by Ray Connolly
‘I must admit I don’t want to be the one to come out and say the Beatles are finished. I agree that they were an institution, and I don’t want to go and break them up, but now I’m beginning to suffer because of all this, and beginning to turn the other cheek. I suppose really I do believe now that we have finished performing together, and I do believe now that we have finished recording together. I may not be right, but I must say I’m really enjoying what I’m doing at the moment.
‘I didn’t leave the Beatles. The Beatles have left the Beatles — but no one wants to be the one to say the party’s over.
‘John said last year he wanted a divorce. All right, so do I. I want to give him that divorce. I hate this trial separation because it’s just not working.
‘Personally, I don’t think John could do the Beatles thing now. I don’t think it would be good for him.
‘John’s in love with Yoko, and he’s no longer in love with the other three of us. And let’s face it, we were in love with the Beatles as much as anyone. We’re still like brothers and we have enormous emotional ties because we were the only four that it all happened to — who went right through those ten years. I think the other three are the most honest sincere men I have ever met. I love them. I really do.
‘I don’t mind being bound to them as a friend. I like that idea. I don’t mind being bound to them musically, because I like the others as musical partners. I like being in their band. But for my own sanity we must change the business arrangements we have. Only by being completely free of each other financially will we ever have any chance of coming back together as friends. Because it’s business that has caused a lot of the split.’
Basically Paul’s worry over their business affairs is over a contract signed in July, 1967, which ties all four Beatles together financially until 1977. Thus the profits from all their activities (with the exception of songwriting) are paid into Apple, the company which the four of them own. But under the agreement none of the four is able to earn separately — thus John’s Plastic Ono Band records and Paul’s individual record productions are treated in exactly the same way financially as their Beatle material.
And in the same way the Lennon-McCartney agreement with Northern Songs disregards the fact that John wrote ‘Instant Karma’ by himself, and that all the songs on Paul’s album were written by him alone. They must both share the royalties for all their songs.
‘Personally,’ he says, ‘I would like to see an independent panel of experts work out how the Beatles could be given their independent finances — so that on their individual things they could get the rewards for their efforts. Beatles things would, of course, still be shared.’ (Several albums of repackaged Beatles’ songs are already planned.)
‘We should all have our independent incomes, and let us work out for ourselves the accompanying problems. Klein says it’s impossible for tax reasons, but I’m not convinced that it couldn’t be done. After all the years of work all I’ve got to show is money locked up in a big company.
‘Strictly speaking we all have to ask each other’s permission before any of us does anything without the other three. My own records nearly didn’t come out because Klein and some of the others thought it would be too near to the date of the next Beatles album [which hasn’t actually been set yet]. I had to get George, who’s a director of Apple, to authorise its release for me.
‘Give us our freedom which we so richly deserve. We’re beginning now to only call each other when we have bad news. The other day Ringo came around to see me with a letter from the others, and I called him everything under the sun. But it’s all business. I don’t want to fall out with Ringo. I like Ringo, I think he’s great. We’re all talking about peace and love, but really we’re not feeling peaceful at all.
‘There’s no one who’s to blame. We were fools to get ourselves in this situation in the first place. But it’s not a comfortable situation to work in for me as an artist.’
The final break up in the Lennon-McCartney partnership came, he thinks, about eighteen months ago, although for the past three years the vast majority of their songs had been individual efforts.
‘It simply became very difficult for me to write with Yoko sitting there,’ he says. ‘If I had to think of a line I started getting very nervous. I might want to say something like “I love you, girl” but with Yoko watching I always felt that I had to come out with something clever and avant garde. She would probably have loved the simple stuff, but I was scared.
‘I’m not blaming her, I’m blaming me. You can’t blame John for falling in love with Yoko any more than you can blame me for falling in love with Linda. We tried writing together a few more times, but I think we both decided it would be easier to work separately.
‘I told him on the phone the other day that at the beginning of last year I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership. It’s taken me a year to realise that they were in love. Just like Linda and me.’
Throughout lunch the McCartneys sat close together. As Paul talked Linda squeezed his hand and whenever he talked about their marriage and family, she put her head on his shoulder and smiled.
There used to be a rule that the rich and famous dressed up, ate in only the most fashionable places and lived like monarchs. But the Beatles have killed all that. On the day I met Paul and Linda she was casual in her mac (which she didn’t take off during lunch), and he was even more casual in an old blazer and open necked navy blue shirt.
Once Paul had got over telling me of his relationship with the Beatles, they relaxed a lot. They looked easygoing and they looked happy, and since they’d been to the restaurant before, Linda ordered for all or us. Nothing fancy. They’re not fancy people.
Ever since Paul married Linda just over a year ago, the two have dropped further and further from the public gaze. Now they are rarely seen about town, and spend much of their lives at their farm in Scotland. Paul’s contact with Apple is practically limited to telephone calls, and only when it is completely necessary.
‘But I get tired of reading that I’m some kind of hermit or a recluse having an awful time,’ says Paul. ‘I’m having a great time. I can see how it’s all happened. I was always the ambassador for the Beatles, but now all I want to do is to be with my family. It’s understandable. I have a better time with my family.
‘In the early days of the Beatles I was a salesman for them. It was necessary and I was a good salesman for them. My dad was a salesman so perhaps he taught me a lot. But now I don’t have to be.
‘I’ve got a great wife, who I love today more than I did on the day I married her, two great kids and a nice house. These are precious moments for me, which I can waste if I want to, or which I can make the most of. I could go to the office every day and just not watch the baby grow up — she stood up today, by the way. If everybody had the opportunity to stay at home they would. That’s all I’m doing.’
Heather McCartney, who is now seven, is Linda’s child by a previous marriage. ‘But she now thinks of me as her daddy completely,’ says Paul. ‘And it’s great the way she’s accepted Mary, the baby, who is now seven months old.
‘What I would really like to tell the people is that I’m the same as anyone else. I get up in the morning, have my breakfast, watch telly at night — do all the things everybody else does and I love my family. The only difference is that I’m more famous and richer than them.
‘As I see it now we all have a great opportunity for a fantastically lucky life. We don’t have to have schedules — if we think of something we either do it or we don’t. We’re the way everybody could be if they could afford it.’
Not, they both hasten to point out, that they spoil their children. ‘We’re not a showbiz family at all,’ says Linda.
‘No,’ Paul goes on. ‘We explain to Heather that she can’t have too much ice-cream, or that sweets will ruin her teeth — all that sort of thing. She’s going to get the lot when s
he’s twenty-one and I want her to have learned how to cope when that time comes. I don’t want her to be a spoilt little brat. We’re really quite strict with her in some ways.
‘We really just treat her as an ordinary child. She goes to an ordinary primary school in St John’s Wood — that can be a bit of a drag because she misses so much at home, but we can give her some things she wouldn’t have normally.’
In St John’s Wood they don’t have a cook (’Linda’s a great cook’), nor a housekeeper. A daily goes in to help with the housework, and they get baby-sitters from an agency when they need them. They have a Rolls-Royce convertible, but no chauffeur. Paul always drives himself.
Their great excitement is when they can go off to their farm for a few weeks during Heather’s school holidays. ‘That’s the real life,’ says Paul, ‘I just have to get away from all this concrete. It’s very rough up there, but it’s the life I have always dreamed about.’
‘We don’t even have a bath tub,’ says Linda.
‘… And I can wear the same shirt for ages up there. It’s a tramp’s life. But I love it. I need to get with the earth a bit. I love nature. When I was a kid we used to go on nature rambles with the school near Gateacre in Liverpool, and I used to love it when the master told us all about the different birds. Linda and Heather are both animal nuts.’
Despite all his years as a Beatle, Paul is still remarkably sensitive to criticism. An unfavourable review of his new album in a pop newspaper annoyed him, but William Mann’s highly flattering review in The Times last Friday made up for everything.
And when John Lennon made a funny, fairly innocuous little comment in another pop newspaper about one of Paul’s songs being like an Engelbert Humperdinck song, he was cut to the quick, although he knew that John had been joking.
They refuse to get implicated in whatever John or any of the other Beatles do. ‘I think John’s great,’ he says, ‘but what he does is none of my business. I also think my brother’s great, but I’d never dream of interfering with my brother’s life.’
At the moment he is particularly upset about a new arrangement which was added without his knowledge to one of his songs on the next Beatles’ album.
The album was finished a year ago, but a few months ago American record producer Phil Spector was called in by John Lennon to tidy up some of the tracks.
‘But a few weeks ago,’ says Paul, ‘I was sent a re-mixed version of my song “The Long And Winding Road”, with harps, horns, an orchestra and women’s choir added. No one had asked me what I thought. I couldn’t believe it. I would never have female voices on a Beatles’ record. The record came with a note from Allen Klein saying that he thought the changes were necessary.
‘I don’t blame Phil Spector for doing it. But it just goes to show that it’s no good me sitting here and thinking I’m in control because obviously I’m not. Anyway I’ve sent Klein a letter asking for some of the things to be altered, but I haven’t received an answer yet.’
About the future he’s happily vague. He doesn’t like to talk too much ahead about what he’s going to do, but would rather surprise everyone when he does it. For the moment he has no immediate plans to make any new recordings. As soon as they can they want to be off up to Scotland again, and then later in the year take a holdiay abroad somewhere.
One project that he is working on is an animated cartoon feature film of Rupert Bear, the Daily Express children’s cartoon strip. He was brought up on Rupert, he says, and is planning a musical version of it.
‘I asked Heather what she would like to see in Rupert, and she said “horses”. So I’m going to work flying horses into it for her.’
We have to go, but as we get up someone asks about the Beatles. Paul looks slightly mortified. ‘Just tell the people I’ve found someone I like enough to want to spend all my time with. That’s me — the home, the kids and the fireplace.’
POSTSCRIPT This second interview with Paul McCartney (there are lots of others not reprinted here) took place just after the Beatles break-up became public. It was his idea. He phoned me and asked to meet to talk things out, as much as a way of communicating with the other three Beatles as with the public, I suspect. By this time, however, it was too late. The tabloid headlines had already branded him as the ‘Beatle Who Quit’. When John Lennon read the piece he was astonished that Paul should be so upset about the re-mixing of ‘The Long And Winding Road’. But things had reached such a state by April 1970 that neither could speak to the other for more than a few moments without getting into a row. Hence the article.
June 1970
Stevie Wonder
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon in a fourth-floor golden suite in Kensington Palace Hotel and we’re waiting for Stevie Wonder to come through from his bedroom to begin his breakfast.
There are eight of us. There’s a little girl with pigtails and a black eye who wouldn’t tell me her name; there’s Roy Jones, the Evening Standard photographer setting up his cameras; there’s Judy Tarlo, a publicist with a laugh like that giggling robot at Blackpool Fun Fair, and there’s a music publishing publicist with his secretary, Stevie’s manager, a gentleman who appears to act as general aide who brings in the two hard-boiled eggs, toast, tea and two glasses of orange juice, and there’s me.
When eventually Stevie comes through for the interview we sit together on a couch, and the assembled audience form a semicircle around us. It is all rather like giving a public performance. I’m not exactly turning my best side to an imaginary camera, but I cannot be unaware of having to act out the part a bit, and the questions come in a much more formal phrasing than I’m used to.
And like all good audiences (and every assemblage of pop’s camp followers) every suggestion that the star might be attempting levity or humour is greeted with gratuitous appreciation.
It is amazing, but being in the presence of the famous and successful seems to drain so many people of their own personalities. Good will generates from all sides. Did you ever see anyone sulk in front of the Beatles? Never. Fame is a magnet that never fails to draw the smiles.
And when you’re blind as well as being famous the good will is squared and cubed. Maybe it’s sympathy or guilt or something. It doesn’t matter. Off-stage Stevie Wonder asks for none of it.
He was born blind, and since he’s never known sight, he insists that it is not so much of a handicap. ‘It’s like having a television with a tube that doesn’t work,’ he adds, to make his point, although I’m not too sure that he has chosen the right simile.
He is twenty and has been around since 1963 when he made a record called ‘Fingertips’ and on which he was known as Little Stevie Wonder. When he grew past six feet tall his bosses at Detroit’s Tamla Motown record complex thought it was time they dropped the ‘little’ bit.
Since then he has had a great many hit records, made a great deal of money (all of which is kept in trust for him and administered by an official of the State of Michigan until his twenty-first birthday next May) and toured the world — or at least those parts of it penetrated by the Tamla Motown sounds of modern American music.
Before he began his three-week stint at the Talk of the Town on Wednesday he had just flown in from doing some gigs in Australia, stopping over in Rome for a television show. When he gets back to the States in July there’s more television and more gigs awaiting. He works like a Trojan.
Chatting in his suite he creates a totally different impression from that of the frantic, jumping, unco-ordinated, straining stage performer. On stage he is a complex of bursting energies, a musician who wants to play everything and does. He seems determined to show that even blind he’s better than the next man.
Today in a flared gaberdine suit that looks rather like a pair of pyjamas he is very relaxed, very sensible, more aware and more articulate than one might possibly have expected.
‘Music,’ he says, ‘has been like air to me. I began playing the harmonica when I was about four and the piano when I was abou
t five. We lived in an apartment block [he is the third of six children of a man who bakes Jewish bread] and someone else in the block had a piano I used to go and play on. I’m the only musical member of the family, but I have a little brother called Timothy who’s a very promising dancer.
‘I started playing the drums when I was about seven. We went to a picnic and I was playing on all the plates and dishes — you know, just pretending — and a drummer saw me and took an interest in me.
‘After I started my career the superintendent at the Michigan School of the Blind arranged it so that I could have a programme of studies which wouldn’t interrupt my career too much.
‘Being blind isn’t a handicap in so far as being able to get about is concerned. Not unless you make it one. And there are advantages. I mean you don’t judge a book by looking at its cover. If a man has long hair you don’t say “well I don’t like you because your hair is long”.
‘I think that being as I have never seen, it would be hard for me to say whether or not I would have gone into music if I hadn’t been born blind. Maybe if I had seen I’d have been more interested in going out on the streets fingerpoppin’, but I did some of that anyway.
‘I’m the only member of my family that is blind — but I think I can see better than some of them.
‘Sometimes I think I would like to see, just to see the beauty of the flowers and the trees, and the birds and earth and grass. But being as I’ve never seen I don’t know what it’s like, so in a sense I’m complete. Maybe I’d be incomplete if I did see. Maybe I’d see some things I don’t want to see. I guess that to see is to compare — to compare the beauty of the earth with the destruction of man. It seems to me that when man takes one giant step forwards, he takes two giant steps backwards.’