Paul McCartney (79 page)

Linda took sole responsibility and later appeared at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court, where all Heathrow malefactors end up. In view of the tiny quantity involved, she escaped with a fine of £75, telling the press it had been ‘much ado about nothing’. Paul’s last album gave Fleet Street a perfect headline: ‘PIPES OF POT’.

The timing could not have been worse for still more embarrassing revelations from a formerly intimate and trusted associate. Since the end of Wings, Denny Laine’s solo career had not prospered and his financial difficulties had multiplied to the point where he’d sold his equity as co-writer of ‘Mull of Kintyre’ back to Paul for £135,000. Now, following his ex-wife’s example, his memoirs of the Wings era were all over a British tabloid, in this case the far nastier and more widely-read Sun.

The series was titled ‘The Real McCartney’ and its opening instalment bore the strapline ‘I saw Paul smuggle pot in his son’s coat’. According to Laine, Paul and Linda smoked pot on a daily basis, so much so that Paul’s records suffered chronically from delay and lack of focus. Referring back to the Tokyo episode, he said they derived a perverse thrill from trying to get illegal substances past customs officials. He also reiterated Jo Jo’s view of their relationship, but more woundingly: ‘[Paul’s] a mummy’s boy who didn’t have a mummy after his mother died when he was 14. He would be lost without Linda now.’

For Peter Webb, directing a major Hollywood movie instead of the originally-planned one-hour TV special had turned into ‘a nightmare scenario’. By now he was editing Give My Regards to Broad Street in London and driving down to Sussex to let Paul and Linda edit his edit. These viewings at Hog Hill Mill became increasingly fraught; Webb sensed that Paul regretted hiring him and longed to turn the project over to Richard Lester, who had directed A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

When a rough cut was finally agreed, Webb flew to Los Angeles to show it to 20th Century Fox. Its plot remained the paper-thin one of Paul trying to track down his stolen album-tapes as a succession of distinguished British actors struggled to provide plausibility. Sir Ralph Richardson, perhaps the greatest Shakespearian actor of his generation, had a minuscule role as a pub landlord feeding a pet monkey. That ignominious cameo proved Richardson’s last screen appearance: he had died soon after completing his part.

Broad Street railway station, supposedly the film’s nostalgic raison d’être, appeared only at the end as the place where the tape-snaffler had inexplicably gone to hide out and then got locked in a lavatory. Bleak and charmless, it suggested no reason why Paul or anyone else should give it their regards. The final moments showed him busking ‘Yesterday’ on a platform, then awakening in the back of his limo and realising it had all been a dream.

The only substance–or, indeed, sense–was in the music. Between bouts of tape-hunting, Paul and a star-studded new Rockestra played Wings material like ‘Silly Love Songs’ and ‘Wanderlust’ and a handful of his Beatles songs, including ‘For No One’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, the last of which he’d never previously performed in public.

Thanks to his Hollywood budget, he didn’t just perform it–on the stage of an empty Royal Albert Hall–but expanded it into a lengthy Victorian fantasy sequence starring himself, which began like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe with Linda, Ringo and Barbara, and ended with him on his own, prowling nocturnal streets in a top hat and cloak like some angel-faced Jack the Ripper. At one point, for no discernible reason, the scene changed to a snowy Highgate Cemetery and a vision–horribly sad in retrospect–of a ghost-like Linda on a white horse.

All this totally baffled the 20th Century Fox executives, who had been expecting a latter-day Hard Day’s Night but been presented with what one of them called ‘Paul McCartney’s home movie’. Yet because of their investment, and because it was Paul, the release-process ground into gear nonetheless. By now, the stress had become too much for Peter Webb and he was hospitalised suffering from extreme nervous exhaustion. A remorseful Paul inundated him with so many flowers ‘I thought someone had died’. He would later say it took him two years to recover.

Give My Regards to Broad Street opened in October 1984 with a huge fanfare, premiering in Los Angeles and New York, then Liverpool and London. This return to his home city had double significance for Paul as Liverpool Council (not without some internal opposition) had recently voted to give all four former Beatles the freedom of the city. Before the film premiere at the Odeon cinema, he accepted his award in the Picton Library–the same place where he’d received his prize for his Coronation essay as an 11-year-old in 1953.

The film’s reviews made those for Magical Mystery Tour, 17 years earlier, seem positively benign. Variety found it ‘characterless, bloodless [and] pointless’ while to the Washington Post it had ‘the kind of smothering tedium that leaves you screaming for air’. The Chicago Sun-Times’s influential, and scrupulously fair, Roger Ebert, while praising the music, called it ‘about as close to a non-movie as you can get’, adding that ‘the parts that try to do something are the worst’.

At the starry London premiere at Leicester Square’s Empire cinema, it was greeted by an embarrassed silence, as Eric Stewart remembers. ‘People were looking at each other, saying, “What was that?”’ The next edition of Spitting Image, ITV’s satirical puppet-show, featured a steroid-eyed Paul figure at a restaurant table, being served a film can on a plate. ‘Your turkey, sir,’ leered his waiter.

The soundtrack album, however, was a huge hit, as was its lead single, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, with a video of Paul on a now romantically dark and rainy Broad Street platform, and a yearning guitar solo by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.

When Give My Regards to Broad Street went on general release, it was accompanied by another MPL film in the old-fashioned role of ‘second feature’ which audiences could applaud unreservedly. This was Rupert and the Frog Song, a 13-minute sample of the feature-length Rupert Bear cartoon Paul had been planning since 1969.

Animator Geoff Dunbar had created a Disney-standard vignette of Rupert stumbling on a choir of frogs said to convene only once every 200 years. Their song, ‘We All Stand Together’, was the one on which work had been stopped by the news of John Lennon’s death. Paul was the voice of Rupert and his friend, Bill Badger. The imperturbable Mr Bear in tweed plus-fours, working in his garden, was yet another involuntary echo of Gentleman Jim McCartney.

‘We All Stand Together’ became a UK number two single and the film won a BAFTA award in the ‘animated short’ category. But, although it ended with a teasing ‘That’s all for now’, there was to be no sequel. Another producer had acquired the Rupert rights and insisted the feature-length version could only be made by his company and MPL in partnership. With that, the project quickly withered away.

But at least there was now in existence a movie with a story and script by Paul, and with Paul playing the lead, that indisputably worked.

‘I bought your songs, Paul’

In July 1985, a devastating famine in Ethiopia prompted Live Aid, to this day the biggest charity pop concert ever staged. Simultaneous outdoor shows in Britain and America, featuring a multitude of top names–among them Queen, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Duran Duran, Elton John, U2, Led Zeppelin, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, the Who, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, the Beach Boys and Tina Turner–were watched live by almost 200,000 people and televised to an estimated 1.9 billion in 150 countries. With glorious weather at both venues, it was like a rebirth of ‘All You Need Is Love’.

Because of the five-hour time difference, the marathon opened with a British segment from London’s Wembley Stadium, which then linked up with the American one at Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium. Despite formidable younger competition, the only possible choice for the British finale, just before 10 p.m., was Paul, alone at a white piano singing ‘Let It Be’.

He suffered sound problems from the beginning, so was forced to give a rather souped-up version of his mother’s dream-hymn. Over-the-shoulder videoing allowed millions to share his view of Wembley’s huge, living darkness, from which faint boos signalled that many people couldn’t hear. Towards the end, David Bowie, Pete Townshend, Alison Moyet and Live Aid’s organiser, Bob Geldof, joined him as impromptu backup singers. Afterwards, when the other UK artistes congregated onstage, he and Townshend saluted Geldof’s achievement by hoisting him onto their shoulders.

Only later would the full story emerge of what ego-clashes and back-stabbing had gone on behind Live Aid’s seeming altruism and unanimity. As if for old times’ sake, there was even a breath of historic Beatle rancour. Originally Paul wanted George to join him in ‘Let It Be’, a nice thought for the man whose Concert for Bangladesh had first motivated rock stars to unite for good causes. But to George, the song was too redolent of his bruised ego in the Beatle wars of 1969–70. Paul hadn’t wanted him to sing on it 16 years ago, he responded when Geldof made the request, so why would he want to now?

After the Give My Regards to Broad Street disaster, Paul had sought refuge in his new windmill studio on Hog Hill and his fifteenth album since leaving the Beatles. Rather than draw on his banks of existing material, he wanted to write a complete new set of songs with a new collaborator would also be a co-producer.

The perfect candidate seemed to be his VIP sideman Eric Stewart, who’d had extensive production experience at 10cc’s Strawberry Studio and whose major composing credits included ‘I’m Not In Love’ and ‘The Things We Do for Love’. Accordingly, Stewart was asked down to Peasmarsh as co-writer and co-producer of the album that would become Press to Play. ‘Bring your acoustic round and we’ll have a plonk,’ was how Paul would remember the invitation.

But when Stewart arrived at Hog Hill Mill, he found he wasn’t the only one to have received the call. In the eternal quest for contemporaneity, Paul had also recruited Hugh Padgham, a young producer currently enjoying great success with Genesis, Peter Gabriel and the Human League.

The two rival co-producers did not fall out–that, indeed, was the trouble. Early in the sessions, Stewart felt that one of Paul’s vocals wasn’t as good as it could be, so he switched on the intercom and said so. When Paul asked Hugh Padgham’s opinion, Padgham was at first reluctant to criticise such a colossus but, under pressure, admitted that he agreed with Stewart. ‘Hugh, when did you last make a number one record?’ Paul inquired coldly.

Yet that autocratic Macca could always be replaced by democratic Paul, whose accessibility and informality seemed too good to be true–but weren’t. At Christmas time, he was a familiar sight at Hamleys toyshop in Oxford Street, standing in line like anyone else with armfuls of purchases for his children. One day when travelling into London by train, he saw an elderly woman on the platform struggling with a heavy bag and insisted on carrying it for her.

His thoughtfulness, and sheer sweetness, could be overwhelming, as his designer–editor friend David Litchfield discovered when leaving for a holiday in France. As a goodbye gift–though the trip was only for two weeks–Paul composed and recorded a short instrumental piece, with seabird sound effects, and gave Litchfield the tape, as he said, ‘so that you won’t forget me’. The tape later got mislaid in a house move, but Litchfield recalls: ‘It was a lovely, haunting tune, rather like the theme to the Deer Hunter. He called it Seabird or Seadance, probably because I was working on a movie script called Seadance at the time.’

If that was pure Paul, the circumstances of its recording were even more so. He’d been at Abbey Road studios one day, testing some amps, and got talking to a delivery-driver who was a classical violinist on the side. At Paul’s invitation, the man had fetched his violin from his truck, Paul sat down at the piano and the two had made the track together.

Little of the same sweetness was to be felt by the young co-producer/engineer of Press to Play. There was only one now since Eric Stewart–shocked by Macca’s frigid put-down of Hugh Padgham–had bowed out of the album a few days later, so ending an otherwise happy and fruitful relationship extending over five years. Padgham soldiered on alone with a growing feeling of being able to do nothing right.

As a forty-third birthday present, he’d given Paul the Trivial Pursuit board game, not thinking that its pop music section was bound to feature questions on the Beatles. Paul was incensed to find one of them was about his mother’s death.

The month after Live Aid, he received some news that drove all thought of album-making from his mind and turned up the Macca-control even higher. His erstwhile collaborator Michael Jackson had bought ATV Music and so now owned the Lennon–McCartney song catalogue. As Padgham–relieved not to be the offender for once–would later recall, ‘The air turned blue.’

Since his failed attempt to buy ATV Music with Yoko in 1981–82, Paul had seemed as intent as ever on getting back his ‘babies’. An additional spur was discovering that he couldn’t sing ‘Yesterday’ and the other Lennon–McCartney songs in Give My Regards to Broad Street without first clearing the rights with ATV. The fact that he and John’s estate took a share of the copyright-fees didn’t make it any less galling.

Lord Lew Grade had by this time been ousted as boss of ATV Music’s parent company, Associated Communications Corporation, by its Australian majority shareholder, Robert Holmes à Court. And in 1983, Paul had approached Holmes à Court with another bid to regain control of his songbook. This time, there was no mention of any partnership with Yoko: he believed her interventions had stymied the previous attempt–just as she believed his had–and they were no longer in contact.

Forty years Grade’s junior, Holmes à Court had grown up with the Beatles and was thrilled by the prospect of negotiating with Paul. He seemed refreshingly simple and approachable, although Lee Eastman recognised this as a favourite pose among predatory tycoons and urged caution. Nonetheless the two got on well, so much so that Holmes à Court cherished hopes of Paul hosting a charity telethon on the TV channel he owned in his native Perth.