Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (54 page)

Many friends knew a different Paul to the controlling, penny-pinching character described by Angie, someone capable of spontaneous acts of generosity - helping Howie Casey buy his house, for example, giving Eric Stewart an expensive drum machine for his birthday - and indeed Paul had been generous with Angie and Ruth McCartney, as he continued to be with other family members. If he suspected he was being taken advantage of, however, he could become implacable. An instance came in the summer of 1981 when a former member of the Quarry Men tried to sell the first record Paul ever made.

The reader will recall that back in 1958 Paul, John and George, together with their drummer Colin Hanton and occasional pianist John Duff Lowe, chipped in their pocket money to cut a 78 rpm shellac disc, making a recording of Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and Paul’s ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. This disc was passed between the boys so each had a chance to play and enjoy it at home. As Paul recalled for the Beatles’
Anthology
, John had the disc for one week. ‘I had it for a week, and passed it on to George, who had it for a week. Then Colin had it for a week and passed it to Duff Lowe - who kept it for twenty-three years.’

As John Duff Lowe moved from job to job, got married, divorced and married again, he took the shellac disc with him. For almost a quarter of a century the record languished in a succession of drawers. In 1981 John contacted Sotheby’s, who offered to put ‘his’ shellac disc into an auction of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. In advance of the sale, a story about the disc appeared in the
Sunday Times
, upon which Paul telephoned John Duff Lowe’s mum, who still lived in Liverpool, asking John to ring him. Guessing what McCartney wanted, Duff Lowe didn’t respond immediately. The next thing he knew he received a hand-delivered letter from the London law firm Clintons to inform him that Paul could take legal action to prevent the sale of the disc, urging him instead to contact Paul personally ‘so that the matter can be discussed and settled in a friendly way’. Duff Lowe called the Sussex number he’d been given. ‘I ring and Linda’s there. She says, “He’s not in. He’ll be in about 7:30.” So then Paul rings me and we have a long discussion about the record, and about old times …’ Paul said John would probably receive letters from his lawyers, but he should ignore them. ‘It’s just the way these guys write. It’s not me!’ John took this with a grain of salt, gaining the impression Paul was trying to charm him into giving him the disc for free, asking if he’d like to come to London and go out on the town. No. The disc was for sale, and John wanted to know what Paul was willing to pay for it.

The former friends negotiated over the shellac disc, the price soon reaching into the thousands. John Duff Lowe could hear McCartney becoming annoyed at the other end of the line. At one point it sounded like he’d snapped his pencil in frustration. Finally they agreed a price. Duff Lowe won’t say how much; he promised Paul he wouldn’t, but it seems to have been in the low five figures, which is to say the price of an average family home in 1981. A couple of days later, Stephen Shrimpton of MPL, accompanied by a lawyer from Clintons, came to meet John Duff Lowe in Worcester. He took the men to his bank, where he had the disc in a briefcase in a safe deposit box. ‘I opened the case, showed them the record, and obviously they saw it was in one piece. It was all that it was expected to be. The deal was done and they went off to London.’ The next day John rang Paul to ask what he thought of the record. ‘But the phone had been cut off.’ Having got what he wanted, Paul clearly didn’t want his old friend to contact him again.

That summer Paul applied for planning permission to knock down the derelict farmhouse he’d acquired in Sussex, and build a new five-bedroom family home. At present the McCartneys were squeezed into a two-bedroom cottage, which was far from ideal considering they had four children, aged between three and 18, a slightly mad arrangement bearing in mind how rich Paul was, but illustrative of his desire to maintain a tight family unit away from public life. Paul had tried as far as possible to bring the kids up in the way that Jim and Mary McCartney had raised him and Mike. In fact, he’d modelled the new house on 20 Forthlin Road: drawing up plans for a much larger but nonetheless modestly proportioned brick dwelling, the hub of which was the kitchen. Paul then handed his drawings to a firm of architects to create detailed plans. The proposed house was by no means extravagant, and notably lacking in rock star accoutrements. It included a master bedroom and sundeck upstairs for Paul and Lin, behind which were four bedrooms for the children. Downstairs there would be a series of interconnecting living rooms, leading to a large kitchen, with a semi-circular wall of windows overlooking the fields. There were no guest rooms, interestingly. Although a sociable man, outside of family and work Paul and Linda didn’t have many close friends, and in any event there were other properties on the estate where guests could be accommodated. Built in red brick, with a steep-pitched tile roof and two tall chimneys, the house was slightly ugly, especially from the back, which most resembled a corpy house. In this sense the new home was an expression of Paul’s nostalgia for his Liverpool childhood, a time that had become golden in his mind. It was therefore especially disturbing for him to see news coverage of riots in Liverpool in 1981.

Urban riots occurred across England that summer, during a period of industrial unrest and rising unemployment, with the young and disaffected attacking property and the police in London, Bristol, Birmingham and Chester. Some of the worst scenes were in the Toxteth district of Liverpool, not far from Paul’s old school. Long-term unemployment and racial tensions in the inner city contributed to two intense weeks of trouble resulting in many injuries, one fatality, and £11 million worth of damage ($16.8m). In the aftermath, Paul resolved to do something to help the regeneration of the city, though he was not sure what. In time his philanthropy was channelled into the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), an institution that would cater to talented young people, such as Paul and John had been, who wanted to make a career in show business.

At the same time the old issue of who owned the songs Paul and John had written together re-emerged, with McCartney given a rare opportunity to regain control of the Beatles’ catalogue. For the past few years Northern Songs had been in the hands of the mogul Lew Grade, who’d struck up a friendly rapport with Paul, giving him to understand that he would have first refusal if Grade ever wanted to sell. In the autumn of 1981, the recently ennobled Lord Grade offered Northern Songs to Paul for £20 million ($30.6m). Paul suggested to Yoko Ono that they put up half the money each. John’s widow thought the price too high and tried to get the company for £ 5 million ($7.6m). Lord Grade considered the offer insufficient and decided to include Northern Songs in the sale of his much larger organisation, Associated Communications Corps (ACC), which made acquiring the songs much more expensive. Even at this stage, Paul would have been wise to enter the bidding for ACC. Instead he conflated business with justice and complained publicly about the unfairness of what was happening. ‘[Lord Grade] should not screw me for what he could get from somebody else,’ Paul moaned to
The Times
. ‘I’m not interested in buying his whole company. I just want my songs. Give me back my babies, Lew!’ Grade subsequently sold ACC to the Australian businessman Robert Holmes A’Court for £45 million ($68.8m), making him the owner of ATV Music in which Northern Songs was held. In the years to come the value of the song catalogue would multiply, making even £45 million look a bargain. It was a missed opportunity.

This problem was on Paul’s mind when, on Christmas Day 1981, as he was unwrapping presents at home with the family, the telephone rang. An unfamiliar, high-pitched voice asked for Paul. ‘Who is this?’ asked McCartney gruffly, suspecting a female fan had got his number.

‘It’s Michael Jackson.’

‘Come on, who is it really?’

‘Oh, you don’t believe me?’

Although Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney were 15 years apart in age, and totally different in almost every respect, the artists stood shoulder-to-shoulder in their careers in 1981-2. Both were prodigiously talented stars who’d enjoyed huge success in their youth. Both were now working with favourite producers on solo albums: Jackson with Quincy Jones on
Off the Wall
; McCartney with George Martin on the soon-to-be released
Tug of War
; and they intended to repeat the formula with their next albums, Jackson working with Jones again on
Thriller
, McCartney with Martin on
Pipes of Peace
. It made sense for the musicians to do one another a good turn by co-writing and duetting on songs for their respective LPs, creating the funky ‘Say Say Say’ (and less significantly ‘The Man’) for
Pipes of Peace
, while ‘The Girl is Mine’ would find a home on
Thriller
, the most successful album in pop history. By associating himself with a hip young star, Paul also hoped to reach a younger audience, while working with an ex-Beatle flattered the American’s vanity.

Jackson came to England in the spring of 1981 to meet Paul, checking into a fancy Central London hotel. Paul invited his young friend to the country for the weekend, asking Michael if he would like to go riding with him and Linda in the Sussex woods. The American said he couldn’t.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not allowed to get dirty,’ replied Jackson, a peculiar reply which rang alarm bells with the McCartneys. Jackson was clearly strange. Paul did get Michael down to Sussex, and delivered him back to his hotel after the weekend safe and sound, save some Sussex mud on his shoes, the American proclaiming that he’d had a great time. During his visit, Michael asked Paul disingenuously if he had any career advice for him. Paul suggested Jackson might invest in song publishing, as he had done so successfully. ‘I’m going to buy your songs one day,’ Michael told the older man cheekily.

‘Great, good joke,’ Paul replied, little thinking this might actually happen.

Paul brought Jackson into AIR Studios in London, telling Eric Stewart and his other sidemen that they would have to clear out while Michael recorded. Jacko didn’t want to see or talk to anybody bar Paul and Lin and their four-year-old son James. Between takes Jackson played on the floor with Dee Dee. The guy was weird, but he sang like an angel.

Paul’s other collaboration with an American star, the Stevie Wonder duet ‘Ebony and Ivory’, proved a massive hit in the spring of 1982, reaching number one in both the UK and USA where it held the top spot for seven weeks, partly thanks to a well-produced video in what was now the video age, MTV having been launched the previous year.
Tug of War
proceeded to the top of the album charts in both territories. This was in fact the high-water mark in Paul’s post-Beatles career. Though he had enjoyed simultaneous number ones in the UK and US many times,
Tug of War
was his last post-Beatles album (to date) to achieve the double. All successful show business careers have a golden period, and Paul had been doubly fortunate in reaching the top with the Beatles in the Sixties and again with Wings in the Seventies. Paul would remain a great star during the decades ahead, but he would never sell as many new albums again.

With clear evidence that a duet with a major American artist was a winning formula Paul and Linda went to LA to work further with Michael Jackson on ‘The Girl is Mine’, which led to a reunion with Peggy Lipton, the actress who’d set her cap at Paul in the Sixties. Peggy ultimately lost out to Linda McCartney at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fourteen years on, Peggy was married by coincidence to Michael Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones who, knowing of his wife’s history, insisted they all meet to show no hard feelings. McCartney was relaxed about it, greeting ‘Mrs Jones’ with a friendly peck on the cheek, Linda saying how nice it was to see her again, all of which Peggy found so overwhelming she went home and cried.

Over the next few days Peggy adjusted to the idea of the McCartneys being around, even babysitting Mary, Stella and James, now aged 12, 11 and four. The eldest, Heather, was now a young woman of 19 and something of a worry to her parents.

After leaving Thomas Peacock, Heather McCartney had taken a photographic course at the London College of Printing and started an apprenticeship as a photographic printer, winning an award in 1981 for a picture she’d taken of Steve Gadd in Montserrat. Mum’s career as a photographer had been revived in recent years, with photo shows and the publication of a book,
Linda’s Pictures
, but Heather, after initial enthusiasm, drifted away from photography; her sister Mary would be the photographer. For Heather, taking and printing pictures was only one of several phases.

Heather’s teenage years were difficult. ‘I was the most chaotic, clumsy teenager,’ she admitted. Her appearance changed with the fashions, dressing by turn as a Punk, New Romantic and ordinary, middle-class young woman, maturing into a hippie throwback. Heather dated a number of boys, including the punk singer Billy Idol briefly, to Paul’s dismay, and seemed to want to be independent of her famous family, while being too timid to stray far from Mum, who was very protective. ‘Linda used to keep her sort of separate from the madness,’ notes Tony Bramwell. The other McCartney kids were more robust and outgoing, especially Stelly, who was a real livewire. Heather seemed to clash with Dad sometimes. She confided in Cavendish Avenue neighbour Evelyn Grumi that she wanted a flat of her own, asking if she could rent the Grumis’ basement, giving Mrs Grumi the impression that Heather and Paul didn’t get along. Then, in an unfortunate and unrelated incident in May 1982, when she was riding in the Sussex woods, Heather was thrown from her mount, suffering a broken leg and collar-bone. After visiting Heather in the Royal East Sussex Hospital, Paul spoke to the press in a strikingly sombre way about his adoptive daughter. ‘The family has been struck down by bad luck,’ he said. ‘It’s our personal tragedy, a family matter, and I’m not going into details about how the accident happened.’