Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (69 page)

While Heather seemed fragile, Stella was as hearty and robust as Paul himself, whom she resembled strongly in personality and features, and was soon to be appointed Creative Director of the French fashion house Chloé. James was a quieter person who shared Dad’s passion for music. When he took up the guitar, Paul advised his son to have formal lessons, to which the boy retorted: ‘You didn’t, Dad.’ So a third generation James McCartney learned to play music by ear. Just before the trip to Scotland, Paul and James had recorded a song together, ‘Heaven on a Sunday’, James trading guitar licks with his father. A true family affair, Linda sang backing vocals. It was one of the last times she would record with Paul.

SIR PAUL AND LADY Mc CARTNEY

As Lee Eastman had predicted, the time came when Paul McCartney’s considerable contribution to his country’s cultural and economic life had to be recognised with more than an MBE. Paul and Linda’s propensity for getting busted had probably delayed the receipt of more elevated honours, but it was now 16 years since the McCartneys’ last arrest and, what with Paul’s recent meeting with Prince Charles at St James’ Palace, and his charitable work with LIPA and his local hospital in Rye, Paul’s friends felt it was high time he received a KBE, elevating a Member of the Order of the British Empire to a knight of the realm.

Although Paul would always tell friends he didn’t expect to be addressed as Sir Paul, as if he hadn’t expected the honour, and didn’t want to be seen to be swanking it, the knighthood was instigated by one of his closest associates, and supported by a campaign of friends. Having had a conversation with Paul’s manager along the lines of ‘Oh look who’s got a knighthood now, while Paul is overlooked!’, Mark Featherstone-Witty took action. Anyone can nominate friends and colleagues for honours by filling out a Cabinet Office nomination form. Mark did so, suggesting Paul would be a worthy recipient of a KBE. This was done apparently without Paul’s express knowledge. Mark soon received a reply from the Cabinet Office. ‘Some man rang back from the office that deals with these things, enquiring if I knew that Paul already had an award, his MBE. The implication, I suppose, was that this was enough. At that point I gave him a piece of my mind.’ Mark also rallied support from friends and influential music industry figures, including Sir George Martin, who’d received his KBE the previous year. Their campaign was successful. News that Paul was to be knighted was announced in the New Year’s honour’s list, on 1 January 1997, the ceremony scheduled for March.

In the meantime, Sir George orchestrated ‘Beautiful Night’, one of the new songs Paul had recorded with Ritchie. Appropriately for a love song, the orchestration was overdubbed at Abbey Road Studios on Valentine’s Day, part of which Paul spent at Cavendish Avenue with David Matthews working on
Standing Stone
, which Paul now wanted to hear. ‘So he hired the London Symphony Orchestra so they could play it through,’ laughs Matthews, amazed at such largesse. ‘I don’t think he quite realises how the rest of us have to put up with slightly less rehearsal time and so on. You know, he can afford to have absolutely everything he needs …’ The following week, on 11 March, Paul went to Buckingham Palace to be formally knighted by Her Majesty the Queen, watched by Mary, Stella and James. Lady McCartney, as Lin was now formally addressed, was too ill to attend, giving her husband instead a watch inscribed with the words, ‘To Paul, my knight in shining armour’. Stella burst into tears during the ceremony, Mary saying afterwards: ‘It was just like the end of a wonderful film with the Queen placing the sword on Dad’s shoulders. I will never forget that moment.’
⁵⁸

Fourteen songs Sir Paul had been working on during his
Anthology
sabbatical were released in May as the album
Flaming Pie
, after John Lennon’s humorous explanation of why the Beatles were so named: ‘a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, “From this day on you are Beatles with an A”’. The eponymous title song - again produced by Jeff Lynne - worked much better than the ‘new’ Beatles singles Lynne had produced for the
Anthology
, possessing a pleasingly fat sound. The words were good, too, as they were throughout this new LP, which came as a welcome change.

The proverb ‘nice writes white’ applies to Paul’s career. Although ambitious, impatient and sometimes overbearing, Paul is essentially a decent man, a happily married family man for many years past. But domestic happiness does not tend to beget great art. Rather it engenders the bland; in Paul’s case, prosaic and clichéd love songs. His albums typically featured one or two outstanding tunes, padded by filler, with a marked propensity for the sentimental, and though he agonised over some albums, many of his records had been put out before enough reflection and revision had taken place.
Flaming Pie
was different. The fact that the tracks had been written and recorded over a long period of time - the oldest, ‘Calico Skies’, dated back to 1991 - gave Paul a sense of perspective, allowing him to cut out weak material. Working on the
Anthology
, and talking about his life for his forthcoming biography, also caused Paul to reflect on the Beatles, and here were some of the best songs he’d written about the band and the wider Beatles family, including ‘Flaming Pie’, ‘The World Tonight’ and ‘Little Willow’. Importantly, Paul McCartney sounded less cocksure, more like a man in his fifties should. There were love songs on the new record, but not ‘silly love songs’, more interesting ones like ‘Somedays’; also songs about parenthood (‘Young Boy’); while a melancholy sense of vanishing time imbued ‘Heaven on a Sunday’. The collaborations with Ringo Starr and Steve Miller were joyous. The co-productions with Jeff Lynne also worked well, with Sir George Martin’s orchestration lending a touch of class to the CD. There was in summary a sense of quality and substance to
Flaming Pie
that had been missing from Paul’s albums for years, the material also having a touch of winter about it, as one expected from an artist reaching an age where loss and regret are as important as love and sex. Bob Dylan released such a wintry album in 1997,
Time out of Mind
. This was shortlisted along with
Flaming Pie
for Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. Dylan won, deservedly, but
Flaming Pie
was a strong contender.

Moreover,
Flaming Pie
marks a turning point in Paul’s mature career, after which his music generally becomes more interesting. In the years ahead he would sell less records, partly because of a sea change in the way the public consumes music, but the work he put out was often better than his more commercially successful albums of the Seventies and early Eighties. Certainly
Flaming Pie
is a finer record than
Wild Life
or
Venus and Mars
.

Paul also seemed less concerned now with being relentlessly commercial. As a case in point, he was working again with Youth on a second Fireman project,
Rushes
, recording enigmatic, trance-like ambient tracks which, though lacking conventional lyrics or melodies, are beautiful and moving. ‘He just rang me up, he said: “I want to do some more Fireman. I’m really up for it, come down, and let’s just do something new, and jam,”’ remembers Youth.

So we did and I think, reading between the lines on that one, I didn’t realise it at the time, but that was when Linda was very ill, and by the time we’d finished it she was dying, and for me it became very much a requiem for her … It certainly wasn’t consciously discussed when we made it, but the emotion of it and the sadness and the melancholy, it definitely picked up on that. That was happening … It is a very sad [record].

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the Anita Howarth (
née
Cochrane) paternity case blew up again in May 1997 when one of her relatives gave newspapers details of the £5,000 pay-off Anita received from NEMS in 1964, an old story still capable of making front-page news in the British tabloids 33 years later (when the pay-off would have been worth £64,000 [or $97,920]). As a result, Anita and her son Philip, now a 33-year-old lighting technician, told their story to the
Daily Mail
. ‘There was never any doubt in my mind that Paul was Philip’s father,’ Anita was quoted as saying, while her son described the paternity issue as an albatross around his neck, causing him to dislike Sir Paul and take comfort in drugs. He revealed that he’d developed a heroin habit as a young man, which led to petty crime. ‘I had started stealing from everywhere, even from home. I had turned into a rather nasty character.’ Anita then told Philip that Paul
wasn’t
his father, thinking this would help him. It did for a while. Philip stopped using drugs. Mum joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But when the story blew up again in 1997, Anita admitted to Philip she actually thought Paul was his father, but wasn’t 100 per cent sure. The only way to know for certain was to take a DNA test, so they asked a solicitor to contact McCartney. The star didn’t take the test, but Philip says he did, and so did another man whom Mum thought could be a contender, with the result - some years later - that this other man was proven to be Philip’s father. Thus ended the four-decade farce of the Liverpool typist who claimed Paul fathered her child. Like the German barmaid story, it turned out to be completely untrue. Paul’s only children were those he’d had with Linda, plus his adoptive daughter Heather.

That summer, the McCartneys checked into the Plaza Athénée Hotel in New York, so Linda could be treated by the renowned oncologist Larry Norton at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. When she heard that Paul was in town, his most devoted New York fan Linda Aiello (
née
Magno) came by the Plaza Athénée with her friend, Toni Kraker, intending to give Paul gifts for his forthcoming 55th birthday. Linda Aiello was now a woman of 43, married to a New York cop, but part of her heart still belonged to Paul, whose signed photo from the
Give My Regards to Broad Street
publicity junket hung on her bedroom wall. Hotel staff warned Linda and Toni that it wasn’t a good time to approach Sir Paul, but the women walked up to him anyhow as he rounded the corner. Paul reacted furiously, angry in a way the women had never seen before, refusing their gifts, saying they shouldn’t be bothering him, and storming into the hotel. John Hammel then came out and explained: Paul and Linda had just been given some bad news. The girls later found out that Linda’s cancer had spread to her right breast.

Suddenly, death was all around. The McCartneys were shocked when they heard in May 1997 that musician Jeff Buckley, son of Linda’s Sixties’ lover Tim, had drowned in the Mississippi River. The McCartneys had befriended Tim in recent years and were taken aback by his premature death, which followed the early demise of his father in 1975. Not long after this came news that George Harrison had throat cancer, which spread to his lungs. A lifelong smoker, his prognosis was not good. Then Derek Taylor, former Apple press officer, died at 63 of throat cancer. When Paul attended the annual Buddy Holly Week luncheon that September, without Linda, he appeared worn and tired, the grey showing through his thinning hair. Linda’s appearance had also changed. This became evident when she felt able to accompany Paul to Paris in October to watch Stelly’s first catwalk show for Chloé. Gone was Linda’s long blonde hair. She had lost a good deal of it during chemotherapy, and had what was left cut short. Lin was determined to make the best of her trip, though, applauding and smiling enthusiastically during her daughter’s show.

That autumn, Linda accompanied Paul to the London and New York premières of
Standing Stone
, at the Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall. Final preparations had been somewhat fraught, with Paul asking the composer Richard Rodney Bennett to re-orchestrate some of the work done with David Matthews. ‘In the end he wanted a slightly richer sound,’ says Matthews.

Richard is an absolute expert on producing the ultimate Hollywood sound, and Paul is really rather addicted to that. A lot of
Standing Stone
is like that, too, because [Richard] re-orchestrated the ends of the movements. They are very beautifully done. They are slightly in conflict with the rest of the piece, which is much more quirky. Suddenly the music sort of smoothes over and it becomes very, very sort of Hollywoodish - that’s what Paul wanted.

There was also some to-ing and fro-ing over who would conduct the première performances, the original idea being to have fellow Liverpudlian Sir Simon Rattle conducting his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle pulled out, apparently unsure about the piece. Another name conductor, the American Kent Nagano, was approached. ‘Then he got cold feet, twice, and I had to ask him to stand down,’ said Paul.

In the end, Lawrence Foster conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 October 1997, as he had in the recording studio. The huge theatre was packed on the night, Paul’s presence lending a classical event the giddy atmosphere of a rock show, Sir Paul and Lady Linda holding hands as they took their seats, beaming like boyfriend and girlfriend, despite their careworn faces. Clearly Linda was proud for her husband, and Paul was delighted to share this moment with her, for ultimately the music the audience was about to hear revolved around their life together, and their love, as was indicated by the CD photography. The CD case and booklet were illustrated with Linda’s photos of her horse Blankit beside their standing stone at High Park.

The audience applauded the entrance of the conductor, who bowed, turned to the orchestra and began the bold, energetic first movement about the creation of man, after which the piece followed the narrative of Paul’s poem. The music was varied, incorporating characteristically catchy McCartney tunes, also some spare, modern music in the second movement, which adhered to Sir Paul’s keyboard computer work, together with mistakes he’d made, liked and kept in; while Richard Rodney Bennett had indeed brought a lush, dramatic flair to the work. Inevitably, the piece built to an emotional climax, with the chorus singing a few simple but nonetheless powerful words Paul had written in praise of love: