Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (49 page)

When summer came, the McCartneys headed back to Scotland. Denny Laine and his partner Jo Jo were living at the time in a cottage on Paul’s estate so that he and Paul could write together. One afternoon Paul came over to the house with an idea for a song about their holiday home. ‘He had the chorus. He already had the “Mull of Kintyre” title,’ remembers Laine, referring to the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. ‘He wanted to write a song that reminded him of the area.’ The men had a couple of glasses of whisky, then sat outside Laine’s cottage and finished the song, looking at the scenery: ‘that was the way that song came about, looking around and seeing what was there. You didn’t have to come up with anything. It was just in front of you.’ The finished song was a waltz with good, poetic lyrics. The words are in fact noticeably superior to all Paul’s solo work to date, which is explained by the fact that McCartney didn’t write them. At least not all of them. While Paul wrote the chorus, and already had the title, Laine says he wrote ‘quite a lot’ of the rest of ‘Mull of Kintyre’, meaning that Paul has to share the credit for what may be his best post-Beatles lyric. Laine says his input is strongly felt, for example, in the following romantic verse:

Far have I travelled and much have I seen
Dark distant mountains with valleys of green
Past painted deserts, the sunsets on fire
As he carries me home to the Mull of Kintyre

The recording of the song was highly unusual, using the services of the Campbeltown Pipe Band, one member of which was Jimmy McGeachy, teenaged son of a piper of the same name. Aged 15 when ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was recorded, Jimmy was in his final year at Campbeltown Grammar School, after which he would become an apprentice fitter in the shipyard. In his spare time he played in the pipe band. The band members met at Castle Hill Church two evenings a week to practise, and when summer came they sallied forth in Royal Stewart tartan kilts, sporrans and feathered bonnets to perform in the streets of the town and at regional competitions. As with the Black Dyke Mills Band, there was considerable community pride in the band, with youngsters always eager to join. Jimmy saw no conflict between playing drums in the pipe band and drumming in his school punk band.

The Pipe Major was a former Scots Guardsman named Tony Wilson, a larger-than-life character often to be found in the pub. One day Paul invited Wilson up to High Park to play him his new waltz, asking if the pipe band, whom he’d last had up to High Park when he was with Jane Asher, would like to play on a recording. Wilson put the idea to his colleagues at their next meeting at Castle Hill. ‘We thought it was a wind-up, obviously,’ notes Ian McKerral, then a young piper. ‘We knew Paul had a farm in Kintyre and we used to see him around the town, he was quite regular, but Tony was a bit of a character and we thought he was having us on.’ Tony was in earnest, however. He chalked Paul’s tune on the blackboard, and they started rehearsing it.

On the evening of Tuesday 9 August 1977, Wilson took seven pipers and seven drummers, all dressed in tartan, to Low Ranachan Farm. Geoff Emerick and Mark Vigars were there to make the recording. ‘All of a sudden the dogs come on down, there’s the sheepdog Martha, and then the McCartneys. He’s there in front of us. “Hi, how are you going?” His family is all there, who were just kids at the time, Mary, Stella, and Heather was my age,’ recalls Jimmy McGeachy, who got to know Heather a little. ‘She was quite clingy, she was always at mother’s side …’ Denny Laine and Joe English were also present, but not Jimmy McCulloch. The volatile guitarist had parted company with Wings after a silly incident at the farm when, no doubt drunk, he’d thrown eggs against a wall. The eggs came from Linda’s pet chickens and she was upset. As a result, Jimmy left to join the Small Faces.

Wings had already recorded the basics of ‘Mull of Kintyre’. Now the pipers recorded their part, priming their pipes by inflating the sheepskin bags, then unleashing the fierce, weird, almost mechanical noise of the instruments. Paul counted them in, for the pipes aren’t heard until after the third verse. When this was done to his satisfaction, he went outside and recorded the drums, yelling ‘Whoo-hooo!’ at the end, as can be heard on the record. With the work done, Paul went away and reappeared with a wheelbarrow loaded with cans of McEwan’s Export beer, which the pipe band members drank while Paul tried on John McGeachy’s tartan and attempted to squeeze a tune out of the pipes, which was harder than it looked. Linda made sandwiches for the men. ‘She was a lovely woman,’ says John McGeachy, the town mechanic. ‘You could meet her in the streets of Campbeltown- I met her quite a bit-and she would always stop to chat …’ Young Jimmy McGeachy (no relation) wandered inside the barn and had a go on Joe English’s drums, Linda coming to join him for a jam session. ‘She makes you feel really welcome, you know. There [was] a warmth about her.’ Although eight months pregnant, Linda sneaked a cigarette from young Jimmy. ‘Don’t tell Paul,’ she whispered.

Although Joe English seemed on good terms with the McCartneys during the ‘Mull of Kintyre’ session, he left Wings soon afterwards, grumbling about money. Once more, Wings were the irreducible trio of Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, again putting a question mark against Paul’s relationship with his musicians. ‘Paul is wonderful but he can be pretty ruthless to people around him,’ comments former Apple man Tony ‘Measles’ Bramwell, who was doing PR for Wings nowadays. Band members came and went ‘without any sort of acknowledgement’. To be fair, Paul had more important things happening in his life. His dream of having a son was fulfilled the following month when, on 12 September 1977, Linda gave birth to a boy. They named the child James Louis, after Paul’s father and Linda’s grandfather respectively. In registering the birth Paul was obliged to provide Linda’s previous married name. He gave Lerch, though he knew full well that Heather’s father was Mel See; probably an intentional dig, the McCartneys not being on good terms with Mel at the time. So proud was Paul at having a son, he had his PR put out a press release. ‘I’m over the moon!’ Paul was quoted as saying. ‘When I knew the baby was a boy I really flipped.’

Paul had originally intended ‘Mull of Kintyre’ as an album track, but he had such a good feeling about the song he made it a double A-side single with ‘Girls’ School’, the salacious lyrics of which, concerning schoolgirls and their sexy teachers, sounded out of place coming from a father of three girls. ‘Girls’ School’ was, however, a conventional rock ’n’ roll song that might play well in North America, whereas ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was a Scottish folk song with bagpipes that almost certainly wouldn’t. Paul decided, nevertheless, to release it in the UK, shooting a promotional video with the pipe band on Kintyre. At the start of this video Paul is seen strumming his guitar outside a cottage, with Linda walking down to meet him babe in arms. The impression given is that we are looking at Paul’s Scottish home. In fact, he travelled several miles up the coast to Saddle Beach to make the video and the house is nothing to do with the family. Again, the pipe band members were charmed by the McCartneys, and happily signed away their rights to royalties for a modest one-off payment. By agreement with Tony Wilson, each man got £30 cash ($46) in a brown envelope on the night of the recording, and another £300 ($460) or so for the video, which they thought generous. Nobody expected what happened next.

Released in mid-November 1977, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ went quickly to number one in the British charts - the first and only Wings song to be a UK number one - then stayed there for what seemed forever. Paul, who was in the habit of calling MPL to ask about weekly sales, was given astonishing figures: up to 145,000 copies a day were being sold in Britain at a time when a good daily sale was 20,000. ‘Mull of Kintyre’ soon sold a million, and kept selling. Not since the Beatles had Paul shifted so much vinyl. He brought the Campbeltown Pipe Band to London, where they made a second video to give the viewers of the BBC TV show
Top of the Pops
something different to look at. All told, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ stayed at number one for nine weeks, selling over two million copies in the UK, the biggest-selling single in British history up to that time.

The song also did well in countries with a sizeable ex-patriate Scottish community, such as Canada and New Zealand, stirring feelings of nostalgia. As expected, it sold far fewer copies in the United States, as did its flipside ‘Girls’ School’, which Paul had hoped would do well in the USA. This disappointment contributed to Paul’s decision to end his long association with Capitol Records. A light, peppy synthesiser-based tune from the new album, ‘With a Little Luck’, did however make number one in the United States, after which Paul launched
London Town
.

The album cover, showing Paul, Linda and Denny posed by Tower Bridge on a cold day, was at odds with the fact that much of this record had been cut in the Caribbean, while the tracks were the usual mixture of catchy ballads - with one or two stand-outs - surrounded by make-weights and songs that sounded half-finished, such as ‘Backwards Traveller’. The words of ‘Children Children’, referring to a secret waterfall in a forest where children play, surely relates to the family home in Sussex; while it wasn’t clear whether Paul was being ironical or not when he sang in mockery of rock stars and their groupie girlfriends in ‘Famous Groupies’. After all, he’d married a groupie (Linda), and Denny was about to marry another one (Jo Jo).
London Town
also sounded distinctly old-fashioned in a year when most of the young record-buying public were either into disco or punk in Britain.

When Paul asked ‘Measles’ Bramwell what he thought of
London Town
, he didn’t like the answer he received. ‘I said, “Well, it’ll be all right when it’s finished.” He did one of his prodding things. You know, he prods,’ says Measles, explaining that if Paul was in a good mood he gave you his famous thumbs-up gesture, but if he was displeased with someone in private he would prod them in the chest while he told them off. ‘It was just Macca being Macca: thumbs up Macca or prodding Macca.’ As he poked Measles in the chest, Paul asked: ‘What the fuck do you know? I fucking brought you down from Liverpool.’ It was what he used to say in the old days at Apple, to Peter Brown and others, when he was pissed off. Bramwell was not given the job of promoting
London Town
and the men didn’t speak for more than ten years.

Although Paul was out of step with young Britons, he continued to command a large, older audience, and
London Town
went top five in the UK and USA. It may have done even better had its release not coincided with a classic spoof. The story of the greatest of all Beatles tribute bands, the Rutles, goes back a couple of years to when former
Monty Python
member Eric Idle and Bonzo Dog songwriter Neil Innes, both great friends of George Harrison’s, made a comedy series for the BBC named
Rutland Weekend Television
, satirising the conventions of television and spoofing
Hard Day’s Night
-era Beatles, because, as Innes explains, ‘it was a cheap visual gag - black and white, four guys in wigs and pointy shoes running around a field. It would do!’ When Idle presented
Saturday Night Live
in 1976, he showed a clip of the Rutles, receiving such a favourable response from American viewers that
SNL
commissioned a full-length film of the ‘the prefab four’.
All You Need is Cash
is a documentary parody presented by Idle in the character of a humourless TV journalist whose cockeyed comments poke fun at both the Beatles story and the way journalists carelessly repeat the commonplace. The viewer is shown the Cavern and the Reeperbahn, ‘the world’s naughtiest street where the Rutles found themselves far from home and far from talented’; the Rutles making their first album ‘in 20 minutes; the second took even longer’; then falling into the clutches of a Klein-like manager whose ‘only weak spot was his dishonesty’. The Paul character was named Dirk McQuickly, played by Idle as a peppy Mr Showbiz always willing to talk to the press or write a quick song for another band. ‘Any old slag he’d sell a song to,’ sneers Mick Jagger in a delicious cameo, all the funnier because Paul gave the Stones their first hit.

NBC broadcast
All You Need is Cash
the day Paul was launching
London Town
, the parody airing on the BBC five days later, shortly after which a Rutles LP was released. As Paul tried to sell his own record, journalists asked him constantly about Rutlemania, a gag the media took to with alacrity even though it was partly at their expense. Paul was not amused. ‘I don’t think he liked Eric’s portrayal of him,’ says Neil Innes, laughing despite feeling bad about the Rutles clashing with
London Town
. When he met Paul at a party at George Harrison’s house he tried to apologise to the star. ‘I did take him to one side and said, “Look, old bean, I’m really sorry about [the] Rutles.” He said, “Oh no, I know it’s affectionate.”’ Still, Innes got the impression Paul was offended. ‘He suddenly started to look a bit edgy.’

BACK TO THE EGG

Paul attended the London première of
Annie
in May 1978, taking not only Lin and the kids to the theatre but 37 members of his extended family, partly to celebrate the fact that the Eastmans had bought the rights to the musical to add to MPL’s growing music publishing division. The show became a major hit, further enriching the star. The Eastmans were also in the process of renegotiating Paul’s record deal with EMI and Capitol, with the result that McCartney signed with CBS in America for a $22.5 million advance (then £10m). The size of the deal reflected his track record in the United States. The Beatles had been the most successful act of the Sixties, and it could be argued, on the strength of US singles, that Paul was one of the most successful acts of the Seventies. There were high expectations that he would continue to deliver hits for CBS with Wings.