Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Paul had his publicist release a statement explaining his absence from the Hall of Fame function: ‘After 20 years, the Beatles still have some business differences which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.’ After Mick Jagger introduced the Beatles at the Waldorf-Astoria, it fell to George Harrison to say how honoured the band felt to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, joking, ‘I don’t have too much to say because I’m the quiet Beatle.’ Then it was Yoko’s turn to speak.

  Despite not attending the dinner, Paul and Linda had a keen interest in events in New York and early the next day Linda called her friend Danny Fields at his Manhattan apartment to ask what had happened. Danny, who’d helped discover Iggy Pop and managed the Ramones during his career, aside from his work as a journalist, had a seat on the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee. ‘Did you go last night?’ Linda asked her friend, calling from her country kitchen at Blossom Farm.

  ‘Yeah. You would have had such a good time,’ Danny drawled in his camp manner, ‘you would have heard Yoko’s speech.’

  Knowing the McCartneys would want to hear what Yoko said, Danny had recorded her speech, and he had his tape machine cued up in anticipation of Linda’s call. He asked coolly whether she and Paul would care to listen to what Yoko said, and heard Linda telling Paul to pick up the extension. ‘He picks up the phone and I press the tape.’ All three listened as Yoko told the Waldorf that if her husband had been alive, he would have attended the induction, which was as neat a put-down of the McCartneys as she’d ever made. Danny listened for a reaction. ‘Paul said, “Fucking cunt, makes me want to puke.”’

  Paul continued working on Flowers in the Dirt at Hog Hill Mill throughout that summer, taking a break in August to visit Liverpool, where he was shocked to discover his old school had fallen into dereliction. Despite its long and illustrious history, the Liverpool Institute had been closed in 1985 by Liverpool City Council, when the council was under the sway of the militant socialist Derek Hatton, who was himself an old boy. The closure was not so much to do with Hatton’s socialist principles as with Liverpool’s declining population. Apparently there weren’t enough clever boys in the shrinking city to fill such an elite school. Four years on from its closure, Paul was dismayed to see that the Inny had become a ruin. The roof was letting in so much rain the classrooms were flooded and rats scurried along corridors that had once resounded to cries of ‘Walk, don’t run!’ Paul had a film made of himself on a nostalgic tour of this sad old place, later released as the documentary Echoes, during which he remembered himself and cheeky school mates and eccentric masters in happier times. Privately, he ruminated on how he might rescue the school.

  Since the Toxteth riots, Paul had been looking for a way to give something back to Liverpool. Following his visit to the Inny he decided the school should be the focus for his philanthropy. But what was one to do with the place? Initially, McCartney thought he might simply put a new roof on the Institute, to save it from total ruin, but as he looked into the problem more deeply he saw that the only way to save the building in the longer term was to give it a use and, because of its history, that had to be an educational one.

  George Martin, one of the few people in whom Paul placed unswerving trust, mentioned that he’d been helping an entrepreneur named Mark Featherstone-Witty raise money for a school for performing arts in London, based on the New York School of the Performing Arts depicted in the movie Fame. A Fame school for Liverpool might be a use for the Inny. Paul was circumspect. Traditionally, show business is an industry where people learn by experience. He hadn’t gone to a school for performing arts. The idea was anathema, rock ’n’ roll being about self-expression and rebellion. George Martin, a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music, took a different view. He believed there was a place for a formal musical education, and a need to teach young people the essentials of the music business - if future Lennons and McCartneys weren’t to be ripped off, as Paul felt he’d been with Northern Songs. Sensible George went some way to persuade Paul that a Fame-type school for Liverpool was therefore a worthwhile project. McCartney’s primary motivation remained saving the Inny, though, and, canny as ever with money, he didn’t propose to buy the place. The hope was that Liverpool City Council, and the charitable trust in which the building was held, would give the premises to Paul if he devised a regeneration plan.

  In April 1989, Paul wrote an open letter to the Liverpool Echo asking his fellow Merseysiders if they wanted a Fame school: ‘I got a great start in life courtesy of Liverpool Institute and would love to see other local people being given the same chance.’ Readers phoned in 1,745 votes in favour, 48 against. The following month, Paul invited George Martin’s friend to MPL to talk about beginning the process.

  Mark Featherstone-Witty proved to be an ebullient, jokey fellow of 42, with a theatrical and slightly posh manner (Paul worried that his double-barrelled name would raise hackles on Merseyside) and a varied CV ranging from acting to journalism to teaching, the last of which led him to create a number of private educational institutions. ‘Then the key moment occurred, the key moment, whereas I was sitting in the Empire Leicester Square and saw Alan Parker’s film Fame, and I thought, “That’s what I’m going to do next.”’ In emulation of what he had seen at the pictures that day in 1980, Featherstone-Witty worked to create the British Record Industry Trust (BRIT) School in Croydon, which was established with the help of George Martin and others. Now he wanted a new project.

  Although Mark had met many famous people working on the BRIT School, when Paul walked through the door at MPL the entrepreneur was overwhelmed.

  You are trying to carry on a reasonable conversation, but one half of your mind is saying, I don’t bloody believe it. I just don’t believe it. I’m actually talking to Paul McCartney! Over years of course that’s completely gone, but at the time I was just amazed … I’ve seen the same reaction with other people.

  Despite Mark’s being star-struck, the meeting went well. It was agreed that the entrepreneur would approach Liverpool City Council with Paul’s backing to see if it was feasible to turn the Inny into what Paul wanted to call the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). To show he was serious, Paul pledged £1 million ($1.53m) of his own money, but, shrewd as ever, he didn’t hand it over all at once. He advanced Featherstone-Witty small sums initially. ‘It was £30,000 [$45,900]. Let’s see what you can do with it. So it was to some extent payment by achievement really. Also the payment needed to be matched with a payment, not simply from him, but from other people. He was never going to be the sole funder.’ Still, having started the process, Paul committed himself to a project that would take up a lot of his time, and require much more of his money, over the next few years, while Mark discovered that the charming superstar he met on day one could also be ‘a right bastard’.

  BACK ON THE ROAD

  The first single from Flowers in the Dirt was released in May 1989, the catchy but unfulfilling ‘My Brave Face’. Though it wasn’t a hit, the LP was greeted as a return to form featuring several strong songs such as ‘Rough Ride’ and ‘We Got Married’, which seemed to document Paul’s early relationship with Linda, vis-à-vis John and Yoko, ‘the other team’. The LP went to number one in the UK, with Paul appearing on TV shows to promote it prior to his first tour since 1979.

  Ticket prices were to be modest. Paul was less interested in enlarging his fortune than in playing to as many people as possible, partly because he and Lin wanted to use the concerts to proselytise vegetarianism and ecology. The tour schedule was arranged to coincide with the publication of Linda’s new vegetarian cookbook, with the 81-strong tour party served a meat-free diet backstage. Remarkably, audiences front of house wouldn’t be able to buy meaty snacks, not even hot dogs at Madison Square Garden. MPL banned such concessions, licensing instead the sale of veggie burgers. To accompany the tour, MPL com
missioned a 100-page programme that included information about acid rain and deforestation, and exhortations to turn veggie. Unusually, the programme was given away free.

  Alongside didactic articles about vegetarianism in the tour programme, Paul took the opportunity to tell his audiences his life story. A series of long interview features saw him correcting what he viewed as misinterpretations about the Beatles’ history. He made the point strongly that he, rather than John, was the Beatle most into the avant-garde in the Sixties. Paul was checking out the new music and meeting new writers along with his friend Barry Miles, ‘when [John] was living out in the suburbs by the golf club with Cynthia’. This was a foretaste of an authorised, putting-the-record straight biography Paul had started work on with Miles, who’d become a biographer of distinction in recent years, writing lives of his friend Allen Ginsberg and other counter-culture figures. Miles had come up with the idea of the book, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, agreeing to let Paul vet the manuscript and, perhaps surprisingly, retain 75 per cent of the royalties, meaning it was really going to be Paul’s book.

  Other old friends found themselves back in Paul’s orbit as the world tour kicked off. Richard Lester had been hired to make a montage film introduction to the concerts, and to direct a full-length concert feature, the pedestrian Get Back. Linda’s artist friend Brian Clarke was commissioned to create the stage set, as he had the Flowers in the Dirt album cover. To publicise the tour, Paul hired a significant new associate, a likeable former tabloid newspaper journalist named Geoff Baker, whose qualifications for the job included boundless enthusiasm for Paul’s music, as well as sharing Paul and Linda’s fondness for dope and their zeal for vegetarianism.

  Richard Ogden asked Paul what songs he was going to play on stage, urging him to perform his greatest hits, which meant Beatles songs as well as the likes of ‘Live and Let Die’. Up until now, Paul had never performed more than a handful of Beatles’ numbers in concert, but feeling the need to come back strongly after ten years away from the stage he drew up a set list that featured 14 Beatles tunes, approximately half the show. He had to learn to play many live for the first time, the Beatles never having performed them on stage, though paradoxically his sidemen had in other bands, Beatles songs having become common to all musicians. As Hamish Stuart observes, ‘some of them we knew better than Paul did’.

  After warm-up shows in London and New York, the tour opened in Oslo on 26 September 1989, the first of a run of European arena concerts, after which Paul took his band to North America, returning to England in January 1990 to play Birmingham and London. To interject a brief personal note, the first Paul McCartney show I ever saw was on this tour, at London’s Wembley Arena in January 1990. McCartney’s solo career had made little impression on me so far. What I’d heard on the radio of his work with Wings and afterwards seemed lightweight, and I didn’t own any of his records. The Beatles were another matter. Although they were stars before I was born, the energy and creative brilliance of the band had captured my imagination, as with millions of others. The Beatles cross generations. I therefore attended my first McCartney show with mixed feelings, as I’m sure many others did during that tour. One was coming primarily because of the Beatles, rather than the music Paul had made since 1970, and hoping not to hear too much of the latter.

  McCartney bounded on stage, chubby and grey at 47, but evidently eager to entertain us. His band seemed up for the challenge, too, though Linda appeared less engaged than Hamish, Robbie, Chris and Wix, sitting awkwardly at her keyboard, a Union flag draped next to her, periodically making V-signs as if impersonating Winston Churchill. When the show opened with ‘Figure of Eight’, one’s spirits sank. Were we to be subjected to a series of mediocre new songs? Thankfully, the friendly opening bars of ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ followed, the start of a sparkling stream of Beatles songs. To see and hear Paul McCartney perform these iconic songs was genuinely thrilling, and unlike his contemporary Bob Dylan who deliberately changes his songs live to keep the work fresh for himself and his audience, McCartney and his band were playing these classics like they sounded on the records, which is the way you want to hear them, at least the first time. ‘You owe something to the music to present it in as authentic a way as possible,’ comments Hamish Stuart. ‘I remember “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Robbie basically played the solo note for note, because that’s part of what was written.’ Although London audiences have a reputation in the rock industry for being reserved and undemonstrative, compared to elsewhere in the UK, and abroad, people were weeping with emotion, couples were embracing. ‘Sometimes it was hard to watch,’ says Hamish. ‘Look away or you get drawn in and forget what you’re doing.’

  To perform ‘Fool on the Hill’ Paul brought an artefact of swinging London on stage, the multi-coloured piano that Binder, Edwards and Vaughan had painted for him in 1966. Paul played this fabulous Joanna on a platform that elevated and rotated as he sang, causing him to rename the instrument his Magic Piano. The crowning moment of the show came, however, in the encore when McCartney picked out the plangent opening chords of ‘Golden Slumbers’ on a Roland keyboard, going on to perform the complete Abbey Road medley, culminating in the sublime ‘The End’, the Beatles’ final exaltation to love one another proving enduringly powerful.

  This spine-tingling moment was the closest one could get in 1990 to experiencing the magic of the Beatles live, and it was perhaps better than seeing the boys in the Sixties, in that Paul was performing a complex album piece the Beatles never staged, with state-of-the-art sound equipment and amplification, so it sounded great. I walked away from the show a convert to Paul McCartney as a live performer, and urged everybody I met who hadn’t seen McCartney in concert to do so.

  Off stage, Paul and Linda were coping with a difficult family situation. As noted, Heather McCartney had long found the McCartney name a burden. If she was introduced simply as Heather, people showed little interest in her. ‘Then somebody would say McCartney and really emphasise it and I’d just watch their face change.’ For a fairly simple person who didn’t have a strong idea of herself, or what she meant to do in life, this turned into an identity crisis, and in 1988 the 25-year-old admitted herself to a private clinic in Sussex.

  After her treatment, Heather went to the United States to spend time with her natural father, Mel See, whom she called Papa, and his girlfriend Beverly Wilk, who lived with Mel in an adobe on the opposite side of Tucson to the McCartney ranch. Mel continued to pursue his interest in anthropology, and he and Beverly took Heather with them to Mexico to visit native Hoichol Indians, who made a big impression on the young woman. Heather admired the Indians’ uncompromising way of life, living on the periphery of the modern world, and picked up design ideas for her new hobby of pottery. Back home in Rye, pottery was a long-established industry, with five potteries in the town at one time. Heather had gone to school with the son of one of the most eminent Rye potters, David Sharp, and worked for a time with another local potter.

  During her visit to Arizona, Heather seemed a fragile, mixed-up girl to Mel and Beverly, who says: ‘I think she just needed to get away and find herself.’ Despite the effort Paul and Linda had put into parenting, and the public image they projected of a happy and successful family, it seemed Heather had been left emotionally scarred by her upbringing, first in an unhappy marriage, then with a stepfather who happened to be one of the most famous people in the world. ‘I guess if you had a dad who let someone else adopt you [that would be an issue], and then being in a family where you’re the odd girl out,’ comments Beverly. As a self-made man, Paul was ambitious for his children to build careers of their own, but Heather was a dreamy type, not academically bright, a girl who was content to potter about at home with her roll-ups and pets. She also seemed scared of being identified as a McCartney by members of the public, travelling in America under a nom de plume. One day, when Beverly took Heather to the bank in Tucson, the young woman emerged in an unsettled state saying that she’d
signed for her money in the wrong name. ‘I don’t think she sometimes knew who she was - I thought, Wow, what a way of living! ’

  Although she enjoyed visiting Arizona, Heather soon returned to the family estate in Sussex, which she considered her real home, and here her emotional problems returned. During the early part of Paul’s world tour, the press reported that Heather had again been admitted to a clinic. ‘I think she has identity problems. It’s a lot of pressure on a child to have to live in the limelight all the time,’ Mel told a journalist; ‘she finds it difficult to be a member of such a famous family.’ Fortunately, Paul and Linda had arranged the European stage of their tour in such a way that they flew home most nights, meaning they could see Heather almost daily. As Heather got better, her parents felt confident enough to continue the tour further afield.

  Paul took his band back to North America in February 1990, after which they played Japan, almost exactly ten years after Paul had been deported from the country. Then it was back to the USA, where MPL had cut an advantageous sponsorship deal with Visa. This involved the credit card company paying MPL $8.5 million (£5.5m), which covered most of the tour expenses, further agreeing to run nationwide television ads featuring Paul. The ads used snatches of his Wings and solo career songs, urging Visa card members to use their card to buy tickets for his concerts. (MPL had tried to get permission from Apple to use Beatles songs in the ads, but Apple refused, meaning George, Ritchie and Yoko wanted to limit the extent to which Paul could benefit from Beatles material.) The TV ads caused Paul’s ticket sales to rocket. From selling 20,000 tickets for an average city, there was demand for 100,000 tickets per stop, transforming an arena tour into a stadium tour, which Paul capped on 21 April 1990 by playing a record-breaking show before 184,000 people in Rio de Janeiro.