Beatles (66 page)

He did odd songs for other people, and for films, then slowly he realized that he should do what he’d always enjoyed most in life – playing with a group on stage. This had always been his ambition for the Beatles, to get them out of the studio again, at least for occasional shows. So he decided to form his own group, Wings, along with Linda, his lady wife, who had no previous musical experience. The pop world had a jolly chuckle at this. They started off very quietly, arriving unannounced on university campuses, but it still didn’t stop Linda being loudly derided by the experts for her lousy voice and daring to muscle into Paul’s group. One of Wings’ early singles was called ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, which wasn’t very inspired. John was quoted as saying that Paul sounded like Engelbert Humperdinck, beyond which there is no nastier comparison. He went on to have a go at Paul in several of his own albums.
In ‘Imagine’ he refers to Paul as ‘Muzak to my ears’ and talks about a ‘pretty face may last a year or two’.

Very slowly, Wings got better. On their tours, Paul wasn’t above throwing in the odd Beatles number, which everyone loved. Then, with ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Venus and Mars’, he started producing world number ones again and almost, if not quite, repeating some of his Beatle success. His 1976 tour of the States was a sell-out and at last proved that Wings, Linda notwithstanding, was a very successful pop group.

Paul’s songs haven’t perhaps reached the heights of ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Eleanor Rigby’ but, commercially, Paul is far and away the most successful of the Beatles. ‘Mull of Kintyre’ in 1977 beat any Beatle single. Paul says he made more money with Wings than he did in the whole of his Beatle career. This isn’t too hard to believe, as so many people had shares in their lives as Beatles.

Wings has now come to an end. And several people who worked with him in that strange ad hoc group have since made capital out of saying how awful he was to work with, how bossy, how nasty he could be. Probably some truth in it. Paul is a perfectionist and can drive assistants mad with his demands. And working with Paul, or so it seems since the Beatles finished, you have to be an ‘assistant’, not a co-leader. Paul in turn now says he is fed up with running a band. ‘I hate groups – it’s like being stuck with bad relations.’

Paul today is still the public Beatle, giving interviews at fairly regular intervals, being open and honest about himself and his past, his worries and his pleasures. Naturally, as ever, there are people who suspect his motives, putting him down for being too charming. Paul may be a bit of an actor, acting the part of Paul McCartney, the charming superstar, still loved by every mum, which can make him sound rather prissy at times, but I believe he does tell the truth about himself.

He gave countless interviews during 1984 to promote his film
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, a film which was criticized, if not abused, by many reviewers. I always thought the criticism of
Magical Mystery Tour
was unfair – and it was Paul who was
mostly blamed for that, being the main instigator. But it did have some good songs and was a modest, made-for-TV production. We all expected so much more from
Broad Street
, a full-length feature film with a good cast, but Paul’s script was so tame it gave little scope. Perhaps, now he has created his own film, he will stick to composing and singing, and even acting, well, now and again, and find experts to help on things like screenplays. I’m surprised he hasn’t tried an original stage musical. Think what a director like Trevor Nunn could do with Paul’s tunes.

Paul continues as a composer and singer on his own, even though Wings have flown, and will have many more Top Twenty hits. It would be impossible to imagine him doing anything else. He is also still very much a businessman, running his own company, McCartney Promotions Limited, which has offices in Soho Square, London. It handles all his own creations, plus other things they have bought, such as
Annie
and
Grease
, and scores of individual songs. He has at least put his money into music, rather than boring assets like property companies.

He has told the world often enough that what he cares for most is his family life. Heather, their oldest daughter (by Linda’s first marriage), is now 22 and working as a photographer’s assistant. Then there is Mary, 17, an attractive brunette, Stella who is 15 and red-headed, and James who is seven and fair-haired. All have gone to state schools, which is surprising, considering the many pressures. They live and play and stay together as one family, without nannies and without servants.

From the outside, their new home in Sussex can seem rather daunting, with searchlights and security fences, but all this is understandable, after what happened to John. The locals know it as Paulditz. But inside, it is surprisingly small, with only five bedrooms, and they live a modest, relaxed life with the usual family clutter. Linda was never the most house-proud of mothers, though she is a keen cook.

They moved there from an even smaller house nearby, knocking two old cottages together to get more security. They still have their London home in St John’s Wood, dear to all
those Apple scruffs and ’60s Abbey Road groupies, and also their farm in Argyll in Scotland. Paul is a vegetarian, a non-cigarette smoker, and does a bit of jogging, a bit of pottery, loves drawing and painting, watches a lot of TV. The influence of his heavy TV viewing was noticeable in
Broad Street
– all that glossy commercial stuff and the Children’s Hour Dickensian period flavour.

As with George, there are endless contradictions. For a clever and supposedly devious person, he has been very silly to get caught four times in the last ten years or so for soft drug offences. Walking into a Japanese airport carrying £1,000 of marijuana was utterly daft. For a supposedly concerned father, getting caught taking drugs at all, even soft ones, is hard to reconcile.

He has let his hair start to go grey, yet watch him when a photographer arrives, and he pulls in his stomach. His self-consciousness extends to his physical body as well. He often moans at what people write about him, yet he gives interviews. He should know the consequences, after all these years. He is upset by the mad rush to buy and sell Beatle memorabilia, yet he himself has bid at Sotheby’s. (He wanted a postcard that he had sent to John, but someone else outbid him.) Both he and George have, in fact, contributed to the present craze for Beatle artefacts, by putting out
more
material, such as Paul’s book of drawings and George’s book containing the originals of his songs.

Oh, what a complicated man he is, what convolutions, what self-justifications, what fears, how vulnerable he is. How could we, in the 1960s, have taken Paul for a simple, lovable soul, or accepted George as a quiet little boy? In the end, I think both of them are much harder to explain and understand than John. He was so much up front, to the point of brutality, quick to reveal himself and his opinions. Paul and George have so many layers. They both get upset when outsiders think they know them, when they are described in black-and-white terms, which of course is never completely true of any of us.

Not long after John’s death, I had some strange conversations with Paul. He seemed so upset by so many things, not least
of all John’s death. This was in May 1981, and I jotted down in a diary some of the things he told me.

John’s death had grown into a sort of cult, with instant books already appearing, and the papers were still full of it. Many people, in praising John, were at the same time putting down Paul, or so it appeared. He felt he had already been criticized in a book just out written by Philip Norman, formerly a colleague of mine on the
Sunday Times
. I had helped him, and let him see all my files, telling him things like Mimi’s phone number, when he had come to talk to me, saying he was writing a book about the 1960s as a whole. I didn’t know then it was going to be a Beatles biography. None of the Beatles had in fact given him any interviews for his book, which was subtitled ‘The True Story of the Beatles’.

Paul rang me on 3 May 1981, and went on for over an hour, all about how hurt he was. He had already been moaning at length to my wife, as I was out walking on Hampstead Heath when he first rang. He said he was fed up with all these people going on about him and John and getting it all wrong. Only he knew the truth. It wasn’t anything like the things being said.

Paul criticized me, for having gone on some TV news programme after John’s death. In my tribute to him, I said that John was more the hard man, with the cutting edge, while Paul was softer and more melodic.

But what had really got him upset that day was an interview with Yoko, in which Yoko was quoted as saying that Paul had hurt John more than any other person. Paul thought they were some of the cruellest words he had ever read.

‘No one ever goes on about the times John hurt
me
,’ said Paul. ‘When he called my music Muzak. People keep on saying I hurt him, but where’s the examples, when did I do it? No one ever says. It’s just always the same, blaming me. Could I have hurt John
more
than anyone in the world? More than the person who ran down Julia in his car?’

‘We were always in competition. I wrote “Penny Lane”, so he wrote “Strawberry Fields”. That was how it was. But that was
in compositions. I can’t understand why Yoko is saying this. The last time I spoke to her she was great. She told me she and John had just been playing one of my albums and had cried.’

So why don’t you ring her up, I suggested, and find out if she really made that remark?

‘I’m not ringing her up on that. It’s too trivial. It’s not the time. I wouldn’t just ring up on that.’

What did you think then might have hurt John?

‘There’s only one incident I can think of that John has mentioned publicly. It was when I went off with Ringo and did “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”. It wasn’t a deliberate thing. John and George were tied up finishing something and me and Ringo were free, just hanging around, so I said to Ringo let’s go and do this.

‘I did hear him some time later singing it. He liked the song and I suppose he’d wanted to do it with me. It was a very John sort of song anyway. That’s why he liked it, I suppose. It was very John, the idea of it, not me. I wrote it as a ricochet off John.

‘Perhaps I have hurt people by default. I never realized at the time John would mind. At Ringo’s wedding [the previous week] Neil happened to say to me that Mimi was upset I’d never contacted her after John’s death. I’d never even thought of it. I don’t know Mimi. I probably haven’t seen her for about 20 years, since Menlove Avenue. I was just the little kid that hung around with John. We didn’t get into her house.

‘Anyway, I rang her up, in case she really was upset, and apologized for not ringing, saying I hadn’t got her phone number, and she was terrific and we had a good chat. We discussed Philip Norman’s book and she didn’t like it either. She said I should write and complain. I told her I’d been writing letters constantly, but I’d torn them all up. She said I should do something about it, to stop this sort of thing.

‘“In an earthquake you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it. And they’re all true.” That’s what I wrote in one letter. But how can you get the full story from someone who
wasn’t
there? But I tore that up as well.

‘Nobody knows how much I
helped
John. Me and Linda went to California and talked him out of his so-called lost weekend, when he was full of drugs. We told him to go back to Yoko and not long after he did. I went all the way to LA to see the bastard. He never gave me an inch, but he took so many yards and feet.

‘He always suspected me. He accused me of scheming to buy over Northern Songs without telling him. I was thinking of something to invest in, and Peter Brown said what about Northern Songs, invest in yourself, so I bought a few shares, about 1,000 I think. John went mad, suspecting some plot. Then he bought some. He was always thinking I was cunning and devious. That’s my reputation, someone’s who’s charming, but a clever lad.

‘It happened the other day at Ringo’s wedding. I was saying to Cilla [Black] that I liked Bobby [her husband]. That’s all I said. Bobby’s a nice bloke. Ah, but what do you
really
think, Paul? You don’t mean that, do you, you’re getting at something? I was being absolutely straight. But she couldn’t believe it. No one ever does. They think I’m calculating all the time.

‘I do stand back at times, unlike John. I look ahead. I’m careful. John would go for the free guitar and just accept it straight away, in a mad rush. I would stand back and think, but what’s this bloke really after, what will it mean? I was always the one that told Klein to put money away for tax.

‘I don’t
like
being the careful one. I’d rather be immediate like John. He was all action. John was always the loudest in any crowd. He had the loudest voice. He was the cock who crowed the loudest. Me and George used to call him the cockerel in the studio. I was never out to screw him, never. He could be a manoeuvring swine, which no one ever realized. Now, since his death, he’s become Martin Luther Lennon. But that really wasn’t him either. He wasn’t some sort of holy saint. He was still really a debunker.

‘For ten years together he took my songs apart. He was paranoiac about my songs. We had great screaming sessions about them.

‘In the beginning he was a sort of fairground hero. He was the big lad riding the dodgems and we thought he was great. We were younger, me and George, and that mattered. It was teenage hero worship. I’ve often said how my first impression of him was his boozy breath all over me – but that was just a cute story. That was me being cute. It was true, but only an eighth of the truth. I just used to say that later when people asked me for my first memory of John. My first reaction was very simple – that he was great, that he was a great bloke, and a great singer. My
really
first impression was that it was amazing how he was making up the words.

‘He was singing “Come Go With Me to the Penitentiary” and he didn’t know
one
of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great.