Fab

by Howard Sounes

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  Many of Paul’s associates had died prematurely, several worn down by the rigours of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Brian, John, Linda and George had all passed away before their time, along with a host of supporting players in the epic story of Paul’s life. Now Neil Aspinall, the backroom boy who had as much claim as anyone to being the ‘fifth Beatle’, was dying of cancer in New York. Paul went to see him, as he had George, thanked Nell, as the boys always called their friend fondly, for all he had done for the band, discreetly paid his medical bills, and mourned his passing when he died in March 2008 at the age of 66.

  Neither Paul nor Ringo attended Neil’s funeral in his adoptive home town of Twickenham, just outside London. ‘We went to Neil’s house for the reception afterwards and Yoko said to me, “Where is Paul and Ringo?” And I said, “I don’t know. You should know better than I do where they are’,” says Peter Brown, who attended the service along with Olivia Harrison, Sir George Martin and Mary and James McCartney.

  Paul was represented through his children, but he and Ringo were not there. Now whether they thought it was more discreet for them not to go … but it wasn’t as if there was going to be a million paparazzi or anything. So I don’t know what happened that day.

  Sir Paul spent a good part of the spring on holiday with Nancy Shevell, his decree nisi coming through in May, at the end of which he returned to Liverpool to help his home town celebrate its year as European Capital of Culture. In recent times Liverpool had been perceived not so much as a place to go to enrich one’s mind as a scruffy, declining seaport beset with social and economic problems. So the Capital of Culture accolade - a European Union initiative to boost investment in designated cities - was a welcome fillip to Merseyside. A huge amount of money was being invested in building works, including a new shopping arcade opposite the docks, part of which had some time since been restored and given World Heritage status, with the city hosting an impressive series of cultural events in 2008 ranging from art shows to symphony concerts. Art with a capital A was all very well, but for millions Liverpool was the Beatles, and the city’s year as Capital of Culture would ring hollow without a Beatle or two in attendance. They got both.

  Ringo Starr, now in his 68th year, opened Liverpool’s celebratory year by playing drums on the roof of St George’s Hall in the city centre on 8 January 2008, and proclaiming improbably that he might return from tax exile in Monte Carlo to live on Merseyside. When Ringo subsequently told Jonathan Ross on TV that he couldn’t think of a single thing about Liverpool he actually missed, and had only said he might come back to please the crowd, Liverpudlians were outraged. Many had long thought Ringo thick, and this seemed to prove it. Ringo’s head was cut off a topiary likeness of the band in Allerton, while cabbies told visitors to the city that if ‘that twat’ ever came back to Merseyside he’d be pelted with eggs.

  The centrepiece of the year of culture was the Liverpool Sound concert on Sunday 1 June at Anfield, iconic home of Liverpool Football Club. The event was headlined, naturally, by the other, more important ex-Beatle, the one who, drugs and women aside, rarely put a foot wrong. Sir Paul McCartney arrived on Merseyside a few days in advance of the show, spending part of Saturday driving around the city with his major-domo John Hammel, son James and daughter Beatrice, a lively little kid now coming up for five. In contrast to Paul’s older children, Bea was being brought up by her mum in an atmosphere of conspicuous wealth. This tour of Liverpool was intended to show her the normal world Daddy came from.

  Stopping at 72 Western Avenue, Speke, Paul led Bea up the garden path to the door of his old corpy house. ‘This is where Daddy used to live,’ he told the child, as they posed for a souvenir picture outside what was now a run-down terrace. As they did so, the man next door popped his head over the wall. ‘All right, Macca!’ James ‘Brickhead’ Gillat, a tattooed joiner, hailed the superstar.

  ‘All right, la,’ rejoined McCartney pleasantly. ‘Is there anybody in?’

  Sir Paul rang the bell of number 72 to introduce himself to the current occupants, Paddy and Lyn Kearney. He hoped they didn’t mind him taking a souvenir picture on the doorstep. The Kearneys and Brickhead were charmed by Paul, who still seemed connected to ordinary people. ‘He never walked away from us, never turned his back on us,’ says Brickhead admiringly after the great man left.

  When Paul cruised by Forthlin Road with John, James and Bea, he decided not to go up to the door, wary of the tourists who arrived every few minutes to stand outside this much better-known address, taking pictures and pulling off bits of the hedge as keepsakes. Visitors on the National Trust tour were admitted in small groups by the live-in custodian John Halliday, who calculates he’d shown 70,000 people around Paul’s old house in the ten years it had been open to the public. One of John’s ambitions was to give Paul himself the tour, and now here was his chance. ‘I glanced out of the corner of me eye. He wasn’t driving; he was in the front passenger seat - I thought, that’s Paul! He gives me the thumbs up. I thought he’d come in, but he drove past.’

  National Trust ticketholders were taken to Mendips before Forthlin Road, Aunt Mimi’s old home, also now managed by the charity. The two houses were included in the same £15 tour. This particular afternoon, Mendips was closed for a private visit from Yoko Ono and her son Sean. A well-preserved little woman of 75, with clever, sparkling eyes, and a daringly low décolletage, Yoko attended a host of events in the city that weekend, including a rare coming together of most of the surviving members of the Beatles family at LIPA the following afternoon.

  As her contribution to the festivities, and to raise money for LIPA, Stella McCartney staged a lunchtime fashion show at the Institute on Sunday 1 June. Sir Paul showed up with son James, taking a seat in the front row of the Paul McCartney Auditorium alongside Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. Paul kissed the widows and chatted with Yoko as if they’d never been anything but best friends. Watching them, one was reminded of a royal court, all eyes upon the heads of state, attended in turn by their lords and ladies. In the court of the Beatles, the followers included Paul’s brother Mike (his show business career as Mike McGear a distant memory), Sir George Martin, snowy-haired and almost stone deaf at 82, the rotund figure of the elderly court artist Sir Peter Blake, and LIPA chief Mark Featherstone-Witty. Every king needs a servant, and John Hammel hovered nearby, quick to tell the press photographers they’d taken enough pictures. Sir Paul welcomed the PR opportunity of a happy snap with Yoko - it made the front pages of the nationals the next day - but he didn’t want pictures of himself with Beatrice, who was being minded by Mike McCartney a few rows back, a pretty little girl dressed head to foot in pink.

  When John Hammel had shooed the snappers away, Bea stood on her chair and loudly asked Daddy for an ice cream. Sir Paul turned, acknowledged Bea’s presence with an affectionate, fatherly expression, upon which she ran to him, climbed into his lap and chattered away for a few minutes before going back to sit with Uncle Mike for the start of the show.

  Stella McCartney strode onto the stage - a perky, ginger-haired woman of 36 - to acknowledge her family links to Liverpool. ‘I’ve got about 50,000 relatives in this city,’ she said, upon which Sir Paul shouted: ‘Three cheers for Stella!’ The audience did as it was told. During the ensuring catwalk parade, Paul and his son sat with fuzzy looks on their faces watching the leggy beauties model Stella’s latest creations, Paul taking the occasional picture on his mobile phone as if lining up dates for later. Bea returned with a balloon, scrambled into Daddy’s lap, then fell asleep with her thumb in her mouth. ‘I thought, fantastic, he’s got a great relationship with her,’ notes Mark Featherstone-Witty.

  Liverpool was overcast that evening as 36,000 people streamed towards Anfield for the concert, most of the ticketholders local people, though others had come from around the world to see Sir Paul play his home town. The fact he was playing at Anfield was special: the McCartneys had lived briefly round the corner at 10 Sunbury R
oad, and a home town show always has that bit of extra emotion. After the support acts, the Kaiser Chiefs and Zutons, two of whose members had attended LIPA, the comedian Peter Kay appeared on stage to a warm reception. ‘It’s my job to introduce the star turn tonight, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Kay, who is hugely popular in the north.

  He’s a local lad who’s done very well for himself in the old music game. He’s played with some amazing people over the years: Stevie Wonder, Rupert the Bear [big laugh] and the Beatles! [huge cheer] … In conjunction with Liverpool County Council [boos and hisses], BBC Radio Merseyside [cheers] and Heatwave Sun Bed Centre, Norris Green [laughs], it is my duty to reveal Britain has got talent, ladies and gentleman, and his name is Sir Paul Mildred McCARTNEEEEEY!

  Strolling on stage in a silver suit, Paul opened with ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’, taking his audience back to the Cavern. Next came ‘Jet’, the audience punching the air with the repeated exclamations of ‘Jet!’, singing along to the verses in the style of a football crowd at a home fixture. ‘Liverpool! I love ya!’ exclaimed Paul at the end of the number, and who would doubt him? In recent years he’d spent more time in the city than at any stage since the early Sixties, becoming almost a familiar figure in the streets again. Stories of the star strolling about town - popping into Lewis’s to buy a tie one day - were legion. ‘I was born just down the road from here, Walton Hospital, Rice Lane,’ he reminded his audience, ‘and I lived in Sunbury Road.’ Sitting in the Lower Centenary Stand, Brenda Rothwell turned to the person sitting beside her and said excitedly: ‘I live next door!’ After ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ Paul held up his Höfner bass and cried: ‘OK, let’s hear it for Speke! For Garston! …’ Local people cheered their suburb.

  Paul sang ‘My Love’ for Linda, whose picture appeared on the huge screens (all images of Heather excised). The audience applauded everything the star said, his every joke and story, and sang along heartily to almost every song, the ukulele tribute to George Harrison raising the crowd to a collective roar when Paul sang his friend’s sweetly questioning lyric, meant originally for George’s first wife, Pattie Boyd, but having a universal resonance: ‘You’re asking me will my love grow/I don’t know, I don’t know’. The words echoed around the stadium as a football chant, tears pricking the eyes of performer and fans. Olivia was watching. Yoko was beside her. She appeared to approve Paul’s performance of ‘Give Peace a Chance’, as a tribute to her late husband. Paul signed off with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, setting middle-aged Liverpudlians jiving in the aisles, round ladies of pensionable age recreating the dance steps of their youth, touching their ample bosoms and sending out their love with the palms of their hands as Paul sang of his heart going boom.

  With a detonation of fireworks, the home town celebration of the greatest pop band ever was over. In the club’s trophy room, Sir Paul greeted the selected friends, celebrity guests and relatives who’d been gathered to meet him briefly after the show, going down the line shaking hands and exchanging friendly words with everyone. ‘Even though I’ve known him all these years, I’m still in awe of the fact he’s a Beatle,’ says Sam Leach, a promoter from the early days who was among the guests. ‘If I call him Sir Paul, he laughs.’ Outside, the rest of the audience shuffled away down the narrow, red-brick streets of Anfield, chanting with drowsy happiness, ‘Liverpool! Liverpool!’

  FURTHER ON DOWN THE ROAD

  The musician’s life is on the road, and for an artist who loves to perform, tours are a pleasure, an opportunity to cast the happy spell of music over an audience and bask in their appreciation. ‘I think it’s basically magic,’ Paul has said. ‘There is such a thing as magic, and the Beatles were magic.’

  Later that summer Paul indulged himself, and offset the cost of his recent divorce, with massive one-off shows in Kiev and Quebec (the latter to celebrate the province’s 400th birthday). En route to Canada, he joined Billy Joel on stage at Shea Stadium for the final concert at that famous venue before it was demolished to make way for a new home for the New York Mets. Afterwards, he got his old Ford Bronco out of his Amagansett garage, took Chuck Berry’s tip and motored west with Nancy Shevell on Route 66, via Chicago, St Louis, Flagstaff, Arizona (not forgetting Winona), 2,000 miles and more to LA. Everyday folks found themselves bumping into Sir Paul and his girlfriend at gas stations and diners along the way, the couple apparently happy together and happy to pose for pictures. It was a road trip he’d always wanted to make.

  That autumn saw the release of a welcome third Fireman album, the records Paul made with Youth being among the most interesting of his later career. Electric Arguments was more song-based than their previous projects, with proper lyrics that seemed to criticise an ex-love - references to betrayal, lies and a woman who went looking for a pay daddy (‘Highway’) - without identifying Heather. Paul was always careful that way. Although a more mainstream offering than Rushes, the record was still too different for Macca traditionalists. ‘I don’t like this Electric Arguments,’ says New Yorker Linda Aiello, who otherwise lives in a state of McCartney devotion. ‘It’s not him, because it really isn’t him. It’s the Fireman … I can’t get into it.’

  In the spring of 2009 Paul appeared on stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York with Ringo Starr, in support of Transcendental Meditation, one of the dopier Sixties’ crazes, but something the men had carried with them into old age. More North American shows followed. Having helped mark the closure of Shea Stadium, Paul played three sell-outs at the new home of the New York Mets, Citi Fields, promoted with an appearance on David Letterman’s Late Show at the Ed Sullivan Theater where the Beatles first electrified America. Paul performed a special homecoming set from the marquee, later releasing a live CD of the New York concerts, Good Evening New York City. Excluding the Radio City benefit, Paul played a dozen shows across the USA in the year, grossing almost $41 million (£26.7m). Together with the other concerts he’d given recently, the divorce was paid for.

  Two old foes died that summer, first Michael Jackson in suspicious circumstances aged 50, never having given Paul a pay rise on Northern Songs, part of which Jackson had sold to Sony to help fund his excessive lifestyle, putting the songs beyond Paul’s grasp. It seemed he would never get them back now. Paul insisted in his tribute that he and Jackson had never really fallen out, despite all his grousing. Ten days later, almost unnoticed amidst the Jackson news, a true enemy, Allen Klein, died aged 77. As old friends and foes alike dropped away, McCartney rolled on, looking spry for a man approaching 70, popping over to Paris with Nancy to attend Stella’s latest fashion show, casting a paternal eye over son James as he recorded his first album at Hog Hill Mill, while Dad worked on a guitar concerto and oversaw the endless exploitation of the Beatles’ back catalogue, being the driving force behind the Beatles Rock Band video game, released in the autumn of 2009, around the same time as a complete digital reissue of the Beatles’ studio albums. Although almost everybody already had all this music, and the box sets cost almost $300 (£196), they sold strongly, helping make the Beatles the second best-selling act of the decade in America, just behind Eminem, a remarkable achievement for a group that split 39 years ago.

  Always busy, Paul recorded a song for a new Robert De Niro picture, Everybody’s Fine, and had a movie of his own in the works - the animated film about Wirral the Squirrel he and Linda had decided on years back based on stories he used to tell the kids. To introduce the character to the public, Paul and Geoff Dunbar created in the first instance an illustrated children’s book, High in the Clouds, the plot of which harked back to the death of Mary McCartney - a trauma Paul still spoke of as if he were an orphaned child. ‘That association [is] very, very strong in High in the Clouds,’ says Dunbar. ‘For us in our childhoods, Mum was this great thing.’ In the book, Wirral loses his mother, as Paul had, after which the creature goes off into the world to find adventure, music and love with a cute little red squirrel named Wilhamina. At the end, the two characters stand together, looking at the
stars. ‘If only Mum was with us,’ says Wirral.

  ‘She is,’ replied Wilhamina, clutching his paw.

  This little story expresses much of Paul’s own life: a sentimental man formed by his childhood experiences in Liverpool, from whence he had gone searching for love in a musical world. (For Wilhamina read Linda.) Now his squirrel story was to be made into a 3D Hollywood film. Hopefully it would be ready in time for Bea to appreciate, before she began to realise the enormity of who Daddy was.

  THE ROAD GOES EVER ON

  On a frosty night in December 2009, with Christmas in the air, Sir Paul McCartney opened his latest tour - a European tour - in Hamburg, second city of his musical genesis. It was way back in 1960 that Paul first drove here with the boys, in Allan Williams’s overloaded van, to play the Indra. A lifetime later, Paul flew back by private jet to play the Color Line Arena, five subway stops from the Reeperbahn, declining an invitation to meet the city’s mayor, and keeping his fans waiting as he played a late sound check and ate his customary vegetarian pre-show supper. Although the animal rights group PETA, which McCartney had long been associated with, had stalls at the Hamburg show, distributing Eat No Meat literature, the intense animal activism of Linda’s day was gone. Once upon a time the McCartneys screened fierce antivivisection films before their shows, and banned meat products from gigs. Tonight, fans munched schinkenwurst at the concessions, while those who’d purchased €319 ($440) VIP ticket packages tucked into gourmet meats in the Platinum bar.

  Germans are a punctual people, so when the advertised start time came and went, and they were obliged to wait a further 80 minutes for the show to begin, they became disgruntled, slow-clapping, booing and hissing the unseen star. Finally, Sir Paul stepped up on the stage - dressed in the dark suit, white shirt and braces he favoured these days for live performances - greeting his audience with a supremely confident shrug as if to say: ‘What’s up?’ Eleven thousand grumpy Germans were immediately pacified, then brought to their feet by the upbeat sound of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, Paul as ever following Uncle Mike’s advice to him and John at the Fox and Hounds, Caversham. ‘A good act is shaped like a W,’ Mike had told the boys. You had to start on a high.