Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (50 page)

First, Paul had to re-form the band. This time he delegated the job to Denny Laine, who picked two Englishmen in their twenties to replace Joe English and Jimmy McCulloch: drummer Steve Holley and guitarist Laurence Juber. The auditions were perfunctory. ‘We played some Chuck Berry tunes and some reggae grooves and they offered me the job on the spot,’ recalls Juber. Holley believes the almost careless choice was an indication that Paul was losing interest in Wings. ‘I don’t think they particularly wanted a long, drawn-out audition process, which I think Paul was bored with. I think Paul was probably getting bored in general anyway, to be absolutely truthful … Perhaps the responsibility of having a band was becoming a little tiresome for him.’

Previous versions of Wings failed partly because the musicians felt they were underpaid sidemen rather than full band members. Holley and Juber were essentially hired on the same basis, but the pay was better, and the terms of unemployment were explained more clearly during a business meeting with Paul’s father-in-law. Over iced tea on the lawn of his summer home in East Hampton, Lee Eastman spelt out the deal. ‘Basically there was an annual amount and it was paid on a monthly basis and there was a percentage of tour revenue,’ says Juber. ‘It was certainly a reasonable deal.’ As Paul’s lieutenant, Denny Laine had a different, enhanced deal, having finally been given a share in the band’s royalties - what Denny Seiwell had always hankered after, but didn’t stick around long enough to get. The Eastmans were also beginning to manage Laine’s financial affairs, alongside Paul’s, within MPL. Unfortunately, Laine had already got into the position of owing the tax man more money than he could pay. This became a serious problem for the guitarist.

That summer Wings convened in Scotland to start work on the new album,
Back to the Egg
, produced by Paul with Chris Thomas, who’d become a well-known producer since stepping into George Martin’s shoes on the
White Album
, producing Procol Harum, Roxy Music and, most recently, the Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks
. There was an attempt to introduce something of the energy of punk and new wave music - which was essentially the rediscovery of rock ’n’ roll - to
Back to the Egg
, the title indicating a return to basics. This is heard most clearly on ‘Spin It On’, with echoes of the Clash audible in ‘Again and Again and Again’. As always with Paul there were also plenty of catchy love songs, some filler, and forays into different musical styles, including the jazzy closing track, ‘Baby’s Request’, which his father would have loved.

Steve Holley realised that Paul missed working with John Lennon.

Actually it was the morning that we recorded ‘Arrow Through Me’. The night before had been a particularly long one, it was the only time he ever spoke about it, nothing about his relationship, it was just more of a feeling that I had than anything, that he just missed that closeness … just a perception,
My God, he misses John
- that it was a huge hole in his life.

Denny Laine suggests Paul was actually bored dealing with young musicians who didn’t know the ropes. Some of the elementary rock band stuff that went without being said between Laine and McCartney had to be spelt out to the new boys; ‘they were more like younger fans than old-school road warriors’. Yet Paul was talking about making a movie with them.

The movie project, which ultimately morphed into the execrable
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, began when Paul invited playwright Willy Russell to Scotland to hang out with the group to see if the experience might inspire a screenplay. There was inevitably a great deal of waiting around in what passed for a green room at Low Ranachan Farm, leaving Willy alone with the musicians and roadies. As others had before, the playwright noticed a sycophantic atmosphere around Paul:

Paul’s fame is such [that] everybody around him is affected in some way and the truth is not told. People would come out and moan about hanging around all day. People would come out and say privately, ‘Why is he re-doing that bass part when it was brilliant four days ago?’ And I’d go, ‘Why don’t you fucking say it to Paul?’ It’s not Paul who doesn’t want to hear those things. Paul would probably be the first person to accept that his life would be richer and better if the people around him would have that kind of dialogue with him, but this kind of deference infects
everybody
.

To kill time the boys played
Scrabble
. Denny’s game was let down by poor spelling. ‘[Denny] said to me one day when we were playing, he said [affecting a Midlands accent], “I’ve got a good one here. Do you owl think that, er, obscenity is allowed?” I said, “Yeah, it’s all right.” And he put down T-E-R-D.’

Willy had written a play,
Stags and Hens
, about a successful Liverpool musician who returns to Merseyside to take up with an old girlfriend. He thought this might serve as a basis for Paul’s movie, supplying a challenging but manageable part for him and a role for Linda. ‘What there wasn’t, really, was roles for the rest of the band and [the] brief was I had to keep the Wings thing intact so there had to be a role for Steve and Laurence and Denny …’ After a week in Kintyre, Willy went home to think about it further.

Shortly after Russell left the farm, Paul transferred the recording of
Back to the Egg
to Abbey Road Studios, then to Lympne Castle, a medieval mansion not far from his Sussex home. ‘Mostly we were there for convenience, because Paul and Linda were spending a lot of time down at Peasmarsh, and they didn’t want to have to be driving up to London quite so much,’ says Juber. Then Paul had the brainwave of cutting a track with a large number of rock musicians as an orchestra, a ‘Rockestra’. Superstar friends including Dave Gilmour and Pete Townshend agreed to play guitar on the session, while Gary Brooker of Procol Harum and John Bonham and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin also said they’d take part. As Paul was preparing for the session, Buddy Holly Week rolled around. This year Paul celebrated with a party at a London club, followed by the première of the movie
The Buddy Holly Story
. Many stars attended, including Who drummer Keith Moon, who told Paul he’d be happy to play drums with the other celebrities on the ‘Rockestra’ session. Unfortunately, Moon died in the early hours of the following morning, having swallowed what his girlfriend describes as ‘a bucket of pills’. Kenny Jones stepped into Keith’s place at Abbey Road on 3 October, Paul conducting everybody in a monster jam recorded as the ‘Rockestra Theme’, whooping with excitement throughout what must have seemed like a really cool idea at the time, but now sounds like bombast.

Along with the misjudgement of Rockestra, there were worrying signs of Paul wanting to rush into his new movie. He summoned Willy Russell and his collaborator Mike Ockrent to Abbey Road to tell them he needed a script post-haste. What with him and Mike being busy people, and Christmas approaching, Willy suggested that the only way they could do a rush job for Paul was to go away somewhere quiet with their families. ‘Paul said something like, “What, like you mean France? ” Mike went, “Far too cold this time of year. I’m thinking of the West Indies,”’ recalls Russell with a chuckle. ‘And I can see Paul going,
You cheeky twat!
’ Still, MPL booked the writers onto a plane to Jamaica, where a villa was put at their disposal. They returned with a screenplay titled
Band on the Run
, in which Paul would play a music star named Jet who, weary with his career, takes up with a scruffy young rock ’n’ roll band featuring Linda, Denny, Steve and Laurence, leading them to the brink of success, before going back to his old life. There was a read-through at Waterfall. ‘And Paul was, I think, very excited by the possibility, ’ says Russell, who got the impression McCartney intended to make the film as soon as he’d finished
Back to the Egg
.

‘I’ve cleared the slate for two months’ time,’ he told the playwright, with a sense of purpose.

‘But there’s been no pre-production,’ protested Willy, who knew a movie couldn’t be made like this, unless Paul wanted a disaster. ‘Look, you can’t do this like
Magical Mystery Tour
,’ he warned, realising he was sounding like ‘a suit’, as Paul and Linda termed company men. ‘Paul and Linda used to talk very disparagingly about
the suits
, you know. I started to sound like a suit.’ Still, there wasn’t even a budget. ‘How it was going to get made, I don’t know. I think the idea was,
Look, when I turn my attention to it, it will get made
. If you are that powerful, people will say, “Yes, we can do it. We’ve got two weeks, yeah we can do it …”’

Meanwhile, there were signs that, after eight years together, McCartney and Laine weren’t getting along. ‘I noticed that there were disagreements that sometimes became quite verbal,’ observes Steve Holley.

I suspect Denny felt that he should have more of a partnership than he actually had, and I think Paul was upset about his demeanour and the way he was carrying on. I also think there were personality clashes between the two of them, and certainly between Denny’s wife Jo Jo
⁴⁸
and Linda. They were poles apart. Jo Jo was a high-spirited party girl, and just loved the glitz and the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and Linda was much more down to earth.

Paul called a band meeting to decide what to do. The decision was that they needed a new single. The younger band members asked Paul what the Beatles did in situations like this. Less guarded about the Beatles now than he had been at the start of Wings, Paul replied: ‘Well, if we needed a single, we’d just write one over the weekend and record it on the Monday.’ So that’s what Paul did, writing ‘Daytime Nightime Suffering’, also completing a song titled ‘Goodnight Tonight’. The two tracks were intended as a double A-side. Written and recorded quickly, the songs have an immediacy and energy lacking from
Back to the Egg
, which was now so overworked it might more aptly have been titled
Over-Egged
. In April 1979, Paul brought the entire Black Dyke Mills Band down from Yorkshire to play on one track at Abbey Road.

Work on the album had been going on for so long that EMI told Paul they needed Studio Two back for other artists. So McCartney had a replica built in the basement of the MPL office on Soho Square. Replica Studio was an exact copy of the control room at Studio Two at Abbey Road, with a photo of the studio on the wall so that it felt like being in the control room at EMI. This was a great extravagance, on top of his new movie project, but Paul was richer than ever. In signing with CBS, he had recently been given a sweetener, the Frank Music Catalogue, making Paul the owner of the works of Frank Loesser, American author of
Guys and Dolls
, and adding to a publishing portfolio that included the Buddy Holly song book, and rights to a raft of hit shows including
Annie
,
Hello, Dolly!
and
A Chorus Line
, which were all earning him big money. Sometimes Paul wondered at his own good fortune. ‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ he remarked that year, ‘as well as gold at the bottom of the garden, he has oil running off the roof.’ But Paul’s luck was about to run out.

19

GO TO JAIL

DOWN ON THE FARM

Ever since she had been brought to England by her mother, Heather McCartney had experienced problems. At first the primary school kids in St John’s Wood made fun of Heather’s American accent (which she dropped); then Paul and Linda took Heather out of school to tour with them, which disrupted her education. When she turned 11, Heather went to a private secondary school in London where she mixed with the children of other wealthy people, her classmates apparently obsessed with status and fame. During an argument with her parents, Heather revealed that her school friends had given her advice about dealing with her famous father. ‘They’d said to her, “You’ve no need to worry about your dad … if he gives you any more trouble you can tell the papers.”’ So concerned were Paul and Lin that Heather was mixing with such children that they took her out of the school and moved virtually overnight to their country home in Sussex. They kept Cavendish as their London base, but the McCartneys’ primary home now became Waterfall, their round house in the woods outside Peasmarsh.

Linda put Mary and Stella into the village primary school, sending Heather to the state comprehensive in Rye. Many parents tried to avoid sending their children to such schools in the 1970s, believing ‘bog standard’ comprehensives produced children of limited achievement and ambition. Those who could afford to do so often chose to have their children educated privately, but Paul and Linda’s decision proved a wise one. It was Linda who initially met with the headmaster, Ray Fooks, at Thomas Peacock School, explaining that she and Paul had decided it would be nice for the family to live permanently in the country; she didn’t allude to the problems Heather had experienced in London. Says Fooks, who subsequently also admitted Paul and Linda’s three younger children to his school, finding the McCartneys model parents - caring without becoming meddlesome:

I think in a way that [it’s] a great compliment to Linda and Paul, because they made sure that their children were treated like everybody else, and their children came to the school, fitted in perfectly, were very cooperative, very pleasant people, and made the best of their education and moved on.

It was around the time of the move to Peasmarsh that the McCartney family made another life-changing decision. They all became vegetarian, a diet Paul and his fellow Beatles had dabbled with in the Sixties, but which now became a way of life and something of an obsession for the family. The epiphany occurred at High Park when the McCartneys were about to sit down to a Sunday lunch of roast lamb. They looked out of their windows at the sheep, grazing around their standing stone, and decided that eating the peaceful creatures that shared their home was wrong. Recalling the moment, Linda said,

we just looked at the leg of lamb I was cooking and realised where it came from and we couldn’t eat it any more. It was a couple of months before I figured out what to do about the gaps on our dinner plates where the chops used to be.

Linda was the driving force in the change to vegetarianism, with an ally in vegetarian guitarist Laurence Juber. His memory is that Paul wasn’t keen at first on the new menu. ‘I remember one occasion Linda wasn’t there so I gave Paul a bag of bean sprouts and veggie stuff, and he just left it in the back of the Rolls Royce and forgot all about it. A week later Linda finds this bag of goo in the back.’

As the McCartneys settled into life in Sussex, it became clear that Waterfall wasn’t large enough to be a permanent home for the family. Paul bought neighbouring Lower Gate Farm to remedy this problem, a 159-acre property costing £250,000 ($382,500) in 1979. The farm was bordered on the west by the same forest that surrounded Waterfall, and was served by the same unmarked and little-used public road, Starvecrow Lane. A 500-yard track led from the lane to a semi-derelict house on a hill. The elevated position gave the house commanding views across the countryside, which the McCar tneys didn’t have at Waterfall, while the trees, and the distance from the lane, meant the house was also very private. Originally the farm had been known as Blossom Wood Farm, a name the McCartneys reinstated. Paul planned to knock down the derelict farmhouse and build a substantial new home in its place. As we forge ahead with Paul’s story, Blossom Farm becomes the focal point of his domestic life.

COMING UP

There was a Beatles reunion that spring in the neighbouring county of Surrey, where Eric Clapton was celebrating his marriage to George Harrison’s ex-wife. After being married to George for eight years, Pattie had left the former Beatle in 1974 for his close friend, three years after which George married his secretary Olivia Arias. Eric married Pattie on tour in March 1979. Two months later, a marquee was erected in the garden of the Claptons’ Surrey mansion, Hurtwood Edge, and 800 people attended a belated wedding reception. The guests included the cuckold Harrison, whose friendship with Eric and Pattie had survived the changing of the guard, a testimony to the freewheeling spirit of the decade in which they’d all come to maturity. Also present were Paul and Ritchie.

The three Beatles got up on stage in the marquee and performed ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, the first time they’d played together since
Abbey Road
, all looking happy and comfortable in each other’s company, even though George had recently conducted an affair with Ritchie’s wife.
⁴⁹
John Lennon telephoned to tell Eric that he would have been there, too, had he known about the party, creating the tantalising thought that all four Beatles might have played together in the tent. Perhaps a Beatles reunion wasn’t so unlikely after all.

Certainly Paul was sick of Wings. The new album
Back to the Egg
had finally been laid, with a silly, egg-theme press reception in the summer of 1979, but it was not the smash EMI and CBS had been banking on. It proved a curate’s egg, good in parts, with token attempts at sounding contemporary. The disc was presented in an elaborate sleeve created by the design group Hipgnosis, a company associated primarily with progressive rock bands, thus putting off many young record buyers to whom this sort of music was now unfashionable. Paul simply moved on. Doing exactly what he had at the end of the Beatles he went home and made a DIY solo album, taking the tapes with him when the family went to Scotland for their summer holidays.

In September came news that former Wings guitarist Jimmy McCulloch had died in his London apartment at the age of 26, succumbing to heart failure brought about by over-indulgence. Though Jimmy had always been difficult, upsetting Paul and Linda with his comments and bad behaviour, Paul had come to see the Laine-McCulloch-English incarnation of Wings as the best version of the band, after which the group seemed increasingly tired. Nevertheless, McCartney went ahead with a series of Wings concerts to promote
Back to the Egg
, starting with warm-up shows at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, to which Paul also pledged a charitable donation.

Before the first Liverpool show, Paul called Willy Russell, asking him to attend a press conference at the theatre. ‘Get down to the Court,’ McCartney told the playwright enthusiastically.

‘Why?’

‘I’m having this press conference this afternoon, and we’re going to talk about the movie.’ Willy Russell was amazed. After the initial read-through of the
Band on the Run
screenplay, the movie project had fallen flat as far as he was concerned. Paul started changing things. Then came a very tedious day when Paul summoned Willy and Mike Ockrent to Sussex, and kept them waiting hours. ‘It wasn’t a good day. He was terribly preoccupied with something … I think we sat around for seven or eight hours before finally we got to see Paul and it was a perfunctory [conversation],’ says Russell, who’d dreaded days like this. Then Paul introduced Russell to his friend, the movie producer David Puttnam, who criticised the
Band on the Run
screenplay so comprehensively that Russell concluded Puttnam actually wanted to squeeze him out and work with Paul himself (Puttnam admits he had an ambition to film the Beatles story). ‘He patronised the fuck out of us.’ On top of which, Paul wouldn’t engage in discussions about pre-production, or budgets, or any of the other details to do with making a motion picture. Yet he now intended to announce
Band on the Run
to the press! Considering this ‘mental’, Russell sat uneasily next to Paul at the Royal Court, only to find the film was never mentioned. ‘No one asks a question about the movie, so Paul doesn’t say anything about the movie. It is the usual press conference, “Isn’t it great to be back in Liverpool?”’ McCartney assured Russell afterwards that they would make the movie. They would do it after he’d toured with Wings, giving the playwright the thumbs up as they parted company. It was at least preferable to a prod in the chest.

While he was on Merseyside, McCartney revisited the Liverpool Institute, renewing his acquaintance with his geography teacher B.L. ‘Blip’ Parker, now the headmaster. Paul invited Parker and the school’s entire complement of boys, plus the girls from the school across the road, to a free first-night show at the Royal Court, a typically generous and sentimental gesture from a man who looked back on his school days with affection, as opposed to George Harrison who made it clear in his autobiography,
I Me Mine
, that he’d had a miserable time at the Inny. Naturally, Paul’s relatives also got tickets to the Royal Court, a considerable contingent of ‘relies’ showing up on the first night headed by the elderly but still redoubtable aunts. Paul was always nervous before a concert - a healthy sign - but with all those eager and familiar faces out front he was more jittery than normal on Friday 23 November 1979. ‘Before we went on Paul was quite nervous and he said, “Oh Jeez, I don’t know if this is gonna go,”’ recalls Howie Casey. ‘I said, “Paul, this is going to be like the second coming … You just walk on there, and they’re gonna go nuts.” And they did.’ It helped that Paul treated his audience to some Beatles songs, including ‘Fool on the Hill’ and ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, which gave Howie’s horn section a chance to shine. ‘For a long time after I started this group, I was embarrassed to do Beatles songs because it seemed like a cop-out,’ Paul said afterwards. ‘But that’s long gone now. I wrote the songs after all …’

Wings proceeded to tour the United Kingdom until Christmas, playing relatively small theatres, like London’s Lewisham Odeon, which the Beatles visited in the Sixties, the shows helping shift more copies of
Back to the Egg
, and pushing a Christmas single up the charts, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, which was no worse than most songs of its ilk, though it sounds tinsel-thin compared with Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’. The new members of Wings enjoyed the tour, their first chance to play live with Paul, but the boss seemed unenthusiastic. Notes Steve Holley:

I remember one show that I particularly enjoyed for whatever reason and bouncing into the dressing room and saying something [like], ‘Ah, great show, great show!’ His reaction was, ‘Yeah, it was OK.’ As I left the room I thought, Of course it was just OK. I mean, look at some of the places he’s been, look at some of the concerts and experiences he’s had … That was one of the first times it dawned on me - is there any way to top what playing a concert with the Beatles must have been like? And I can’t imagine there was. It was almost like that was omnipresent.

Eight days before Christmas, Wings played the Glasgow Apollo, a fine old theatre with a famously rambunctious audience. To give the Glaswegians a treat, Paul closed with ‘Mull of Kintyre’ accompanied by the Campbeltown Pipe Band who were bussed in from Kintyre especially. To keep this a surprise, Paul had the pipe band wait outside the theatre until the last minute. Then they entered via the fire escape in full regalia. ‘We come out the fire door, which is right at the front of the stage, up the steps and then formed a semi-circle behind him [on stage],’ recalls pipe band drummer Ian Campbell.

We rehearsed it during the day. He said, ‘Don’t just leave the stage [at the end]. Enjoy the adulation, because this song has been amazing.’ So we come out, he started ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which drove the crowd a wee bit [mad], and then when we came out I thought the roof was going to come off. Honestly, they went insane.

This concert yielded a live recording of an excellent new song from Paul’s solo project, the ebullient ‘Coming Up’, which became a US number one.

Less successful was a post-Christmas charity show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. The Concerts for Kampuchea were three nights of music featuring a host of acts ranging from young artists such as Alison Moyet to old stagers like the Who, all intended to raise money for the former Cambodia, devastated during Pol Pot’s regime. Paul helped organise the shows and Wings headlined the last night, 29 December 1979, by which time there was widespread expectation of a Beatles reunion on the stage where they’d once given their Christmas shows. Rumours that the Beatles were re-forming circulated almost constantly these days, but this time a sense that it really might happen was created by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, who publicly urged John Lennon to join his band mates at Hammersmith for charity’s sake. Even if John didn’t show up, it was noted in the press that his 16-year-old son Julian was scheduled to perform. Perhaps Julian might sit in with his Beatle uncles.

So much interest was generated by this rumour that when Wings arrived at the Odeon for the sound check that afternoon they found the theatre besieged by ticket touts, fans and press, and were consequently unable to leave the building until after the show, spending what seemed like an eternity cooped up backstage with their fellow artists. A good deal of drinking was consequently done - it being Christmas - and by the time Wings took the stage some musicians were the worse for wear. ‘It was a pretty messed-up deal,’ recollects Steve Holley. ‘I don’t think that performance was particularly good.’ And there was no Beatles reunion. John never left the USA. He didn’t want to play with Paul, and Julian Lennon was so discombobulated by speculation that he might help the Beatles re-form that he pulled out of the show altogether. Instead, Wings delivered its usual set, spiced up with a few Beatles tunes and a Rockestra finale featuring Paul’s superstar mates in silver stage suits and top hats, looking for all the world like Gary Glitter’s Glitter Band. ‘Thank you, Pete! The only lousy sod who wouldn’t wear a silver suit,’ Paul remarked sharply, as Pete Townshend sauntered on in his normal, scruffy attire.