Fab

by Howard Sounes

  The lab that owned her had

  Been doing it for years

  Why don’t we make them pay for every last eye …

  There was a political dimension to another song, released as a single with ‘Hope of Deliverance’. The number ‘Big Boys Bickering’ admonished world leaders for fucking up the planet and became notable because the BBC and other broadcasters refused to play it on air because of the bad language. There was a sense that Paul was courting publicity in an increasingly desperate attempt to sell records in the numbers he once had. When Off the Ground was completed the star decided he wanted dance mixes of a couple of the songs for release as 12-inch vinyl singles, hoping to reach a younger audience this way. To undertake the work he hired Martin Glover, founder member of the band Killing Joke, who, despite being 31 years old, went by the name Youth. Youth quickly established a rapport with McCartney, the two musicians sharing a similar hippyish mindset and manner of speaking. Paul was of course one of the original hippies. Youth was part of a second generation who found inspiration in the same values, his conversation referencing bardic and pagan English traditions, talking about ‘the wheel of the year’ and other such new age stuff that Paul empathised with.

  [So I ] went down there [to Hog Hill Mill] and I started sampling … I said, ‘What would be great if you could just add a couple of other things to the loops I’ve taken off the multi-tracks and just take it a bit further,’ and he was happy to do that. I got him jamming, got him on his guitar, and all these other [instruments]. He’s got such a great collection.

  One of the instruments Paul played on this very modern record was Bill Black’s double bass, a relic from the creation of rock ’n’ roll.

  Youth took the tapes to his home studio where he assembled alternate versions of what he expected to be one final track. Then Paul came over with the family to listen.

  He and Linda and some of the kids would come down and just sit in on the sessions until three or four, and got a real buzz out of some of the alternative mixes I was doing for the ambient ones and really, really loved it, and then he came back and he said, ‘I want to put all these mixes out’ [laughs]. I said, ‘They’re actually for editing into one mix.’ ‘No, no.’ He’s often like this [laughs]. So the first album was really all the different mixes from that one session.

  By the ‘first album’ Youth means the collaborative CD strawberries oceans ships forest. ‘It’s basically a magical reference in the English folk tradition,’ Youth says of the curious unpunctuated title, declining to elucidate. Paul decided to put this enigmatic recording out under a pseudonym, as he had with the Thrillington album in 1977. This time he chose the moniker the Fireman, in honour of the fact that his father had fire-watched in Liverpool during the Blitz. ‘This was supposed to be an antidote to him doing commercial releases or songs with record company pressure,’ comments Youth. ‘It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to imagine how much of a box being Paul McCartney could be, and the idea of wanting to do things outside of that box, with no previous association, anonymously, can be very attractive.’ There was no reference to Youth in the plain packaging of the CD, no clue who had made the music apart from the fact the album was copyright Juggler Records, Inc., a subsidiary of MPL Communications. Paul’s involvement became public only gradually. The album, comprising repetitive music without tunes or lyrics, the spacey voices fading in and out of an electronic sea of sound, was never going to command a big audience or make much money. ‘It is a dance record, but it’s also ambient, and it’s a little esoteric [with elements of] electronica,’ explains Youth. ‘But it’s also none of those things, cos it’s stuff he’s all played, and it’s all originally recorded and that makes it different.’

  While Youth continued to work on the Fireman album, Paul embarked on his New World Tour, so named because he was visiting Australia and New Zealand, places he’d missed in 1989-91, as well as playing shows in Europe and North America. Having learned how well a Beatles-loaded show went down with modern audiences, Paul drew up a set list that was 50 per cent Beatles material, a slightly different selection than last time, opening with the perky ‘Drive My Car’, which got the crowd on its feet, incorporating ‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Penny Lane’ in the main set, along with songs from Wings and his solo career, including several selections from Off the Ground. As in 1989-91, playing Beatles songs with Paul on stage was a thrill for the band members who, in common with their audiences, had grown up with this music. ‘In the ’93 tour we did “Fixing a Hole” and that was always one of my favourite Beatles songs,’ says Robbie McIntosh. ‘Me and Hamish used to play the solo together to make it sound like the record, because it’s doubled on the record.’

  One element of the New World Tour was to raise funds for LIPA and, just when he was starting to feel under enormous pressure to find sponsors, Mark Featherstone-Witty got lucky with Grundig. The German electronics company offered LIPA £2 million over five years ($3.06m) for ‘title sponsorship’, which meant the Grundig name would have to be used over LIPA on its literature. Featherstone-Witty’s excitement at the deal was quelled when Paul told him he didn’t want to endorse Grundig. He’d always rejected offers to advertise products, personally or with his songs, thinking it cheap, which was why he was so angry that Michael Jackson had licensed Beatles songs to advertise cookies and sneakers in the United States. In particular, Paul disliked the idea that Grundig would have its name over the institute. ‘I remember him saying, “I’m not having that. I don’t have my name on it, I don’t see why their name should be on it. You’ve got to find another way, it’s all too commercial.”’

  Although Paul didn’t like endorsing products, it had become commonplace to have a corporate sponsor offset some of the costs of a rock tour, as Visa had in 1990. For this tour MPL had lined up a similar agreement with Volkswagen. It was all but signed when Linda scuppered this deal, too, saying the McCartneys couldn’t associate themselves with the car industry for ecological reasons. This left Richard Ogden scratching around for an eleventh-hour replacement sponsor Linda would approve of. ‘The story-boards had been done, everything had been done. You can imagine the cost,’ recalls Featherstone-Witty, who benefited indirectly when MPL remembered that another German firm wanted to link its name with Paul’s. ‘Ah, Grundig! They seem all right, it’s a tape recorder, no pollutants. Let’s do Grundig! And all of a sudden Grundig were good news …’ With Grundig now able to associate its name directly with Paul, a deal was struck whereby the company paid MPL to be the tour sponsor, which he accepted as part of how a modern tour was organised, as well as giving a smaller donation to LIPA, without having its name too prominently on the institute, the agreement formalised backstage at the Frankfurt Festhalle on 23 February 1993. Mark signed with an executive from Grundig, then waited with him outside Paul’s dressing room, shuffled fractionally closer to the presence by Paul’s minders as show time approached. With moments remaining, Paul emerged, shook hands quickly with the man whose company was giving him so much cash, posed for a thumbs-up photo, and went on stage.

  When Paul reached Australia, his tour changed from an arena to a stadium concert, with the visuals and effects correspondingly enlarged. This included the huge montage screens on which a disturbing animal rights film was shown to audiences before the gig; also the pyrotechnics during ‘Live and Let Die’. Not everything worked properly at first. Says Hamish Stuart:The most difficult time, I think, was when we hit Australia, because we were up-scaling the production at that point and there were a lot of visuals that were a little out of sync at the beginning of that and Paul got a little upset … But it all got sorted out. It was part of getting it right. Musically, there [was] never a problem.

  There were other irritants, though. Paul had agreed that a special LIPA ticket could be sold at the concerts. Costing the equivalent of $1,000 US, this was a very expensive seat, and many fans who dug deep for the money assumed that a backstage meeting wi
th Paul was included. Though this was never explicitly promised, McCartney did meet some LIPA ticketholders in Australia. When LIPA tickets were subsequently sold in the USA, promoters gave enquirers the impression they definitely would meet the star. When this didn’t automatically happen, ticketholders became angry, infuriated when they saw Paul on television meeting other, ordinary concert-goers as the whim took him. When Paul looked out from the stage during his set, he routinely saw banners declaring ‘WE LOVE YOU PAUL’ and so forth. Now there was a banner complaining about a ‘$1,000 LIPA SCAM’. One American fan wrote to Mark Featherstone-Witty in bitter complaint, explaining that she was part of a hardcore group who had supported Paul throughout his career, even when his records weren’t first rate. ‘Who do you think is buying Off the Ground?’ she asked pointedly, as if doing so was an act of charity. ‘It isn’t selling, but everyone who had a LIPA ticket knew all the words to all the songs.’

  Even worse, not enough LIPA tickets were sold in America, part of a wider problem of selling out the North American shows. Following the tremendous success of the 1989 -91 US tour, when Paul had been backed by Visa’s television campaign, the New World Tour had been planned and budgeted on selling out the same vast venues, the likes of the Houston Astrodome and Giants Stadium. But there was no national TV campaign in 1993, and there were no takers for the last few blocks of seats in towns like Boulder and Toronto. These empty seats often meant the difference between profit and loss. While his motivation wasn’t purely financial, Paul didn’t want to work for peanuts (as he sang every night in ‘Drive My Car’). He blamed Richard Ogden, and Ogden resigned accordingly from MPL. Looking back on his six years managing the star, Ogden concludes that Paul wanted to be successful. He wanted to be the toppermost of the poppermost. The Beatles thing. He wanted to be number one. He never lost that desire. Lost maybe the understanding of how to get that sometimes, but was prepared to listen to someone who could tell him, ‘Hey, let’s do this!’ ‘Oh, that seems like a good idea, man, let’s do that.’ … I had a wonderful time managing him.

  He also discovered that if you made a mistake with Paul you were up shit creek.

  To balance the books, Paul extended the tour into the winter of 1993. ‘Not that I need the money, but I still feel that if we bother to get out there then, like everyday working people, we’ll see some sort of reward.’ When Mark Featherstone-Witty came to visit Paul in Oslo in September, he found the musician in a lousy mood. Standing together at the backstage bar, Paul started berating the man from LIPA, demanding that he perform some Shakespeare on the spot to prove he’d been an actor as he claimed. ‘Come on, man, you say you were an actor, do something now.’ When Mark failed to rise to the challenge, Paul told him brusquely to go away. Mark was still with the tour the following week when Paul played Frankfurt again, just seven months after he’d last performed in the city, a testament to the size of his German fan base. Paul was still in a contrary mood, insisting that the Grundig sponsorship banners were hung in the Festhalle in such a way that he wouldn’t see them from the stage, apparently never having reconciled himself to the sponsorship deal, and summoning Mark to his dressing room before the show to give him a lecture.

  From the start, Paul’s interest in the Liverpool Institute had been more to do with saving his old school than founding an educational establishment, with underlying doubts about the validity of teaching show business. On a recent trip to Liverpool Paul had met the band the Christians, a member of which asked McCartney why he was putting money into teaching middle-class kids what musicians from working-class backgrounds, like himself, had picked up by experience. Paul brooded on this conversation, venting his concerns in Frankfurt. ‘He was very angry,’ says Featherstone-Witty, who discovered that his Lead Patron was also contemptuous of some of the proposed LIPA courses, one of which, titled ‘Image and Style’, ‘infuriated and worried him’ because he thought it trivial. Unless Mark did better, Paul warned he might withdraw his support altogether.

  Mark stumbled from Paul’s dressing room at the end of this harangue not knowing what to do. ‘I was so shaken that, putting my hand out to steady myself on the wall outside the dressing room door, I mistakenly placed it on Mary McCartney … who was standing outside waiting to go in,’ he wrote in his memoir Optimistic, Even Then. To his horror, Mark realised that his hand was on Mary McCartney’s breasts. ‘Aghast at the ramifications, I sprang back, white with apology.’

  So the tour rolled on, Paul releasing a spin-off live LP, Paul is Live, that seemed redundant only three years after Tripping the Live Fantastic. On this new live album, ‘Let Me Roll It’ held its own especially well beside the Beatles material, while Paul showed his sense of humour by including a sound-check version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ sung in the style of Mick Jagger, whose career the song kick-started. The album got most attention for its cover, which saw Paul posing with one of his Old English sheepdogs on the Abbey Road crossing, the artwork and album title a riposte to the Sixties rumour that Paul was dead and a double had taken his place on the original Abbey Road sleeve.

  That summer Paul’s school friend Ivan Vaughan died of heart failure aged 51. Although the news was not unexpected, in that Ivy had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for years, the death of a contemporary always comes as a shock. ‘They had the same birthday. They’d known each other from school. They’d gone their different ways, but they had a lot of respect for each other,’ says Ivy’s widow Janet, who received a copy of a poem Paul wrote in response to his friend’s death. In ‘Ivan’ Paul describes how two doors opened in Liverpool on 18 June 1942 when he and Ivy were born; how they went on to become mates, playing music together, Ivy being ‘the ace on the bass’; before Ivan introduced him to a couple of other pals, a reference to the fact that Ivan had taken Paul along to the Woolton fête where John Lennon was playing with the Quarry Men. Now:Cranlock naval

  Cranlock pie

  A tear is rolling

  Down my eye

  On the sixteenth of August

  Nineteen ninety-three

  One door closed

  Bye-bye Ivy

  The Cranlock rhyme is attractive and intriguing. ‘It was like a sort of jingle that they often used to say when they were together,’ explains Janet Vaughan. ‘I mean, it’s nonsense speak, but it’s something that was very familiar to them … I recognised it immediately [in the poem] as a familiar thing that they said to each other … If they were having a conversation, occasionally they would say it, and then burst out laughing. Haha! … It’s a lovely poem.’ There is indeed a simple, charming warmth to ‘Ivan’, a fitting and evidently heartfelt lament for a long and largely private friendship that had continued in the background of Paul’s public life.

  Ivan’s death was followed by a scare closer to home on 13 September 1993, Stella McCartney’s 22nd birthday. Stella, studying in London for a career in fashion design, was home in Sussex with the family when the McCartneys received news that James, who’d celebrated his 16th birthday the previous day, had gone missing surfing off Camber Sands. A lifeboat was launched and an RAF helicopter sent up as Paul drove to the scene. ‘It’s a three-mile drive and all sorts of thoughts were going through my head,’ Paul later said. Fortunately, James was found alive and well, though it wouldn’t be the last time he frightened his parents.

  In November Paul took his band to Japan, then South America, by which time everybody was road-weary. Playing with Paul had been a joy for his musicians, and the New World Tour had been brightened by the introduction of an acoustic set, yet the main show was the same every night, with Paul sticking to faithful recreations of the Beatles songs as heard on record. While this is initially thrilling, such rigid renditions become dull with repetition, for audience and band, pointing out the wisdom of Bob Dylan’s policy of remaking his songs constantly, even if audiences complain that the songs don’t sound like the records. Dylan says this doesn’t matter. The recording is just how the song sounded that particular day. Good songs can stan
d being altered. This was not Paul’s way. He presented his and the Beatles’ greatest hits like museum pieces, even making the same comments from the stage, such as encouraging his audience to sing along to ‘Hey Jude’, which they did eagerly and loudly every single night, first the girls, then the boys, the left side of the stadium, then the right, harmonising on the na na na na-na-na nas, an apparently delighted Paul complimenting everybody for singing so sweetly as though he’d never had this reaction before. As Hamish says, ‘When he knows that something works he sticks to it, which is true of [other artists]. It’s mainly a different audience every night, so I think you can get away with it.’

  By the time they reached Santiago, Chile, for the final show, it was, in Hamish’s words, ‘a little tired’. They had played to 1.7 million people on five continents, with Paul transforming what looked like a loss-making tour into an earner. MPL turned over £14 million in the 12 months to December 1993 ($21.42m), squeezing a profit of £2.6 million on the year ($3.97m). Paul then said goodbye to his band, whom he’d been working with for almost six years, explaining that he was committed to a major new project that would keep him at home in 1994. ‘I’m off to be a Beatle now,’ he said.