Paul McCartney (59 page)

The album reached number ten on the Billboard chart and eleven in the UK, but received a critical mauling even worse than Ram’s. Rolling Stone wondered whether, for some unfathomable reason, it might be ‘deliberately second-rate’. British critics variously derided it as rushed, defensive, badly-timed and over-publicised, the NME saying it showed Paul’s songwriting ‘at an absolute nadir just when he needed a little respect’. As usual, he pretended to ignore the reviews, but later admitted thinking, ‘Hell, we’ve really blown it here.’

The University Tour, as it would become known, was to be more than just a boot camp for Wings. Approaching his thirtieth birthday, Paul was determined to connect with a new generation of pop fans whose idols resembled nothing the Beatles had ever been. Reacting against hippy drabness and psychedelic faux naivety, so-called Glam Rock bands like Slade and T-Rex now wore sparkly clothes, tinted highlights in their hair, even donned lipstick, rouge and eyeliner, while playing the same macho rock as ever (and still seeking no higher accolade than ‘new Beatles’).

To this end, when choosing a post-Apple publicist, he opted for Tony Brainsby, who represented a slew of cutting-edge bands like Curved Air and Thin Lizzy and whose bumptious manner could not have been more unlike Derek Taylor’s discreet charm. Fuelled by pot and amphetamines, Brainsby worked virtually around the clock for his clients but, to begin with, found Paul and Wings a tough sell. All the UK media wanted to know about any ex-Beatle was when he’d be getting back with the others.

Fellow publicist Keith Altham, whose clientele included the Who, T-Rex’s Marc Bolan and the post-Denny Laine Moody Blues, had offices on the top floor of Brainsby’s house in Pimlico. ‘Tony was an intelligent choice for Paul at that time,’ Altham says, ‘and both of them did like their pot. I remember once when he and Linda came in, the fumes wafting up the stairs were so strong that you didn’t need a joint to get high.’

In January, as another firm break with Beatle precedent, the line-up had increased to five. Henry McCullough, who’d previously been with Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, was brought in to alternate with Denny Laine on lead guitar. As with Paul, the ‘Mc’ prefix did not denote Scottish but Irish origins, in this case the British province of Northern Ireland. And coincidentally soon after McCullough’s arrival, Wings became embroiled in the incendiary politics of his homeland.

The early Seventies had brought a steep escalation in Northern Ireland’s long-festering sectarian troubles following the British army’s deployment to protect its minority Catholic and republican-minded population from the rabidly loyalist Protestant majority. That mission dissolved into sick irony on 30 January 1972–forever afterwards known as Bloody Sunday–when men of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 Catholic civil rights demonstrators, three teenagers among them, in the Bogside district of Londonderry.

Although McCullough was a Protestant from County Derry, he’d been on the road with rock bands too long to feel much religious or political zealotry. But, despite having no ancestral connection with Northern Ireland, Paul was moved to write a song calling for Britain’s 300-year rule of the province to end and for it to receive the same independence as the south.

‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ magnified the weakness with big themes revealed by ‘Wild Life’. Leaving aside the simplistic message, its screamy rock treatment was quite unsuitable and its tone oddly ingratiating: ‘Great Britain, you are tremendous/ As nobody knows like me/ But really, what are you doin’/ In the land across the sea?’

Despite having all the rabble-rousing potential of a party squeaker, the single instantly went onto the BBC’s ‘banned’ list, joining such politically controversial ditties as Noël Coward’s ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ and the Goons’ ‘A Russian Love Song’. It still reached number 16 in the UK and number one in the Irish Republic–and also hotly republican Spain.

Interviewed about the furore by America’s ABC TV, Paul insisted his Irish blood had not been his main motivation. ‘I’m British, and I was brought up to be proud of things like the British Empire. I don’t want my army going round shooting my Irish brothers.’ At one point, he seemed almost to side with the Irish Republican Army whose terror tactics included murdering unarmed police officers and Protestant loyalists, often in front of their children, and ‘kneecapping’ recalcitrant members of their own community. ‘I don’t dig it, but if people shoot at [the IRA], they have to shoot back.’

As the newly-augmented Wings prepared to launch themselves into university-land, it was made clear that their stage repertoire would not include any Beatles songs. Indeed, no one in the new band was even supposed to mention the B-word. ‘I’d sometimes say to Paul I liked one of their old tracks, like “Michelle”,’ Denny Laine remembers. ‘He’d go “Oh, yeah”, then change the subject. He wanted his own identity, not just to be a tribute band doing Beatles stuff.’

Preparations were minimal. There were two roadies, brothers-in-law Ian Horn and Trevor Jones (who had first recommended Henry McCullough to Paul); a 12-seat Transit van for the McCartneys, their band, children and dogs; and a white trailer, rented from Avis, for the equipment. ‘On the day we left, I showed up at Cavendish, leaving my wife, Monique, at home in bed,’ Denny Seiwell recalls. ‘Then Paul goes, “Where’s Monique? She’s supposed to come along, too.” It was going to be a real family thing.’

No route was planned, no hotels were booked in advance: they simply took off northward on the M1. In the Midlands, Paul was amused by a signpost to Ashby de la Zouch, and asked the roadies to see if it had a college, which was how they stumbled on Nottingham University.

The show for the students’ union was at lunch-time–like hundreds he had played with the Beatles at the Liverpool Cavern–with tickets priced at 40p. Word quickly spread through the campus and 800 students packed into the Portland Building’s ballroom, many cutting tutorials or leaving them halfway, in some cases followed by their tutors. Paul took the stage in denim dungarees and a red-and-white-striped shirt, explaining that Wings were just starting out and apologising in advance if the sound was a little rough. Linda, making her stage debut on keyboards, wore a shapeless floral dress and trainers, and kept Heather, Mary and baby Stella all within reach in an impromptu crèche.

Wings’ performance included only four of their own tracks, mixed with old rock ‘n’ roll favourites like ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Lucille’, allowing Paul to bring his Little Richard scream out of mothballs. Even so, Denny Seiwell remembers, they had to do ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ twice over to make a full set. The students loved it but, in this era of cerebral singer/songwriters, bopping around to music had become passé. Linda, whose audience-pleasing technique still needed some work, asked her nearest spectators why they hadn’t brought their knitting.

There were ten further shows, on this same cold-calling basis, at universities throughout the north, then down south in Oxford and westward in Swansea. Everywhere, admission cost 40 or 50p, with the band receiving their share in small change on the spot. Paul later remembered being in a constant state of ‘sheer panic… Quite a few times [Linda and I] looked at each other and said, “Oh, God! What have we bitten off?”’ At Newcastle University, Linda completely forgot the opening chords to ‘Wild Life’; when Paul rushed protectively over to rescue her, he realised he’d forgotten them, too.

His plan was for Wings to follow Wild Life with a double album (he had that many new songs to hand), begun in Los Angeles, then transferring to Olympic Studios in Barnes, south London, with Glyn Johns as producer. Olympic had bad memories for Paul; it was where John and George had tried to railroad him into signing Allen Klein’s management contract. But if he wanted the sought-after Johns, whom he saw as his best hope of changing the critics’ minds, there was no other choice.

Johns had his own bad memories of compiling serial versions of the Beatles’ Get Back album only to have each one curtly rejected. And now that he had the whip-hand, he didn’t spare it. Accustomed to producing the likes of the Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin, he decided early on that Wings’ sidemen were nowhere near the same league, just ‘a bunch of guys hanging round Paul… up his bottom most of the time’. At sessions, he would sit in his control room reading a newspaper, refusing to roll tape until they came up with something that interested him. There were acrimonious scenes and in mid-April Johns bowed out.

With the album stalled, Paul chose to release a single at the furthest possible extreme from ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ and one which would take Wings’ credibility as a rock band to rock bottom: a singalong version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.

At the time, recording this prissiest of nursery rhymes was seen as his sardonic riposte to being banned as too politically controversial by the BBC. Actually, the idea had predated ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ and was simply an attempt to create a song for small children, like his own three, whom pop music usually overlooked (and at High Park Farm, his daughter, Mary, really did have a pet lamb). The one, faint, protest from his musicians was voiced by Denny Laine. ‘I said, “Hold on, I didn’t sign up for this, Paul,”’ Laine remembers. But in Wings, now and throughout its life, two against three counted as a majority.

Unlike most nursery rhymes, this had a known author, the nineteenth-century American poet Sarah Josepha Hale. Paul’s arrangement also used Hale’s lesser-known second and third verses, adding a lengthy ‘La-la’ chorus in which both Mary and her half-sister, Heather, joined. The single reached number nine in Britain but in America, where many radio stations preferred the B-side, ‘Little Woman Love’, it didn’t even make the Top 20.

All the deejays who played it took much the same heavily ironic line: ‘Once, Paul McCartney wrote and recorded songs like “Michelle”, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane”. Now here he is with “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.’

Paul’s father had been profoundly upset by the Beatles’ break-up. To Jim McCartney, John and George were still the lads who used to practise in his tiny living-room in Forthlin Road and devour his cooking, and he couldn’t understand how their old camaraderie could have turned into such hatred.

While the High Court action was in progress, the chronic discomfort of Jim’s rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis had been exacerbated by a severe attack of shingles. His wife, Angie, tried to keep him from watching TV news reports on the case for fear they’d make the condition even worse.

Though none of the remedies and treatments Jim tried could check the spread of his arthritis he refused to let it spoil his enjoyment of life. He adored having three granddaughters from Paul and a further three from Michael McCartney, who had married local girl Angela Fishwick in 1968, with ‘our kid’ as best man. Like Paul and Mike before them, the little girls were initiated into Jim’s ‘bubbling underground sense of fun’, his nonsense Scouse-isms (‘There’s no hair on a seagull’s chest’; ‘It’s imposausigable!’) and unbeatable prowess at sticking out his tongue. ‘It often used to hurt him when they all climbed on his knees,’ remembers his adopted daughter, Ruth, ‘but he never showed it.’

Next to his family, the pride of Jim’s life was Drake’s Drum, the racehorse Paul had bought him as a birthday gift in 1964. Since then, the gelding had won several important races, usually with a conscientiously-besuited and binocular-wearing Paul or Mike there to watch their proud dad lead him around the winners’ enclosure. The climax of Jim’s career as an owner was to see him run at Aintree, Liverpool’s world-famous steeplechase course, on the same card as the Grand National. Drake’s Drum won the race immediately before it, the Hylton Plate.

Between race-meetings, Jim loved to visit Wilfred Lyde’s stables in Middleham, Yorkshire, where the horse was in training. As his racing career declined–and long journeys grew more trying for his owner–Paul had him moved to Crossley’s stables in Heswall, just a mile or so from Jim and Angie’s home. At least once a week, Angie would drive Jim to Crossley’s to feed him sugar-lumps in his stall or watch him exercising on the nearby beach.

Despite Jim’s decreasing mobility, he still paid regular visits to Paul and Linda at Cavendish, generally at Christmas when one, or both, of his favourite sisters, Gin and Millie, might also be there. Paul always laid on some spectacular treat like afternoon tea at the Ritz hotel, a starchily formal ritual for which he dutifully donned suit and tie and reprimanded nine-year-old Heather, the unruliest of his girls, for dancing on her chair.

Now and again, Jim even made the 300-mile car journey to High Park Farm, enduring its spartan conditions with unfailing good humour. ‘Here we go on the long and winding road,’ he’d say to Angie as they set off.

‘Once when we arrived, Paul proudly told us he’d done up the garage for us,’ Angie recalls. ‘We slept on a mattress on the floor. The girls were inside the house, on bunk beds with horse-blankets for covers.’

Linda had come to be loved by Jim and Angie, although her possessiveness with Paul caused the occasional raised eyebrow. If he was driving them somewhere, she automatically got into the front passenger seat beside him, unaware–or else not caring–that in northern family pecking-order it should have been his father’s place. But her affectionate manner and spontaneity were disarming: on the spur of the moment at High Park, she might ask Heather and Mary ‘Shall we go see Grandpa?’, order two taxis from Campbeltown, stash them and the dogs inside and hit the long and winding road down to Cheshire.

Angie McCartney remembers the front doorbell once ringing after midnight, mingled with a sound of clucking. En route from Kintyre to London with Paul, Linda had managed to buy some chickens which she planned to keep in the back garden at Cavendish. The agitated birds were kept overnight in a downstairs cloakroom where, despite newspaper on the floor and only dry food to eat, they managed to spatter droppings everywhere. ‘When we opened the door next morning, it looked like a scene from an Oliver Stone war movie,’ Angie recalls.

If Linda was Paul’s main source of strength and reassurance in navigating the unknown waters of a solo career, her family–or, rather, family firm–was of critical importance. Indeed, having his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Lee and John Eastman, as his lawyers, which had been such an embarrassment with the Beatles, proved of lasting benefit now.