Paul McCartney (88 page)

The biography was simultaneously an attack on Yoko so savage that she considered suicide (though, strangely, not legal action). Paul rallied to her support, dismissing Goldman’s more ludicrous claims and urging Beatles fans to boycott the book. Largely because of that, she had consented to the Anthology and allowed it to go forward without trying to influence its format or even seeking to take part. By late 1993, Paul, George and Ringo had agreed to record some new music to go with the out-takes and rarities on its CD series. But, clearly, such an exercise would be pointless unless it included John. Yoko’s goodwill would thus have to be tested even further.

In his five years of so-called retirement from music between 1975 and 1980, John had continued writing songs on the treadmill of competition with Paul that nothing could ever halt. At the Dakota Building, his widow was sitting on a cache of his home-demos, some known to hardcore fans via bootlegs but all justifiably described as ‘unknown’ Lennon tracks. On New Year’s Day 1994, Paul phoned Yoko to say that he, George and Ringo were thinking of doing ‘a little instrumental’ for the Anthology but getting ‘cold feet at the thought of a three-quarters Beatles reunion’. Would she consider handing over something by John for them to work with? Neil Aspinall–of whom she thought highly–had already made the same request.

As she told me at the time, her first thought was how fiercely John had dismissed any idea of a Beatles comeback performance when the world was clamouring for one. ‘He used to say they’d just be four rusty old men. But I decided it would be wrong to stand in its way. The Beatles were John’s group. He was the band leader and the one who coined [their] name.’ The sheer irony of the situation also helped sway her. ‘I had the reputation of having broken the Beatles up. Now I was in a position where I could bring them back together… it was kind of a situation given to me by Fate.’

On 19 January, he and Paul found themselves together in a room for the first time in many years. John was to be posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–a first for an individual member of a band which had already received that honour–and Paul was to give the induction address.

This took the form of an open letter to his old soulmate and arch-competitor, recalling their first meeting at Woolton fete thanks to Ivy Vaughan; John onstage, making up lyrics to the Del-Vikings’ ‘Come Go With Me’; his beautiful mother Julia with her red hair and captivating prowess on the ukulele; songwriting sessions at 20 Forthlin Road, fuelled by Typhoo tea-leaves smoked in Jim McCartney’s pipe; journeys to early gigs in freezing vans when the only way to keep warm was to lie on top of each other in a ‘Beatle sandwich’; the ‘little look’ they’d exchanged before singing ‘I’d love to turn you on’ in ‘A Day in the Life’, knowing the consequences but not caring.

The woman who’d come between them received only the briefest, most tactful mention. One day in the Sixties, ‘a girl named Yoko Ono’ had appeared, soliciting a Lennon and McCartney manuscript. ‘I told her to go and see John,’ Paul said, adding with masterly understatement: ‘And she did.’

At the end, he spoke directly to John about their reconciliation, as it proved just in the nick of time. ‘And the joy for me, after all the business shit we’d gone through, was that we were actively getting back together and communicating again. And the joy as you told me how you were baking bread now. And how you were playing with your little baby, Sean. That was great for me, because it gave me something to hold on to. And now years on here we are assembled to thank you for everything you mean to us all. This letter comes with love from your friend Paul.’

Afterwards, he and Yoko embraced a little gingerly, but there was no doubting how moved she had been. Later that night, she gave him tapes of four songs by John and her blessing for the surviving Beatles to overdub vocals and a backing.

So the reunion that millions had awaited for almost a quarter of a century was finally to happen, albeit only on record and with what the British press termed ‘the Threetles’. After the news came a flurry of speculation that they mightn’t stop there. One report claimed that they’d been offered £20 million each for a single live show with Julian Lennon replacing his father; others, that they were being courted by reincarnations of both the Woodstock and Isle of Wight pop festivals.

The best song on the tapes was judged to be ‘Free as a Bird’, a pensive ballad which John had recorded with just his own piano accompaniment sometime in 1977. Augmented by Paul, George and Ringo, it would be the pièce de résistance of the first Anthology CD as well as coming out as a single. Although George Martin was compiling the archive music, he felt unable to produce this late addition to an oeuvre he had done so much to foster. Martin was now 68 and four decades of fastidious listening had taken their toll: his hearing was beginning to fail.

Instead, the job went to Jeff Lynne, George’s companion in the Traveling Wilburys (whose former band, the Electric Light Orchestra, had been called ‘the Beatles of the Seventies’). The sound on John’s archaic cassette was of such poor quality that Lynne first had to take it to his studio in Hollywood to be cleaned up and digitised. The song being too short as it stood, Paul and George between them supplied a middle eight, for each would sing in turn. So, despite George’s earlier snarkiness, they did end up writing together.

The overdubbing took place in February at Hog Hill Studio. It was the first time the two of them and Ringo had played together since George’s ‘I Me Mine’ in January 1970.

Still the soul of tact, Paul had done his best to forestall any last-minute interference by Yoko. ‘I said, “Don’t impose too many conditions on us,”’ he would recall. ‘“It’s really difficult to do this spiritually. We don’t know, we might hate each other after two hours.”’ But she imposed no conditions and didn’t even attend the session. Different days indeed from when she’d whispered in John’s ear through the White Album and he’d had a bed rigged up for her on the studio floor during Abbey Road.

Playing and singing along with John’s voice was an eerie experience for all of them. ‘I invented a little scenario,’ Paul was to remember. ‘He’d gone away on holiday and he’d rung us [and said], “Just finish this track for me, will you?” It was very nice and it was very irreverent towards John… not too “Aah, the fallen hero.”… John would have been the first to debunk that. “A fucking hero? A fallen hero? Fuck off, we’re making a record.”’

Some of the Let It Be tension resurfaced nonetheless. Paul had initially thought ‘Free as a Bird’ should be a big orchestral number, but George wanted to give it a yearning steel guitar riff like his famous one on ‘My Sweet Lord’ (belying his supposed ‘ruination’ as a guitarist). Paul gave way after hearing the riff and, with impressive self-restraint, offered no suggestions as to how it might be improved.

Three months later, the same team reassembled at Hog Hill to overdub a second John home-demo, ‘Here and There’, for the second Anthology CD. The session was abandoned after one afternoon because of the song’s weakness, although it gave Paul a chance to sing along with John in the headphones, feeling ‘as if he was in the next room’.

In the end, it wasn’t until February 1995 that they came back to work on ‘Real Love’, which John had taped in 1979 in six different voice-and-piano versions, some under the alternate title ‘Real Life’. Paul played the stand-up bass used by Bill Black on Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that Linda had bought him in Nashville.

Relations with Yoko continued to be excellent, so much so that at the time of the ‘Real Love’ sessions she paid a visit to Peasmarsh with her son Sean, now aged 19. She and Paul even recorded a track together at Hog Hill Mill, something that neither of them could ever have imagined.

That August, it would be 50 years since the dropping of the atom bomb on Yoko’s homeland. ‘Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue’ somewhat recalled that emblematic John-and-Yoko anthem ‘Give Peace a Chance’, with Sean, Linda and the McCartney children joining in; there was also a touch of the seance in Yoko’s introductory words, ‘John, we’re here now, together. Bless you, peace on earth and Strawberry Fields Forever.’

She took the lead vocal–simply a repetition of the title segueing into her characteristic sound effects–with Paul on string bass, audibly respectful. The piece would be broadcast by Japanese public radio on the anniversary of Hiroshima’s incineration.

Sean Lennon had grown up feeling that the father he’d lost at the age of five belonged more to the world than to him, and that his only private time with John came through playing the piano. Among Hog Hill Mill’s collection of historic musical instruments was the Baldwin spinet John had used on the Abbey Road track ‘Because’. When Paul invited Sean to play it, he didn’t stop for hours.

The Dakota Building was not alone in yielding up lost recordings for The Beatles Anthology. As a teenager Paul had occasionally been able to borrow one of those so desirable Grundig tape recorders, belonging to two brothers, Reginald and Charles Hodgson, who lived around the corner from him in Allerton. That August of 1995, the brothers were clearing out their mother’s attic after her death and came upon the Grundig and an ancient spool tape. On it were the nameless band that had helped to bridge the gap between the Quarrymen and the Beatles: John, Paul, George and Stuart Sutcliffe.

The Hodgsons contacted Paul’s old friend Joe Flannery and arrangements were made for the tape to be brought to Peasmarsh by Reg Hodgson’s son, Peter. Sure enough, it contained a whole recital, apparently in the front room at 20 Forthlin Road, by the drummerless quartet who vainly used to assure local dance promoters that ‘the rhythm’s in the guitars’. Paul’s contributions included Eddie Cochran’s ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’ and Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’, a memory of his and John’s brief career as The Nerk Twins. To add a bit of percussion, his brother Mike could be heard bashing on anything to hand.

Paul was intensely moved by what he heard and asked to buy the tape (subsequently paying the Hodgson family a reported £260,000). To show his gratitude, he gave Peter Hodgson a guided tour of Hog Hill Mill, pointing out the Bill Black double bass, the ‘Because’ spinet and the Mellotron he’d played on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. To Hodgson, the room above the studio seemed ‘like a museum’, for Paul’s old school desk was also there (scratched with the initials ‘AA’, for Arthur Askey); the walls displayed what were evidently genuine Picassos and against one wall stood a chair which, he learned, had once belonged to Vincent Van Gogh.

As a special concession, the famous Hofner violin bass was taken from its secret underfloor compartment for the visitor to hold. Taped to its back there was still a piece of Senior Service cigarette-packet with Paul’s scribbled setlist for the Beatles’ last-ever live concert, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in 1966. ‘Don’t drop that,’ he warned. ‘It’s insured for two million.’

He also revealed himself as a Beatle memorabilia-collector to beat the most obsessive. The cover of their 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, had shown four cheery, innocent lads leaning out over a metal rail at EMI’s London headquarters in Manchester Square. Six years later, while making the abortive Get Back album, they had a cover prepared of their no longer innocent or cheery selves similarly leaning out over the same rail.

When the EMI building was demolished, Paul had bought the rail. He kept it at Hog Hill with a blow-up photograph of John, George, Ringo and himself, positioned to look as if they were leaning over it.

‘Free as a Bird’ was premiered by BBC Radio 1 on 21 November 1995. There probably has never been a record that more people wanted to love. And the general disappointment was palpable. All Jeff Lynne’s technical expertise had been unable to integrate Paul’s and George’s overdubbed voices with John’s; faint and uncharacteristically diffident, it seemed to come from a separate studio beyond the grave. The extra McCartney/Harrison words had a pang of real sadness: ‘Whatever happened to/ the love that we once knew/ Can we really live without each other?’ Trouble was, everyone knew they didn’t mean it.

The song was lead track on the first Anthology CD, then, after a brief interval, released as a single to catch the Christmas market. It sold 120,000 in its first week, reaching number two in the UK–denied the top spot by Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’–and number six on the Billboard chart. All well and good if one forgot the era when Beatles singles routinely sold a million before release.

On 19 November, the first Anthology documentary was aired by ITV in Britain and ABC in America. The Beatles always used to possess perfect timing, but now it had deserted them. The next evening, on BBC1’s Panorama programme, Diana, Princess of Wales gave a sensational interview admitting that her supposed ‘fairytale’ marriage to Britain’s future king had been a sham and that Prince Charles had been carrying on with his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, throughout it.

From then on, the only story for the world’s media was beautiful, brave, batty Princess Di taking on the House of Windsor and showing every sign of triumphing. Different days again, when the Fab Four could be kicked off the front pages by royalty.

The documentary’s talking-head interviews left no doubt which Threetle had worn best. Recovering alcoholic Ringo now sported a cropped head and a beard which gave him a weird resemblance to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Extensive dental work had left George with a rather camp, cosy smile that went with his homespun coloured woollens–though not the gall that leaked into his reminiscences. Thirty years on, he revealed how insulted he’d been by the Beatles’ MBE awards (an unprecedented honour at the time). ‘For all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, and they just gave us a bloody old leather medal with a wooden string through it.’

Paul, however, seemed unchanged, particularly since all traces of grey had vanished from his hair. While the others looked like retirees, he came across as still busy and engaged with life, sitting in his recording studio, surrounded by guitars, or piloting his converted fishing trawler Barnaby Rudge around Rye harbour.