the creatures up in her animal ambulance and nurse them back to health, where possible, before releasing them into the wild. On one memorably happy occasion, Carla and Linda both had rescue deer ready to release at the same time, so they arranged to meet on a track that led into the forest on Paul’s Sussex estate (which he expanded considerably in the Eighties, buying two adjacent farms and a 50-acre wood, created a contiguous landholding of nearly 1,000 acres - an area three times the size of London’s Hyde Park).
The deer was in the back of our ambulance and Paul had one at the back of [his vehicle] and we did a one, two, three, let them go. And we watched the two deer that we’d nursed better gallop side by side the length of this lane. There were a lot of people there, staff, and Paul and Linda and I, and what a moment it was! Beautiful … It was just one of the nice things that we used to do that nobody knew about.
Though she meant well, Linda’s concern for animals could lead to muddled thinking. She fed her animals a vegetarian diet whenever possible, even to those creatures that were naturally carnivores. She disapproved of the more pragmatic Carla feeding dead chicks to her rescue foxes, for example, and refused to countenance the idea that when her own domestic cats slipped out of the house at night they might be hunting for rodents. ‘She really was against meat being consumed by [any creature],’ says Carla, who believes Linda would have found a way to feed porridge to a T. Rex if she had one in her care. Linda grudgingly accepted wild animals hunted for survival, but she and Paul were implacably opposed to people hunting for sport, becoming terribly upset if they heard a hunt riding through the area or guns going off. One time, when shooting was taking place within earshot, farmer Bob Languish met Paul storming down the lane. ‘Where are those people shooting those poor little bunnies?’ the musician demanded of his neighbour, who informed Paul mildly that the men were only clay-pigeon shooting.
Animals at Blossom Farm lived until they died of old age, even though some local farmers thought this cruel, pointing out that sheep wear their teeth down with grazing and can starve to death if they become very old. The McCartneys took little notice, choosing to spend whatever it cost on vets to keep their ageing animal friends alive. ‘I remember they were devastated when a cow of theirs died, and they had specialists from all over the place coming to this cow. They were heartbroken,’ says Carla, who admits that most people would think Linda and herself eccentric. ‘We are cranks, let’s face it. We don’t mind being called that.’ And Linda drew Paul and the children into this well-intentioned but slightly cranky way of thinking, the whole family becoming evangelical about animal rights. Slaughterhouses, hunting, vivisection and the wearing of fur were their bêtes noires, with the young McCartneys feeling as strongly as their parents. James McCartney got up in school and gave his fellow pupils a passionate speech about why eating animals was wrong. ‘All [of us] had in common this disbelief in what people do to animals, a complete horror of the abattoir and how anyone can be a part of it,’ explains Carla, who also found time to collaborate on animal rights songs with Linda, a couple of which, ‘Cow’ and ‘The White Coated Man’, Paul helped the women record at Hog Hill Mill. ‘He said, “Come on, our Carla,” and he’d got all the music ready. I used to love it the way he called me “Our Carla”. It was so Liverpudlian.’ Unfortunately, Carla was no more a singer than Linda was.
It was the horror of animals being driven to their deaths for food that gave Linda the impetus to create a cookbook that didn’t use as an ingredient ‘dead animals’, as she pointedly described meat; a book in which she would set down her recipes for the kind of hearty meals Paul liked and that she urged her women readers to serve to ‘your man’ - hardly the sort of language one would expect of a woman who’d been at the heart of the Sixties counter-culture, but there was an old-fashioned side to Linda. Away from the public stage, she played the role of a traditional post-war housewife-mother to Paul and their kids, what Paul had been looking for ever since his own mother died, and Paul and Linda seemed to think this was how other people still lived.
In order to create vegetarian versions of the traditional, meat-based meals Paul had been brought up on, Linda used Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) products, such as Protoveg, in her versions of such English staples as Sunday roast and shepherd’s pie. Linda created realistic-looking sausage rolls from soya, even a veggie steak Diane. Carla Lane couldn’t understand why her friend felt the need to mimic the look and taste of meat, serving an elaborate soya turkey at Thanksgiving, for instance, and going to the expense of having ‘non-meat bacon’ imported from the United States so that she and Paul could snack on faux bacon sarnies. It didn’t make sense intellectually to reject meat as part of your diet, yet eat pretend meat. ‘I used to say to her, “What, you like bacon so much?” She said, “I’ve got to confess, Carla, I do like the taste, but you know I would never eat the real stuff.”’
To help Linda sp
read this passionately held but confused veggie message, the McCartneys’ business manager struck a publishing deal with Bloomsbury, whose office was conveniently located next door to MPL on Soho Square, with a vegetarian writer engaged to help Linda turn her veggie menus into a cookbook. For the next two years, Linda worked with Peter Cox on Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking, which put her in the same business as Paul’s former fiancée, Jane Asher. After breaking up with Paul in 1968, Jane had married and had a family with the artist Gerald Scarfe, still pursuing her acting, but also creating a successful second career as a celebrity cake-maker, appearing on television and publishing a series of best-selling recipe books such as Jane Asher’s Party Cakes. Now Linda also thrust herself into the cook-book business. She devised most of her recipes in her kitchen at Blossom Farm which, as she explained in her book, was the heart of the McCartney home and the place she felt happiest. ‘I spend a lot of time in our kitchen. I find it the cosiest, friendliest place in the house,’ she wrote in the introduction to her book. ‘It’s a great place to nurture a happy harmonious family and to spend time with friends, chatting over a cup of tea.’ Yet one of her best friends and most frequent kitchen visitors, Carla Lane, recalls that Paul and Linda were not always a harmonious couple at home in Sussex. ‘They had normal quarrels,’ Carla says. ‘[But] they were never violent. It was, “Oh, alright!” The slam of the door.’
Although Paul enjoyed the country, friends gained the impression he sometimes felt bored at Blossom Farm, hankering for the road and his old life in London, where he had been part of a community of musicians. Although Paul kept the house in Cavendish Avenue, he wasn’t there much, and didn’t tend to use London studios as he once had. Now that Paul owned his own recording facility at Hog Hill he had no need to be at Abbey Road Studios or AIR, where in the past he’d hang out with old friends and meet up-and-coming musicians, getting energy and ideas from what other artists were doing. Everybody who came to work at Hog Hill Mill came at Paul’s invitation, resulting in a slightly stale environment.
In the summer of 1987 Paul started playing with new musicians at Hog Hill, recording demos and auditioning for a band he would ultimately take out on the road. Paul ran down favourite rock ’n’ roll songs with these musicians, numbers including ‘Kansas City’, ‘Lucille’ and ‘That’s All Right (Mama)’, which he sang with the pleasure of a middle-aged man reconnecting with his youth. His engineer recorded the sessions, and when Paul played the tapes back he decided he wanted to put them out as an album.
Richard Ogden was concerned that the time was not right for such a record. Paul’s next major release had to be a strong studio album, one that would make up for Press to Play. Ogden also feared an album of rock ’n’ roll covers might be reviewed critically in comparison to John Lennon’s 1975 Rock ’n’ Roll album. When Paul insisted, Ogden had the novel idea of allowing a Russian company to release a Paul McCartney ‘bootleg’. Despite being banned in the USSR during the Cold War, the Beatles’ music had been and remained hugely popular behind the Iron Curtain, with Soviet fans trading bootleg recordings of their songs. With the rise of the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, it was becoming easier to get genuine Western records in the USSR, and it seemed a fun idea to allow a Russian label to sell an apparently pirated McCartney record in traditional Soviet style. EMI licensed the Russian label Melodya to manufacture 400,000 copies of Paul’s rock ’n’ roll LP, guessing they would print more and that fans who wanted it in the West could buy Soviet imports, which is what happened when CHOBA B CCCP (Russian for ‘Again in the USSR’), was released the following year.
Around the same time, the star agreed that EMI should issue a new ‘best-of’ LP. Although covering some of the same ground as Wings Greatest, released in 1978, Paul McCartney: All the Best sold strongly in the build-up to Christmas 1987, with Paul appearing on British chat shows to promote it. It was on occasions like this that the Wings Fun Club and Club Sandwich magazine came into their own, Paul’s fan club secretary mobilising members to pack TV show audiences just as Brian Epstein used to do. As a result, Paul got a rousing reception when he walked out on stage at the Wogan show, the Roxy, and Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort, three programmes he graced that winter. With typical professionalism, McCartney invited the Last Resort house band down to Sussex to rehearse with him in advance of the Ross show, giving the boys a guided tour of his Beatles museum. Band leader Steve Nieve introduced Paul briefly to his wife Muriel. The couple were impressed a few years later when they ran into Paul again and he immediately greeted Muriel by name, demonstrating a phenomenal memory. ‘I’ve seen him do this many times,’ says Nieve. ‘He has this ability to put people so at ease around him - remarkable how he keeps names and faces.’
Going round the TV studios helped All the Best turn double platinum, a success tempered by the death in December of Paul’s beloved Aunt Ginny. She died of heart failure at 77. Ginny had been among the last of Jim McCartney’s siblings. Only brother Joe and his wife Joan were left now from that generation, enjoying a comfortable old age thanks to the McCartney Pension. ‘Paul was looking after everybody, he always has done. But always very quiet, you see. That’s why I get bloody mad when I hear people say, “Er, he’s got all that money, you’d think he’d do so and so,”’ says family member Mike Robbins. ‘He’s been giving money to charity quietly, and looking after people quietly, for many, many years.’ Several relatives had received substantial cash amounts, with Paul helping relations buy homes, but the more he gave the more some of them wanted. ‘They did used to moan at Christmas,’ reveals Paul’s record plugger and MPL gofer Joe Reddington. ‘[They’d] phone Alan Crowder up, “What’s the present this year? Oh Christ, haven’t you got anything better?” … Just unbelievable, these people.’
While he might write five-figure cheques for relations, and he had given Linda some high-price jewellery over the years, Paul usually bought inexpensive gifts for the family at Christmas, typically popping into Hamley’s on Regent Street - a short walk from his office - to get the kids the colouring pencils they liked. Recalls Joe Reddington:I remember one year we are standing in the queue [at Hamley’s] and I’m standing behind Paul, and this guy behind me, he was an American, he said, ‘Excuse me, who’s that in front of you? That’s not Paul McCartney, is it?’ ‘I don’t know actually,’ and then Paul turned round and said, ‘Yes it is,’ and he signed all this stuff this guy was getting for his kids to take back to America.
NEW BEGINNINGS
After the twin flops of Give My Regards to Broad Street and Press to Play Paul needed what was in effect a comeback record to remain an active headline star into the 1990s. He wasn’t prepared to step off the merry-go-round as John Lennon had done. To help Paul achieve his ambitions, MPL got the star together with Elvis Costello, a talented singer-songwriter with whom Paul could write, sing and record, also a young man - Elvis turned 33 in 1988 - of strong character whom everybody hoped would be able to stand up to Paul in the studio, pushing him to do better than his usual ‘I love you Linda’ material.
Costello found McCartney a disciplined, regimented writer. Elvis tended to write his lyrics first, then make the music fit.
If the words demanded it, I wouldn’t develop the melodic line, I’d just add a couple of bars. He [Paul] thought that sounded messy. He likes logic in the lyrics, too. I might throw in ambiguous things, because I like the effect that has on the imagination. But he doesn’t like anyone to walk into the song with green shoes on, unless they were wearing them in the first verse.
To record these new songs, the basis of the album Flowers in the Dirt, Paul assembled a band around the Scots guitarist Hamish Stuart, 38-year-old founder of the Average White Band, whose life was changed by hearing the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’ as a boy. ‘It was the moment for me when things went from black and white to colour. It’s amazing the number of people who describe it that way.’
Although the original idea was that Elvis Costello would co-write and co-produce Flowe
rs in the Dirt, the old problems soon re-emerged. Paul wanted to do things his way, and Elvis was pulling in a different direction. ‘It was pretty obvious pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to work as a co-production, so things changed and it moved on and some stuff got discarded,’ comments Hamish Stuart. ‘They were kind of banging heads a little bit. Elvis had one way of working, and Paul was more about embracing technology at that time and it just didn’t work, so Elvis kind of left the building.’ The Costello sessions yielded several album tracks, though, including the poppy ‘My Brave Face’ and ‘You Want Her Too’, sung as a duet in the way Paul harmonised with John on ‘Getting Better’, McCartney’s sweet voice undercut by Costello’s caustic interjections.
The drummer in Paul’s new band was Chris Whitten, who’d also worked on the CHOBA B CCCP sessions. Enlarging the group, Paul hired guitarist Robbie McIntosh from the Pretenders. These three musicians helped Paul complete Flowers in the Dirt and formed the basis of his new road band, adding 32-year-old keyboard player Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens, whom Paul and Linda were encouraged to learn was ‘almost a veggie’. Increasingly, the McCartneys had little time for anybody who wasn’t vegetarian. Paul was paying good wages, the new band members getting £1,000 a week as a retainer ($1,530), £3,000 a week ($4,590) for when they were rehearsing and recording, rising to £5,000 a week ($7,650) on the road, generous by industry standards. Paul had learned the lesson of Wings. He made it clear that he’d been hurt by the stories Denny Laine sold to the Sun after the old band broke up, and wouldn’t appreciate it if anybody in the new group did anything like that.
Meanwhile, Paul’s other, more famous former band was about to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, an institution co-founded in 1983 by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner that had already gained prestige in the music community. Stars were falling over themselves to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the annual ceremony in New York, and it was expected that Paul would join George, Ringo and Yoko at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 20 January 1988, when the Beatles’ fellow inductees would include the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, who counted among Paul’s musical heroes. But Paul didn’t show. He boycotted the event because George, Ritchie and Yoko were suing him over a deal the Eastmans had struck when he signed back with Capitol Records after a brief spell with CBS, winning him an extra per cent royalty on the Beatles’ back catalogue. When the other three found out Paul was getting more than them they demanded parity, the dispute settled when Capitol gave all four partners an extra per cent on CDs, which were replacing vinyl. As of January 1988, however, the Beatles partners were in deadlock over the issue.
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