Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (14 page)

The Palladium, a big old music hall on Argyll Street, near London’s Oxford Circus, was considered the most prestigious venue in British light entertainment. A variety show was broadcast live from the theatre every Sunday night on national television, and acts from around the world made it their ambition to top the bill. ‘Only the biggest acts in the world did
Sunday Night at the Palladium
. That was the ultimate career high. Lots of them would come over from America,’ explains the show’s presenter Bruce Forsyth, adding that when an invitation was extended to the Beatles to top the bill in 1963 it was the sign that ‘they really had arrived’. Forsyth and his producer Val Parnell went to see the Beatles in concert in advance, and were troubled by the racket their fans made. It was customary for artists who topped the bill at
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
to talk to Forsyth on the show. If Beatles fans got tickets, nobody would be able to hear a word that was said.

So I hit on the idea of them doing a conversation all with idiot boards that were facing the audience. Paul would rush on and say, just written on the board, ‘It’s great to be here tonight.’ Then John would rush on from the other side, ‘Yes, what a lovely audience.’ They did a whole conversation [like that] because they couldn’t be heard if they’d spoken.

The fact the Beatles were topping the bill at this very important show made national newspaper editors pay full attention to the group for the first time, sending writers along to meet the Beatles at rehearsals. ‘At the end of each song they bowed to an imaginary audience,’ Godfrey Winn reported for the
Daily Sketch
. ‘George [Harrison] went through the introduction a dozen times. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are very pleased to be here at the Palladium.” The Palladium, the Palladium, they shouted out, screaming like their own fans …’ On the night, the Beatles performed briefly at the start of the programme, and again at the end, to a raucous reception from their fans, whom John mocked with his horrible spastic routine and half-jokingly told to ‘Shut up!’, which only made them laugh and scream more. Finally the boys joined Forsyth on the revolving stage, waving goodbye to the audience in the theatre, and the wider TV audience, to the tune of ‘Startime’, as every edition of the show concluded. Forsyth: ‘That night we could have gone round 50 times and those young fans would have kept screaming.’

Sundays are typically quiet news days, editors struggling to find enough good stories to fill Monday’s papers. On just such a quiet Sunday in October 1963 editors were only too happy to seize upon the Beatles’ success at the Palladium, and the extravagant behaviour of their fans, and blow it up into front-page news. The next morning’s papers thereby presented the Beatles as the stars of a new youth phenomenon, one that was not seen by journalists as dangerous and unpleasant, like the recent Teddy Boy cult which was associated with violence and vandalism, but that was approved of as part of mainstream family entertainment.

The
Daily Sketch
devoted two inside pages to an interview with the band. ‘Good morning. Did you watch the Beatles on television in the
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
show?’ Godfrey Winn asked his readers conversationally, going on to report that 12 million Britons had, and he was ready to reveal what these ‘new kings of pop’ were really like. The
Evening News
similarly reported on the ‘Sweet Sound of Success’, noting in a thumbnail portrait of Paul McCartney that he was ‘a head in the clouds dreamer who lives for nothing but music’. Paul’s egoism and personal ambition had not yet been detected, though the British press would never be keen to portray Macca, as they came to call him fondly, as anything other than a decent bloke touched by genius. Paul enjoyed good press from day one.

The Beatles’ appearance at the Palladium also signalled a change in the way British newspapers covered the entertainment industry. ‘Suddenly the golden years of Hollywood seemed to come to an abrupt end when the music era came in with the Beatles’ music and the Rolling Stones - all the old film stars of Hollywood seemed to be of no more importance any more,’ notes the
Mirror
’s Don Short, one of a coterie of Fleet Street reporters who documented the Beatles’ exploits over the next few years, becoming close to the band in the process, especially Paul who cultivated writers who could help them. As an example of how accommodating he could be, Paul once picked up Don personally at the
Mirror
building in Holborn and drove him to a West End club to interview his dad; another time Paul and George came round to the Short household for dinner and Paul sang a lullaby to the journalist’s six-year-old daughter. As time went by, Paul learned to manipulate his press contacts, feeding them stories that would benefit him personally, but making himself scarce when it was not to his advantage to talk. ‘If it wasn’t going to be helpful to Paul, he wouldn’t surface,’ notes Short.

It wasn’t only the popular press that had become closely interested in the Beatles. At the end of 1963 William Mann, music critic with
The Times
, wrote a serious appraisal of the Beatles’ music that still stands as one of the most highfalutin but perspicacious articles about the band ever published. ‘The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney,’ Mann began his seminal piece, going on to explain that he was not interested in the showbiz antics of the band and their hysterical followers, but in their music, which he found fresh and authentically English.

For several decades, in fact since the decline of the music hall, England has taken her popular songs from the United States, either directly or by mimicry. But the songs of Lennon and McCartney are distinctly indigenous in character, the most imaginative and inventive examples of a style that has been developing on Merseyside …

It was when the writer came to analyse the songs in academic language that he lost some of his readers, ‘the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches …’ Yet Mann was clearly right when he praised ‘the discreet, sometimes subtle varieties of instrumentation’ on the Beatles’ records, and noted that their stylised vocals had not tipped over into cliché, concluding: ‘They have brought a distinctive and exhilarating flavour to a genre of music that was in danger of ceasing to be music at all.’

With the national press, tabloid and broadsheet, finally paying full attention to the Beatles, the band became a nationwide phenomenon in late 1963. The term Beatlemania started appearing in newspapers in late October, as journalists documented the hysterical fan reaction to the group’s appearances. ‘This Beatlemania’ was a headline in the
Daily Mail
on Monday 21 October, over a feature article by Vincent Mulchrone, asking ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Beatle?’ The same day the
Sketch
ran a profile of Ringo Starr under the heading ‘Beatles Mania!’ When the boys returned to Britain on 30 October 1963 from a brief Swedish expedition, hordes of fans screamed welcome at London’s Heathrow Airport. By chance, the American television compère Ed Sullivan was passing through the airport that day, shopping for talent for his
Ed Sullivan Show
. Show business legend has it that, seeing hundreds of girls holding up signs for Beatles, Sullivan assumed this was an eccentric, and eccentrically spelt, British animal act. When Sullivan was put right, he saw a booking opportunity: ‘I decided that the Beatles would be a great attraction for our TV show.’

All of which served as the build-up to the Beatles appearing, in November 1963, on another very big show, the Royal Variety Show, staged that year at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre. As with
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, the Beatles were appearing on a mixed variety bill with comics, TV stars and crooners, the show broadcast via television to the nation. The unique aspect of this particular show was that it was traditionally attended by senior members of the Royal Family, this year Her Majesty the Queen Mother, her second daughter Princess Margaret and the Princess’s husband the Earl of Snowdon. The presence of Royalty always drew big stars and a large television audience, but tended to inhibit the performers and audience on the night, making for stilted, often disappointingly bland entertainment. In being their own slightly cheeky selves, the Beatles proved a breath of fresh air.

After performing their latest hit single, ‘She Loves You’, Paul introduced a slower song, ‘Till There Was You’ from
The Music Man
, telling the audience jokingly that the song ‘has also been recorded by our favourite American group - Sophie Tucker’. This safe, well-rehearsed quip - at the expense of the heavy-set Ms Tucker - earned a typically polite ripple of Royal Variety Show laughter. Then John introduced their final song, ‘Twist and Shout’, by asking the audience for help: ‘Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?’ he said, adding with a nod to the Royal box, ‘And the rest of you, if you just rattle your jewellery. ’ At a time when Royalty was treated with greater deference than today, this was considered a daring remark from young Lennon, one that fell just the right side of insolence. The audience was highly amused, with the press the next day praising the boys’ naturalness and wit, further stoking the bigger story of the Beatles being a new national sensation. The
Daily Mirror
put Beatlemania on its front page, in a glowing review of the show by Don Short, who doesn’t believe - as has been suggested by others - that pressmen like him
created
Beatlemania. Rather the relationship between the papers and the band was symbiotic. ‘A lot of people think the press puffed it up, but in actual fact I think the Beatles used the press and the press used the Beatles as much as each other.’

MONEY, THAT’S WHAT I WANT

Two months after moving into the Mayfair flat with his fellow Beatles, Paul moved out again to lodge with the Ashers in Wimpole Street. He was spending so much time at Jane’s house it made sense to stay over, though not in Jane’s room. The Ashers gave him the use of a box room at the top of their house, opposite the bedroom of Jane’s brother Peter, who became a great mate, while Jane and her sister Claire slept in rooms on the floor below. Paul loved his garret, where he had a piano installed so he could sit and compose new tunes in the style of a jobbing song-smith, a self-image he enjoyed, though in reality he was an increasingly wealthy and famous star.

One indication of Paul’s celebrity was the fans who stood sentry outside the Ashers’ front door all day, hoping to catch their idol coming or going. To help Paul avoid these pesky kids Dr Asher worked out an arrangement with his neighbours whereby Paul could climb out of his bedroom window, four storeys above the street, climb back inside the apartment of a retired colonel living next door, go down in the lift and exit the building courtesy of the people in the basement flat, whose back door brought him into the mews behind Wimpole Street. While Dr Asher deserves the credit for this ingenious escape route, it is a mark of how charming Paul was that neighbours felt sufficiently well disposed to the young man to let him use their homes in this way. It was a lesson he learned well. In years to come, when he owned many homes in Britain and abroad, Paul came to similar friendly arrangements with his neighbours whereby he could drive in and out of his properties via their land when he wanted to avoid fans and the press.

Life at Wimpole Street suited Paul so well he lodged here for the next three years, long after the other Beatles had bought houses outside the city, the sanctuary of the Ashers’ home almost as important to Paul as his relationship with Jane, whom everybody in the Beatles’ circle liked. ‘She was lovely. She was good for him,’ affirms Tony Bramwell. ‘The Asher family were good for him, [too], gave him a bit of stability in London.’ Margaret Asher fed Paul up between engagements and her basement music room became a cosy den for Paul and John to write in. ‘We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball,’ John would say of these sessions.

Like in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar, playing the piano at the same time. We had ‘Oh you, you got something …’ and Paul hits this chord and I turned to him and said, ‘That’s it! Do that again.’ In those days we really used to write like that.

Songwriting sessions such as these - some of the happiest and closest times John and Paul ever enjoyed - were all the more precious for being squeezed between concert engagement, the Beatles travelling considerable distances every week to play cinemas and dance halls from Cheltenham to Carlisle, a punishing regime that saw Paul succumb to flu in mid-November. The Beatles had to postpone a show in Portsmouth as a result, one of the few times Paul has ever missed a concert due to ill-health. Brian Epstein was also booking his boys onto a plethora of TV and radio shows, where they were obliged to tell jokes and act up like a comedy troupe. Before pop music became self-aware as an art form, before anybody talked of ‘rock music’, groups like the Beatles were considered part of mainstream show business, no different from the jugglers, ventriloquists and comics with whom they found themselves on shows like
Late Screen Extra
where, for example, they appeared on 25 November 1963 with Liverpudlian comic Ken Dodd. ‘It was a way of getting [exposure],’ says Dodd, who used the Beatles as a foil. ‘At the time, I was hungry for publicity as well as the Beatles, and if you get a chance of being on television you go along with it.’ It helped that Paul enjoyed the play-acting. As with so many members of his family, there was something of the ham about him.

With everything else that was going on, the boys still found time to record their second LP,
With the Beatles
, released in time for Christmas a mere eight months after
Please Please Me
. The cover photograph, by Robert Freeman, presented the Beatles solemn-faced in black turtle-neck sweaters, a monochrome image reminiscent of the early photographs of the band taken by Astrid Kirchherr, and an indication that, while the Beatles would play the fool on TV, they had ambitions to be taken more seriously as musicians. Again the 14 tracks were a mixture of original compositions and covers. The album began with John’s insistent ‘It Won’t Be Long’ followed by an equally commanding lead vocal on ‘All I’ve Got to Do’. As if spurred on to better his friend’s performances, Paul was heard next on the explosive ‘All My Loving’. The song the boys had given the Rolling Stones was also on the album, sung by Ringo, while George sang one of his own compositions for the first time, ‘Don’t Bother Me’. The rest of the tracks were covers, including the closer, ‘Money’, which had new significance now the Beatles were earning £2,000 a week ($3,060) from touring alone, a sensational sum at the time.