Fab

by Howard Sounes

  After South America, Paul returned to the UK to perform in Scotland and Liverpool, the latter show staged in the disused King’s Dock as a fundraiser for LIPA. Backstage, Paul was reunited with several old boys from the Inny, including Ian James who’d helped teach him how to play guitar when they were teenagers. When Paul became a star, Ian didn’t get in touch ‘because I didn’t feel it was right somehow, like taking advantage’. He hadn’t seen his mate for 30-odd years when Paul and Linda walked into the marquee. ‘It was like the King and Queen’s arrived,’ he recalls. Emphasising this quasi-regal feel, which became increasingly pronounced over the next few years, guests were invited up one at a time to be received by McCartney. Ian hung back, falling into conversation with Paul’s brother Mike. Then Paul saw Ian and all formality was forgotten: ‘as soon as he saw me he came over. We just hugged.’ Three decades had passed, the schoolboys had become middle-aged men, but their friendship was somehow unchanged. ‘So from that point onwards we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve been to a few things like his office Christmas party … Linda would always invite the wife and me. She was a lovely woman.’ It is worth emphasising again the paradox that almost everybody who knew Linda liked her, talking of a warm, unpretentious, friendly person, yet her public image was of a pushy opportunist who’d cheated Jane Asher out of her destiny. Part of the problem was that Linda didn’t come across well with the press, journalists finding her gauche and abrasive. She appeared that way on stage, too.

  Two weeks after Ian James met the McCartneys backstage at the King’s Dock, Paul played a charity show at Knebworth, a country estate in Hertfordshire. The concert yielded a notorious tape of Linda singing backing vocals. As we have seen, it was never Linda’s desire to perform live with Paul; she did so to please him. As she became older, she felt less inclined to leave her home - where she was happy with the children and her animals - to perform, and she had to be cajoled into going on the road in 1989-91. She was particularly reluctant this time because Paul would be performing Beatles songs, which Linda had no part in creating, as opposed to her role in Wings. Comments Hamish Stuart:I think she felt more at home back in the Wings incarnation because she was really a part of that thing. With this band it was a little broader in scope, because of the fact we were doing Beatles tunes and things like that and I think maybe she didn’t feel quite as comfortable. But everybody tried to make her feel comfortable, and Wix was very good at finding good [keyboard] parts for her that fit with what everybody else was doing … Sometimes she had it tough on the road when she wanted to be home.

  Inevitably, Linda was criticised for touring with Paul, and it seems she was not held in universally high regard backstage. When they played the Knebworth Festival on 30 June 1990, a technician isolated Linda’s vocal and made a bootleg recording, Linda McCartney Live at Knebworth, that elicited hoots of laughter from almost everybody who heard it. Singing backing vocals to ‘Hey Jude’, Linda was heard droning the na na na na-na-na nas in the manner of somebody getting up in a pub on karaoke night. Band members defend Linda, saying anybody can sound rotten if you isolate them on stage, especially at an open-air gig like Knebworth, but the evidence is clear. Linda was a flat note in the band, slogging her way joylessly through these shows to keep Paul happy, and there was much more of this to come before she could go home to Sparky, Blankit and her other pets.

  The success of the Visa ad campaign led to Paul returning to the US to play an additional series of stadium shows during the summer of 1990. The band rehearsed ‘Birthday’ from the White Album so that Paul could treat his Washington DC audience to the song on 4 July. The tour finally concluded in Chicago at the end of that month, by which time Paul had played to 2.8 million people in 13 countries - the longest and most successful tour of his career to date. By getting back to a Beatles-heavy set list he had recaptured the attention of a vast international audience, who remained bewitched by the fab four. It was a lesson he didn’t forget, repeating the formula for every subsequent tour he undertook, gradually increasing the Beatles content until he became a veritable Beatles jukebox, which was great for audiences. The situation was now clear. With John Lennon dead, and Paul, George and Ringo locked in almost constant disagreements over money, the next best thing to experiencing the magic of the Beatles was to see Paul McCartney live. It has been true ever since.

  Some of the music Wings made in the 1970s wasn’t as good as Paul’s earlier work. Some of the outfits and hair styles Paul and Linda wore were very much of that era.

  In the late 1970s, Paul moved his company, McCartney Productions Ltd (MPL), to this handsome townhouse in London’s Soho Square.

  This charming family picture shows the McCartneys with some of their pets in the garden of their London home, April 1976, just before the Wings Over America tour. From left to right are 13-year-old Heather, Paul, 4-year-old Stella, Linda and 6-year-old Mary.

  Paul poses with the final line-up of Wings in front of the Royal Liver Building, Liverpool, 1979. From left to right are guitarist Laurence Juber, Linda, Paul, drummer Steve Holley and guitarist Denny Laine.

  When Paul took Wings to Japan in January 1980 he foolishly brought marijuana with him in his luggage. Arrested at Narita Airport, McCartney is seen in handcuffs being taken to Kojimachi Police Station where he spent nine nights in a cell.

  John Lennon was murdered in New York on the evening of 8 December 1980. The next day Paul went to work at AIR Studios in London. He is seen speaking to journalists about the death of his friend as he leaves AIR. ‘It’s a drag, isn’t it?’ he asked newsmen.

  In the early 1980s Paul bought Blossom Farm adjacent to his original Sussex retreat, Waterfall, and had a new family home built. The house (bottom of picture) is now the centre of a vast, 1,000-acre private estate.

  To enable him to spend time at home with the family in Sussex, Paul bought a nearby windmill, Hog Hill Mill, and had it converted into a recording studio.

  The 1984 movie Give My Regards to Broad Street proved one of the biggest blunders of Paul’s career. any friends were given parts in the picture. Here Paul and Linda are seen in costume with Ringo Starr and his second wife Barbara Bach.

  After ten years off the road, McCartney returned to touring in 1989, aged 47, with a show that was 50 per cent Beatles material.

  Paul branched out into orchestral composition in 1991 with his Liverpool Oratorio. Here he is celebrating the success of the première at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral with his co-composer Carl Davis and soloist Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (far left).

  In the mid-1990s, the three surviving Beatles reunited for the Anthology project, recounting the story of the band for a TV series and book, and recording two ‘new’ Beatles songs, the disappointing ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’.

  In March 1998, Paul and Linda went to Paris with their children Heather, James and Mary (seen left to right with their parents) to support their youngest, Stella, at her latest fashion show. Linda’s cropped hair was a sign of the treatment she had been receiving for breast cancer. A month later she was dead.

  Linda McCartney died here at the McCartneys’ ranch outside Tucson, Arizona, on 17 April 1998. She was 56.

  Stella McCartney makes it plain that, in her opinion, it’s about time Dad was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. New York, March 1999.

  Sir Paul McCartney (knighted 1997) organised two memorial services for his late wife. Here he leads children Stella, James and Mary out of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, London, on 8 June 1998.

  While still mourning the death of Linda, Sir Paul attended an awards ceremony in London in May 1999, where 31-year-old Heather Mills caught his eye. Here is Heather during her earlier career as a ‘glamour’ model.

  Sir Paul and Heather Mills announced their engagement in July 2001, posing for photographers outside the musician’s London home. Despite a rocky courtship, they married the following June. Heather was 34; Paul was a week shy of 60.

  Over the course of his career Sir
Paul has had many occasions to meet his monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, developing a warm relationship with Her Majesty. Here he shows the Queen around the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, May 2002.

  The divorce of Sir Paul and Heather Mills McCartney was acrimonious. At the culmination of the case, Heather tipped a jug of water over Sir Paul’s solicitor Fiona Shackleton, who is seen leaving the Royal Courts of Justice with her client on 17 March 2008, her hair still wet.

  Immediately after the divorce judgment, Heather Mills addressed the media at the entrance to the Royal Courts of Justice. She said she was satisfied with her £24.3 million settlement, but she had asked for much more.

  In June 2008 Sir Paul returned to Liverpool to help the city celebrate its year as European Capital of Culture. He is seen here at a fashion show at LIPA, his old school, now a performing arts institute, with son James and Beatles widows Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison.

  Since his divorce from Heather Mills McCartney, Sir Paul has spent much of his time in the company of the American Nancy Shevell. Here they are in Paris, October 2009.

  With John Lennon and George Harrison gone, it has fallen to Sir Paul McCartney to carry the Beatles torch. The spectacular shows he gives around the world are emotional celebrations of the greatest band in the history of popular music.

  23

  MUSIC IS MUSIC

  THE LIVERPOOL ORATORIO

  Back in 1988, Carla Lane had persuaded the McCartneys to make a guest appearance in an episode of her television show, Bread. The storyline was that Linda was opening an animal rescue centre in Liverpool. During filming Paul and Lin met the actress Jean Boht, who played the matriarch Nellie Boswell in the series and was married in real life to the composer Carl Davis. When Carl, Carla and Jean subsequently collaborated on a short orchestral work, The Pigeon’s Progress, staged at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Paul and Linda sent a telegram of support - ‘Here’s to you and all the pigeons in the world’ - which caused Carl to think about writing music with Paul. During a visit to the McCartneys’ farm in Sussex, the composer asked if Paul would like to collaborate on an orchestral piece for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, for whom he was guest conductor, and which was due to celebrate its 150th anniversary. The idea of creating music with a Liverpool theme appealed to Paul, who began telling Carl his life story, starting with how he’d been born in Liverpool during the Second World War. ‘That’s good!’ remarked Davis brightly, seeing the beginning of an oratorio - a word Paul wasn’t familiar with.

  ‘Is this a symphony we’re writing?’

  ‘No, that’s slightly different.’

  ‘Is is a concerto then?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Davis, explaining that an oratorio is a piece of music based on a religious story, sung by soloists and chorus; Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius for example. The outcome of Davis’s and McCartney’s collaboration - the Liverpool Oratorio - was indeed to contain an element of pluralistic religiosity, but had much more to do with Paul’s life.

  The story starts with a character named Shanty, like Paul born in Liverpool during the last war, and having the same good fortune to attend the Liverpool Institute, which is evoked fondly in the second movement, with a reference to Paul’s Spanish teacher Miss Inkley teaching the boys a rhyme about three rabbits. The story then veers off into a confusing section about Shanty meeting a ghost named Mary, who assumes corporeal form and becomes Shanty’s wife in the fifth movement, their marriage reaching a crisis when Mary falls pregnant and Shanty takes to drink (wouldn’t you if you married a ghost named after your mum!), their problems resolved in the final movement when husband and wife praise the overarching importance of family life. With a movement devoted to Shanty’s father, and references to a kindly nurse, the oratorio gathered together the talismans of Paul’s early life in a typically sentimental 90-minute work.

  To take on such a project showed ambition, some might say hubris, on Paul’s part, and was a surprising departure from rock. In his childhood, the McCartneys turned off the wireless when classical music came on the air. In the Sixties, Paul dipped into Berio and Stockhausen, as we have seen, becoming sufficiently enthused by their experimental compositions to create avant-garde music of his own. He also became friendly with Stockhausen and Tavener. He’d never shown much interest in mainstream ‘classical’ music, though. On the contrary, Paul and Linda walked out of a New York production of La Bohème when they were courting because they were bored. When the journalist Ray Connolly interviewed Wings at the time of Back to the Egg, he asked if anyone in the band liked classical music; Denny Laine nodded vigorously, which as Coleman noted ‘contrasted strongly with Paul’s bemused frown’. Yet an appreciation of classical music often develops with maturity - Paul chose Benjamin Britten’s Country Dances as one of his records on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs a couple of years later in 1982 - and there is no reason why an innately musical person shouldn’t like, understand and indeed make orchestral music as well as pop, which is not necessarily a lesser form. Music is music, as Alban Berg observed, while another modernist composer, Gunther Schuller, called for a blending of traditional and pop, ‘in a beautiful brotherhood/ sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other’. This is what Paul proceeded to do.

  There was a problem, however. When Paul needed to create music for players who went by notes on a page, he had to employ an amanuensis to orchestrate his music. George Martin had filled that role in the Beatles and afterwards. It was George who scored ‘Yesterday’, The Family Way and the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence in Give My Regards to Broad Street, among other pieces with Paul’s name attached, raising the question of how much credit is actually due to McCartney on such projects. Modest man that he is, Martin has always been content to stand in the background. Carl Davis was a different personality. An American, born in New York in 1936, one like Linda who’d made his home in England, Carl had enjoyed a long and successful career, best known for his 1980 score for the revived silent movie Napoleon, and he was used to getting due credit. He assumed he would at least share co-credit with Paul on their oratorio, which he had suggested and would essentially write, because Paul couldn’t. ‘I naturally assumed it would be The Liverpool Oratorio by McCartney and Davis.’ So Carl was ‘very taken aback when he [Paul] said, quite emphatically, that he wanted it to be called Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio’.

  Work on the oratorio started around the time of Paul’s 1989/90 world tour, after which the star had a live album to oversee, the serviceable Tripping the Live Fantastic, and other projects to attend to, including campaigning with Linda to save their local cottage hospital in Sussex. He also helped Lin launch a range of frozen veggie food; and sat for interviews with Barry Miles for their forthcoming book, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. In addition to these and other commitments, Paul found time to meet Carl Davis regularly, supplying him with the essential story of the oratorio, humming and playing tunes for it on the piano. It was Carl’s task to transcribe these tunes, and do the detailed work of scoring the piece, Paul coming back with comments.

  By January 1991, the composers had been working together in this way for two years, with the première of the oratorio scheduled for June. During final preparations, a documentary camera team followed Paul, the footage revealing tensions between McCartney and Davis, with Paul overruling his partner in a polite but firm way that must have been difficult for Davis to take, being so much more knowledgeable about the world that he, like Virgil with Dante, was leading Paul into. At the same time, Paul was capable of rolling out melodies on the piano that sounded so delightful Davis was scrabbling around for a pencil to note them down before Paul moved on to something else. Davis, who already had the look of a Mad Professor, appeared increasingly frazzled by the experience of working with a man who didn’t technically know what he was doing, but knew exactly what he wanted, and wasn’t to be brooked in argument. After all, Paul was paying for everything, giving him a crushing financial grip on proceedings
. Paul’s unassailable economic strength, by dint of which almost everybody working with him is in his pocket, becomes ever more pronounced as we move into the latter part of his career.

  Even more than when he was a young man, the mature McCartney was also characterised by his habit of doing many things at once, which is why the MPL logo depicts a juggler. While working with Carl Davis on the oratorio, Paul was involved in various campaigns; working with Mark Featherstone-Witty on establishing LIPA; discussing animation projects - mostly films about little furry animals - with Geoff Dunbar; attending to Apple and MPL business; and working with his rock band on a new album in advance of another world tour. The band remained much as it was during the last tour, featuring Hamish Stuart, Robbie McIntosh and Wix Wickens, with a new (vegetarian) drummer named Blair Cunningham. One of the first projects they undertook together was the MTV show Unplugged.