Paul McCartney (2 page)

Otherwise I echoed the view that Paul McCartney had turned into a self-satisfied lightweight and mourned the loss of his Beatle magic, and his increasing attacks of sentimentality and whimsy. Soon after the release of ‘Mull of Kintyre’, I wrote a satirical poem about him in the Sunday Times Magazine whose last verse now looks horrifically tasteless:

Oh, deified scouse with unmusical spouse

For the cliches and cloy you unload

To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon

In the middlemost midst of the road.

Has anyone ever more thoroughly burned his bridges?

In 1979, an industrial dispute closed down the Sunday Times for a year, which I decided to spend writing a biography of the Beatles. Colleagues and friends urged me not to waste my time; by then, the words written and spoken about them must have run into the billions; everything there was to know must already be known.

I approached the ex-Beatles for interviews, but got the same response from all four via their respective PRs: they were more interested in their solo careers than raking up the past. In fact–as we hadn’t yet learned to say–they were still in denial of what had happened to them in the Sixties, an experience finally monstrous more than miraculous. The turn-down from Paul via Tony Brainsby may also have been influenced by that recent verse in the Sunday Times. My conversations with Brainsby grew increasingly tense until one day he shouted ‘Philip… fuck off!’ and banged down the phone.

I delivered my book, Shout!, to the publishers in late November 1980, just two weeks before John was murdered in New York. After five years out of the music business, he’d just released a new album, Double Fantasy, and was doing extensive promotional interviews. I’d kept Shout! open-ended in case he’d agree to talk to me for a postscript.

I did get inside his apartment at the Dakota Building–but not in the way I’d hoped. When the book came out in America the following spring, I went to New York to appear on the Good Morning America television show. During the interview, I said that in my view John hadn’t been one quarter but three-quarters of the Beatles. Yoko saw the broadcast and phoned me at the ABC studio to tell me that what I’d said was ‘very nice’. ‘Maybe you’d like to come over and see where we were living,’ she added.

That afternoon, I found myself at the Dakota, being shown round the huge white seventh-floor apartment where John had raised their son, Sean, while Yoko tended to their finances. Later in her ground-floor office, seated in a chair modelled on an Egyptian pharaoh’s throne, she talked at length about his phobias and insecurities and the bitterness he’d felt towards his old bandmates, especially his other half in pop’s greatest songwriting partnership. As often happens with the recently bereaved, some of the partner she’d lost seemed to have gone into her; listening to Yoko, I often felt I was hearing John. And any mention of Paul brought a wintry bleakness to her face. ‘John always used to say,’ she told me at one point, ‘that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him.’

The words suggested a far deeper emotional attachment between the two than the world had ever suspected–they were like those of a spurned lover–and I naturally included them in my account of my visit for the Sunday Times. After it appeared, I returned to my London flat one evening to be told by my then girlfriend, ‘Paul phoned you.’ She said he wanted to know what Yoko had meant and that he’d seemed upset rather than angry. As with John, I was being offered access much too late and in a way I’d never imagined. However, at that time I fondly believed I’d written my last word on the Beatles and their era. So I didn’t attempt to get his formal response to Yoko’s quote, and afterwards heard no more about it.

The main criticisms of Shout!, by the lyricist Sir Tim Rice among others, were its over-glorification of Lennon and bias against McCartney. I replied that I wasn’t ‘anti-Paul’, but had merely tried to show the real human being behind the charming, smiley façade. Actually, if I’m honest, all those years I’d spent wishing to be him had left me feeling in some obscure way that I needed to get my own back. The pronouncement that John had represented three-quarters of the Beatles, for instance, was (as Tim Rice pointed out) ‘mad’. Paul himself hated the book, so I heard, and always referred to it as Shite.

And in the end–to quote his sum-up on the Abbey Road album–all his critics were confounded. Wings became a chart success and live concert attraction as big as the Beatles had ever been. Shrewd self-management and investment in other musical catalogues (while anomalously not owning copyright in his own best-known songs) earned him a fortune vastly bigger than any of his fellow Beatles, or anyone else in the business, an estimated £1 billion. Ancient rumours of his tight-fistedness (hadn’t he told me ‘I’m a skinflint’ in 1965?) were put to rest by his frequent involvement in charity concerts and, most spectacularly, his creation of a performing arts academy, to bring on young singers, musicians and songwriters, on the site of his old school in Liverpool.

His marriage to Linda, viewed as such a disastrous misstep at the time, became by far the happiest and most durable in pop. Despite the immensity of his fame and wealth, the couple managed to lead a relatively normal domestic life and prevent their children from becoming the usual pampered, neglected, screwed-up rockbiz brats. If the public never quite warmed to Linda, thanks mainly to her militant vegetarianism and animal-rights activism, she was acknowledged to have been the right one for him, just as Yoko had been for John.

He seemed to have achieved everything possible, not only in pop music but in the wider creative world: his classical oratorio performed in Liverpool Cathedral and accepted into the repertoire of symphonies all over the world; his painting exhibited at the Royal Academy; his collected poems published in hardback, prompting suggestions that he’d be an overwhelmingly popular choice as Poet Laureate. In 1997, his lengthy record of drug-busts (including a nine-day prison term in Japan) was brushed aside to allow him to receive a knighthood for services to music. He had indeed, as Rolling Stone magazine said, ‘done less to fuck up his good luck than any other rock star who ever existed’.

Then, in his late fifties, his life suddenly veered off its perfectly-polished rails. In 1998, Linda died after a long struggle against breast cancer. Four years later, he married the charity campaigner and former model Heather Mills, to the evident consternation of his children; six years after that, the couple divorced amid a tabloid tumult uglier than even the pop world had seen before. For the first time ever, it felt good not to be Paul McCartney.

Since Yoko had invited me to the Dakota Building in the aftermath of John’s death, she’d given me several further exclusive interviews. In 2003, we met in Paris and she agreed to co-operate with me in what would be the first large-scale, serious Lennon biography. Even without my troubled history with McCartney, I assumed there’d have been no hope of any input from him. Despite their public displays of solidarity, his relations with Yoko stayed deep in the Ice Age over issues like the order of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting credit and John’s share of royalties from Paul’s ‘Yesterday’. If she was with me, that surely must mean he’d be agin me.

Nonetheless, I thought it only courteous to send him a message via his then PR, Geoff Baker, saying I was doing a biography of John and that it would not be in any way ‘anti-McCartney’. Two weeks later, my office phone rang and a familiar Scouse-Lite voice said ‘’Ullo… it’s Paul here.’ Would that I’d had the balls to answer ‘Paul who?’

My astonished silence elicited a faint chuckle. ‘Yeah… I bet you never thought you’d hear from me, did you?’

He was phoning out of curiosity, he told me, ‘to see what this fellow who seems to hate me so much is like’. We ended up talking for about 15 minutes. But it wasn’t the conversation of a writer and the world’s biggest pop star. I had no hope that he’d help me with the Lennon biography, so employed none of the guile with which journalists try to extract quotes from celebrities. I talked to him bloke-to-bloke, without deference but with growing respect. Rock megastars never have to do anything unpleasant or uncomfortable for themselves if they don’t want to, yet, despite all the aides at his disposal, he’d bothered to pick up the phone.

When I told him I wasn’t expecting him to give me an interview for the Lennon book, he did not demur: ‘Otherwise it’d look as if I was rewarding you for writing bad stuff about me.’ But, I said, there were certain specific factual questions that only he could answer: would he at least do that by e-mail?

‘Okay,’ he said.

As I’d learned in 1965, backstage at Newcastle City Hall, a Beatle’s ‘yes’ didn’t always mean yes. But in this case it did. I would e-mail my questions to his PA, Holly Dearden, and dictated replies would immediately come back, varying from half a dozen words to a couple of hundred.

Some resolved crucial issues about the Beatles’ early history. In their Hamburg days, for example, he was said to have been the only witness when a drunken, pill-crazed John allegedly kicked their then bass-player Stu Sutcliffe in the head, maybe triggering Sutcliffe’s later fatal brain haemorrhage. No, he could not recollect any such incident. Other less sensational points were no less revealing. Was it true, I asked, that when they started writing songs together, left-handed Paul could play John’s right-handed guitar and vice versa? If so, it was a perfect metaphor for the creative symbiosis between two otherwise totally different characters that enabled one to finish a song the other had started.

Yes, he replied, it was true.

In June 2012, I watched the now 70-year-old Sir Paul headline over pop music’s other knights, Sir Elton John, Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Tom Jones, in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace; wearing a dark blue military tunic like a sobered-up Sergeant Pepper and still playing his ‘skinflint’s’ Hofner violin bass. John’s ‘Imagine’ might be the world’s favourite secular hymn but his ‘Hey Jude’ was by now an alternative national anthem. Two months later, again in the Queen’s presence, he and ‘Hey Jude’ provided the finale of the London Olympics’ £27 million opening ceremony. Apart from the sparkly little woman in the Royal box, there was no national treasure Britain was keener to show off to the world.

Yet being honoured and loved on this scale brings with it what one might call the Curse of Yesterday. The Beatles broke up longer ago than John Lennon’s whole lifetime, their career representing barely a fifth of McCartney’s total one. All his solo success since then has not changed a general view that his talent peaked in his early twenties, with John looking over his shoulder; that there can never again be a Paul McCartney song to match ‘Yesterday’, ‘Penny Lane’ or even ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.

Lesser figures from the do-it-yourself songwriting boom Lennon and McCartney instigated are happy to bask in the glow of their old hits, but not McCartney. Although his back catalogue is pop music’s equivalent of the works of Shakespeare, he still feels as great a need to prove himself as the rawest beginner. In common with so many of rock’s enduring monoliths–Mick Jagger, Elton John–adulation seems to go through him like Chinese food, leaving him always ravenous for more. That day he telephoned me, he mentioned he was currently ‘back at Abbey Road, making records’. As I write, in late 2015, the world tour on which he has been more or less continuously for the past 15 years still shows no sign of coming to an end.

The dozens of books that have been written about him almost all focus on his role in the Beatles’ story–what their publicist, Derek Taylor, rightly called ‘the 20th century’s greatest romance’–and treat the four decades which followed as merely an afterthought. His own official biography, Many Years from Now, written by Barry Miles, followed the same pattern, devoting only some 20 pages out of more than 600 to his post-Beatle years and ending in 1997, the year before Linda’s death.

So there has been no comprehensive quality biography of pop music’s greatest living emblem as well as greatest nonconformist. And for all the millions of words written about him, in and out of the Beatles, the page remains strangely blank. This seemingly most open and approachable of all mega-celebrities is actually one of the most elusive. From his apparent ‘normality’ and ‘ordinariness’ he has constructed ramparts of privacy rivalled only by Bob Dylan. Now and again, behind the eternal Mr Nice Guy, we glimpse someone who, for all his blessings and honours, can still feel frustration, even insecurity, and who on the inside niggles and festers just like the rest of us. But for the most part, that smile and cheery thumbs-up have camouflaged everything.

At the end of 2012, I emailed McCartney, care of his publicist, Stuart Bell, saying I’d like to write his biography as a companion volume to John Lennon: The Life. If he didn’t want to talk to me directly–and it was hardly likely he could face ploughing through the whole Beatles story yet again–then perhaps he’d give me tacit approval, so I could interview people close to him who’d never be accessible otherwise. I admitted I might be his very last choice as a biographer, but said I hoped the Lennon book had made some amends for my less than fair treatment of him in Shout! Bell agreed to pass on my request, warning that a response might take some time as McCartney was on tour in America. Oh, yes, I thought… the old runaround…

A couple of weeks later, a response came back, emailed by a PA at his dictation:

Dear Philip

Thanks for your note. I’m happy to give tacit approval and maybe Stuart Bell will be able to help.

All the best

Paul

It was the biggest surprise of my career.

‘Hey, mister, gimme a quid and I’ll show you Paul McCartney’s house’

The pale blue minibus that starts out from Liverpool’s Albert Dock promises ‘the only tour to go inside the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney’. On its side are two cartoon faces, outlined in the vaguest black and white yet still as instantly recognisable all over the world as Mickey Mouse. By now, perhaps even more so.