Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (48 page)

A couple of weeks after the first Buddy Holly luncheon, Paul and Linda took Wings to Venice to play a charity concert and celebrate Lin’s 35th birthday with a family party (naturally the kids came), after which Paul didn’t play live for three years. While he loved performing, Linda only did so to please him, so this was a welcome break for her, and of course the McCartneys didn’t need the money. Wings Over America had filled the coffers; MPL turned over more than £3 million ($4.5m) in 1976-7, out of which Paul paid himself a chairman’s salary of £96,500 (or $147,645) at a time when national average earnings in the UK were less than £4,000 ($6,120), and the company still cleared a £1.1 m profit ($1.68). ‘In the last two years I have earned more money that I have ever earned in all the so-called boom years [of the Beatles] put together,’ the star revealed in a 1977 interview. ‘I was sick with companies. But Lee [Eastman] told me that if I got an office and a couple of good people to pay out of my own pocket I could own my own material.’ Lee’s advice had proved sound. Some Beatles-related income is included in these MPL figures, which are a matter of public record, but the main royalty stream from the Beatles’ back catalogue does not appear in the registered company accounts, meaning that Paul had substantial additional earnings accruing elsewhere. The full picture of his personal wealth would emerge many years later, as we shall see.

After operating out of rented rooms in Greek Street, Soho, for the past couple of years, in 1977 MPL moved around the corner to Soho Square, at the centre of which is a small park popular with office and shop workers. Soho Square is in the middle of a very busy area of Central London, the large clothes shops of Oxford Street a few strides away to the north, Charing Cross Road to the east, with its book and music shops, the bustling life of Soho - with its bars, restaurants and clubs - all around. Paul had bought 1 Soho Square, a five-storey Edwardian townhouse, the ground floor of which resembles a shop, with large, curved, plate-glass windows. Stairs lead up from the reception to four floors of offices, Paul taking as his private study the front office on the second floor. Sitting at his desk, speaking on the phone, he could watch people in the park below, an interesting view for a man always on the look-out for song ideas. Before MPL moved into 1 Soho Square, Paul had the building gutted and redecorated Art Deco-style by the people who designed the celebrated Biba shop in Kensington, commissioning expensive blue carpets, curtains and upholstery, all woven with a music note motif, which was repeated in the hand-carved oak door handles and as a stencil pattern around the windows. Other bespoke features included an antique Wurlitzer loaded with Paul’s favourite records, valuable art works and a restored pipe organ on the first-floor landing. There was a penthouse flat at the top of the building, and space in the basement for a recording studio.

A small team of people worked full time for Paul at 1 Soho Square. The most senior role was personal manager to Paul. It is a reflection of how demanding Paul can be that there was a high turnover of people in this position. First came Vincent Romeo, then Brian Brolly, followed by an Australian named Stephen Shrimpton. Brolly stayed with MPL throughout the changes, looking after Paul’s money alongside accountant Paul Winn, both stalwart members of the MPL team. So too was the ebullient Alan ‘the Crowd’ Crowder, who served as office factotum. In addition there was a changing cast of receptionists and secretaries. Sue Cavanaugh ran the Wings Fun Club and oversaw its magazine,
Club Sandwich
, launched in February 1977 to ‘narrow the gap between the band and its audience’. Initially,
Club Sandwich
consisted of a single folded sheet of newspaper, printed in black and white like the music papers of the day, though it was less like
Melody Maker
in tone than a kids’ magazine, apparently designed principally for the amusement of the wee McCartneys, benevolent, informal and jokey, with room for fan drawings, a letters page (Sue’s Lettuce [sic]), and a crossword puzzle drawn by Paul’s cousin, Bert Danher, a professional crossword compiler.

The MPL building was Paul’s own, better-organised version of the Apple operation at 3 Savile Row, another handsome townhouse building, and one which Apple finally got around to selling in 1976. Looking back from a time when stars, for security reasons, are usually concerned that the public
don’t
know where they live and do business, the Beatles had always been refreshingly public about their place of work. They put themselves on the high street with Apple in the Sixties, and Paul did the same with MPL now. Anybody who was interested could find his new office easily, and even if fans couldn’t get past the girls on reception they could sit in Soho Square watching the building for Paul who was often to be seen walking about the area, using local restaurants and popping into the Nellie Dean pub. He still uses 1 Soho Square as his business headquarters and can be seen occasionally in the neighbourhood.

Likewise, Paul’s Cavendish Avenue address has always been well known to his fans, though the house has changed over the years. After his marriage to Linda, especially since they had children, Cavendish transformed from 1960s bachelor pad into family home, with a scruffy, lived-in feel, the kids hurtling about followed by their dogs, none of whom seemed house-trained, hand prints and crayon marks on the walls, often under valuable artwork, paw prints and dog mess on the rugs, while the McCartneys’ large back garden put the neighbours in mind of the TV sit-com
The Good Life
. In this popular Seventies’ comedy a middle-class couple turn their suburban garden into a small-holding complete with livestock. Similarly Linda had taken to growing vegetables in her back garden, which also included a small zoo of animals featuring rabbits, ducks and chickens, the latter roosting in Paul’s Rolls Royce after he carelessly left a window open. It cost £6,000 ($9,180) to have the Rolls re-upholstered.

The McCartney cockerel woke the whole avenue at dawn. ‘It wouldn’t just crow, it would escape, and you would see all the kids running down the street after [it],’ laughs Adrian Grumi, who grew up in Cavendish Avenue with the McCartney children. Adrian’s mother was less than impressed when Paul and Linda stabled four horses in their garden. Granted, the houses had been built with stables, to pull the carriages of the Victorian gentry who originally lived here, but it was an incongruous sight in 1976/77 to see the McCartneys clip-clopping out of their gate on Sunday mornings, under the mistaken belief they could go riding in Regent’s Park. ‘They had their helmets and all sorts of things, and the jodhpurs, just to go along the bottom of the street to the top of the street. They used to poo, the horses, and the neighbours went mad,’ says Mrs Grumi.

The McCartneys were in fact less often in St John’s Wood nowadays, spending more time at their Sussex bolthole, Waterfall, even though the house was too small for a family of five. As in Scotland, it was the privacy and simplicity of country life that appealed. ‘It was great [for Paul] to get away from being a superstar to being just a family man,’ notes Denny Laine. In September 1976, Paul began improving and expanding his Sussex property, making a planning application for the erection of a stable block and, unusually, for a 70ft observation tower, both of which were granted. The tower attracted a great deal of media attention, not least because it looked like something from a prisoner-of-war camp. Newspapers published pictures of the tower as part of fanciful stories about the high security at Paul’s Sussex home, which the neighbours were apparently calling Paulditz, a pun on another popular TV show of the day, the POW drama
Colditz
. In fact, Paul had little personal security and, rather than erecting the tower to watch for intruders, he wanted to be able to look out over the tree canopy. ‘You see, when you are right in the forest, there’s no views, no outlook, you were just in the trees,’ explains his neighbour Veronica Languish. ‘So when he had that tower built he could see further around.’ The Languishes were among the local farming families who had watched the arrival of the McCartneys with curiosity in the late Sixties, but grew to like the family. ‘He fits in. He is just like everybody else really to us now, he’s been here long enough,’ says Mrs Languish, having known Paul over 30 years. Like so many people, Mrs Languish was particularly fond of Linda, who made the biggest effort to meet and befriend local people. ‘She was a nice girl, Linda, she was a very friendly girl.’ And the McCartneys’ marriage was evidently solid. That Christmas, Linda bought Paul one of his best presents: the double bass Bill Black played on Elvis Presley’s Sun sessions, while there was further good news when a live triple album of their US tour,
Wings Over America
, went to number one in the United States.

ALL ABOARD

In the first week of December 1976, the Sex Pistols had burst upon the consciousness of the British public with an outrageous appearance on tea-time television, the band members cursing and baiting the presenter on the show to the extent that they made front-page news the next day. Punk rock had arrived, and many young Britons took it to their hearts, feeling themselves to have more in common with scruffs like Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious than a millionaire rock star like Paul McCartney. Even Paul’s daughter Heather, now 14, had turned punk. Paul tried to write a punk-style song to entertain her, named, hilariously, ‘Boil Crisis’, but at the age of 34 he was too long in the tooth to empathise with rebellious teens.

In March, Paul had allowed the orchestral
Thrillington
album to be released, six years after he had recorded the curiosity, with a jokey promotional campaign that involved placing short, enigmatic items in the personal column of London’s
Evening Standard
, supposedly written by the fictional band leader, Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington. Releasing an album of tea-dance instrumentals the same month as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ showed how out of step with youth culture Paul had become. But did it matter? He and Linda were rich and happy. They were expecting another baby- Paul hoped for a boy- and plans were being laid to make the next Wings album in the Caribbean. No wonder punks resented him.

Ten years on from the summer of love, Great Britain was a much less attractive and confident place to be than in the mid-Sixties. As 1976 segued into ’77 high interest rates, strikes and mounting unemployment were all symptoms of an ailing economy, while the euphemistically termed ‘troubles’ of Northern Ireland continued to result in bloody murder both in the province and on mainland Britain, with bomb scares and actual blasts commonplace in the capital. In the music industry the talk was all about the Sex Pistols, the band having been sacked from EMI by its new chairman Sir John Read as too controversial for a firm that had built its reputation on making recordings of such great British composers as Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar and, well, Lennon & McCartney. Paul was a favourite son at EMI HQ, and continued to patronise Abbey Road Studios, which had become the most famous recording facility in the world thanks to the Beatles. The zebra crossing outside the studios had become a major tourist attraction in the few years since
Abbey Road
was released, fans coming from all over the world to have their picture taken walking across, to the annoyance of cab and bus drivers who were obliged to stop for them.

In the grey days of February 1977, Paul took Wings back into the EMI studios on Abbey Road to work on their new
London Town
album, named after the title song, which sought to express the feel of the capital in winter. While there is a definite gloomy charm to London at this time of year, Paul soon tired of the dark, damp days of winter. He announced to his band that, after a break in proceedings, Wings would resume recording
London Town
in the Caribbean (again probably partly for tax reasons). What’s more they would do so on a boat.

The McCartneys flew to Jamaica in April for a family holiday, before travelling to the US Virgin Islands where Wings’ advance party had hired three vessels, including the motor launch the
Fair Carol
, into the stern of which Geoff Emerick and Mark Vigars fitted a 24-track recording machine. Captain Tony Garton feared his vessel would sink under the weight. A trimaran,
El Toro
, was hired for the McCartney family, that is Paul and Linda, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, and the girls Heather, Mary and Stella; while a third vessel,
Samala
, accommodated Wings, the roadies and the engineers. The McCartney family came aboard at St Thomas, then sailed to St John to collect Denny, Jimmy and Joe.

This eccentric Caribbean adventure began well, with the band and crew diving into the water to swim from one boat to another, delighting in the coral and brightly coloured fish. Fun was had shouting ‘Shark!’ when friends were bathing. One day a dolphin rose to the surface, cocking its head as if to listen to Paul playing guitar. As the sessions continued, however, there were numerous shipboard mishaps. Alan Crowder slipped and broke his foot, returning from hospital on crutches like Long John Silver; Denny Laine got sunstroke; Jimmy McCulloch temporarily lost his hearing; and Geoff Emerick electrocuted himself. At night, with the three boats moored together, everybody would meet for a long communal supper under the stars. One night, Paul entertained everybody with a production of a story called
The Two Little Fairies
, narrating and playing piano, while his daughters Mary and Stella acted out the parts of the fairies. Too old for this sort of childish nonsense, Heather was to be found skulking in a corner listening to the Damned.

Drink and weed were part of the nightlife, and when the boats were moored in Watermelon Bay two US Park Rangers came aboard to remonstrate with Paul about the noise. The following day the Rangers delivered a letter, warning that if they came back and found drugs onboard arrests would follow. Spooked, Captain Garton tried to impose order on his rock star client, who told him he didn’t need the aggravation and hired a new boat, the
Wanderlust
. Later, a song of that name appeared on the
Tug of War
album, the lyrics making it clear that Paul considered hassles with the authorities over dope a petty matter.