Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (59 page)

Going round the TV studios helped
All the Best
turn double platinum, a success tempered by the death in December of Paul’s beloved Aunt Ginny. She died of heart failure at 77. Ginny had been among the last of Jim McCartney’s siblings. Only brother Joe and his wife Joan were left now from that generation, enjoying a comfortable old age thanks to the McCartney Pension. ‘Paul was looking after everybody, he always has done. But always very quiet, you see. That’s why I get bloody mad when I hear people say, “Er, he’s got all that money, you’d think he’d do so and so,”’ says family member Mike Robbins. ‘He’s been giving money to charity quietly, and looking after people quietly, for many, many years.’ Several relatives had received substantial cash amounts, with Paul helping relations buy homes, but the more he gave the more some of them wanted. ‘They did used to moan at Christmas,’ reveals Paul’s record plugger and MPL gofer Joe Reddington. ‘[They’d] phone Alan Crowder up, “What’s the present this year? Oh Christ, haven’t you got anything better?” … Just unbelievable, these people.’

While he might write five-figure cheques for relations, and he had given Linda some high-price jewellery over the years, Paul usually bought inexpensive gifts for the family at Christmas, typically popping into Hamley’s on Regent Street - a short walk from his office - to get the kids the colouring pencils they liked. Recalls Joe Reddington:

I remember one year we are standing in the queue [at Hamley’s] and I’m standing behind Paul, and this guy behind me, he was an American, he said, ‘Excuse me, who’s that in front of you? That’s not Paul McCartney, is it?’ ‘I don’t know actually,’ and then Paul turned round and said, ‘Yes it is,’ and he signed all this stuff this guy was getting for his kids to take back to America.

NEW BEGINNINGS

After the twin flops of
Give My Regards to Broad Street
and
Press to Play
Paul needed what was in effect a comeback record to remain an active headline star into the 1990s. He wasn’t prepared to step off the merry-go-round as John Lennon had done. To help Paul achieve his ambitions, MPL got the star together with Elvis Costello, a talented singer-songwriter with whom Paul could write, sing and record, also a young man - Elvis turned 33 in 1988 - of strong character whom everybody hoped would be able to stand up to Paul in the studio, pushing him to do better than his usual ‘I love you Linda’ material.

Costello found McCartney a disciplined, regimented writer. Elvis tended to write his lyrics first, then make the music fit.

If the words demanded it, I wouldn’t develop the melodic line, I’d just add a couple of bars. He [Paul] thought that sounded messy. He likes logic in the lyrics, too. I might throw in ambiguous things, because I like the effect that has on the imagination. But he doesn’t like anyone to walk into the song with green shoes on, unless they were wearing them in the first verse.

To record these new songs, the basis of the album
Flowers in the Dirt
, Paul assembled a band around the Scots guitarist Hamish Stuart, 38-year-old founder of the Average White Band, whose life was changed by hearing the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’ as a boy. ‘It was the moment for me when things went from black and white to colour. It’s amazing the number of people who describe it that way.’

Although the original idea was that Elvis Costello would co-write and co-produce
Flowers in the Dirt
, the old problems soon re-emerged. Paul wanted to do things his way, and Elvis was pulling in a different direction. ‘It was pretty obvious pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to work as a co-production, so things changed and it moved on and some stuff got discarded,’ comments Hamish Stuart. ‘They were kind of banging heads a little bit. Elvis had one way of working, and Paul was more about embracing technology at that time and it just didn’t work, so Elvis kind of left the building.’ The Costello sessions yielded several album tracks, though, including the poppy ‘My Brave Face’ and ‘You Want Her Too’, sung as a duet in the way Paul harmonised with John on ‘Getting Better’, McCartney’s sweet voice undercut by Costello’s caustic interjections.

The drummer in Paul’s new band was Chris Whitten, who’d also worked on the
CHOBA B CCCP
sessions. Enlarging the group, Paul hired guitarist Robbie McIntosh from the Pretenders. These three musicians helped Paul complete
Flowers in the Dirt
and formed the basis of his new road band, adding 32-year-old keyboard player Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens, whom Paul and Linda were encouraged to learn was ‘almost a veggie’. Increasingly, the McCartneys had little time for anybody who wasn’t vegetarian. Paul was paying good wages, the new band members getting £1,000 a week as a retainer ($1,530), £3,000 a week ($4,590) for when they were rehearsing and recording, rising to £5,000 a week ($7,650) on the road, generous by industry standards. Paul had learned the lesson of Wings. He made it clear that he’d been hurt by the stories Denny Laine sold to the
Sun
after the old band broke up, and wouldn’t appreciate it if anybody in the new group did anything like that.

Meanwhile, Paul’s other, more famous former band was about to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, an institution co-founded in 1983 by
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner that had already gained prestige in the music community. Stars were falling over themselves to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the annual ceremony in New York, and it was expected that Paul would join George, Ringo and Yoko at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 20 January 1988, when the Beatles’ fellow inductees would include the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, who counted among Paul’s musical heroes. But Paul didn’t show. He boycotted the event because George, Ritchie and Yoko were suing him over a deal the Eastmans had struck when he signed back with Capitol Records after a brief spell with CBS, winning him an extra per cent royalty on the Beatles’ back catalogue. When the other three found out Paul was getting more than them they demanded parity, the dispute settled when Capitol gave all four partners an extra per cent on CDs, which were replacing vinyl. As of January 1988, however, the Beatles partners were in deadlock over the issue.

Paul had his publicist release a statement explaining his absence from the Hall of Fame function: ‘After 20 years, the Beatles still have some business differences which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.’ After Mick Jagger introduced the Beatles at the Waldorf-Astoria, it fell to George Harrison to say how honoured the band felt to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, joking, ‘I don’t have too much to say because I’m the quiet Beatle.’ Then it was Yoko’s turn to speak.

Despite not attending the dinner, Paul and Linda had a keen interest in events in New York and early the next day Linda called her friend Danny Fields at his Manhattan apartment to ask what had happened. Danny, who’d helped discover Iggy Pop and managed the Ramones during his career, aside from his work as a journalist, had a seat on the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee. ‘Did you go last night?’ Linda asked her friend, calling from her country kitchen at Blossom Farm.

‘Yeah. You would have had such a good time,’ Danny drawled in his camp manner, ‘you would have heard Yoko’s speech.’

Knowing the McCartneys would want to hear what Yoko said, Danny had recorded her speech, and he had his tape machine cued up in anticipation of Linda’s call. He asked coolly whether she and Paul would care to listen to what Yoko said, and heard Linda telling Paul to pick up the extension. ‘He picks up the phone and I press the tape.’ All three listened as Yoko told the Waldorf that if
her
husband had been alive, he would have attended the induction, which was as neat a put-down of the McCartneys as she’d ever made. Danny listened for a reaction. ‘Paul said, “Fucking cunt, makes me want to puke.”’

Paul continued working on
Flowers in the Dirt
at Hog Hill Mill throughout that summer, taking a break in August to visit Liverpool, where he was shocked to discover his old school had fallen into dereliction. Despite its long and illustrious history, the Liverpool Institute had been closed in 1985 by Liverpool City Council, when the council was under the sway of the militant socialist Derek Hatton, who was himself an old boy. The closure was not so much to do with Hatton’s socialist principles as with Liverpool’s declining population. Apparently there weren’t enough clever boys in the shrinking city to fill such an elite school. Four years on from its closure, Paul was dismayed to see that the Inny had become a ruin. The roof was letting in so much rain the classrooms were flooded and rats scurried along corridors that had once resounded to cries of ‘Walk, don’t run!’ Paul had a film made of himself on a nostalgic tour of this sad old place, later released as the documentary
Echoes
, during which he remembered himself and cheeky school mates and eccentric masters in happier times. Privately, he ruminated on how he might rescue the school.

Since the Toxteth riots, Paul had been looking for a way to give something back to Liverpool. Following his visit to the Inny he decided the school should be the focus for his philanthropy. But what was one to do with the place? Initially, McCartney thought he might simply put a new roof on the Institute, to save it from total ruin, but as he looked into the problem more deeply he saw that the only way to save the building in the longer term was to give it a use and, because of its history, that had to be an educational one.

George Martin, one of the few people in whom Paul placed unswerving trust, mentioned that he’d been helping an entrepreneur named Mark Featherstone-Witty raise money for a school for performing arts in London, based on the New York School of the Performing Arts depicted in the movie
Fame
. A
Fame
school for Liverpool might be a use for the Inny. Paul was circumspect. Traditionally, show business is an industry where people learn by experience. He hadn’t gone to a school for performing arts. The idea was anathema, rock ’n’ roll being about self-expression and rebellion. George Martin, a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music, took a different view. He believed there was a place for a formal musical education, and a need to teach young people the essentials of the music business - if future Lennons and McCartneys weren’t to be ripped off, as Paul felt he’d been with Northern Songs. Sensible George went some way to persuade Paul that a
Fame
-type school for Liverpool was therefore a worthwhile project. McCartney’s primary motivation remained saving the Inny, though, and, canny as ever with money, he didn’t propose to buy the place. The hope was that Liverpool City Council, and the charitable trust in which the building was held, would give the premises to Paul if he devised a regeneration plan.

In April 1989, Paul wrote an open letter to the
Liverpool Echo
asking his fellow Merseysiders if they wanted a
Fame
school: ‘I got a great start in life courtesy of Liverpool Institute and would love to see other local people being given the same chance.’ Readers phoned in 1,745 votes in favour, 48 against. The following month, Paul invited George Martin’s friend to MPL to talk about beginning the process.

Mark Featherstone-Witty proved to be an ebullient, jokey fellow of 42, with a theatrical and slightly posh manner (Paul worried that his double-barrelled name would raise hackles on Merseyside) and a varied CV ranging from acting to journalism to teaching, the last of which led him to create a number of private educational institutions. ‘Then the key moment occurred,
the key moment
, whereas I was sitting in the Empire Leicester Square and saw Alan Parker’s film
Fame
, and I thought, “That’s what I’m going to do next.”’ In emulation of what he had seen at the pictures that day in 1980, Featherstone-Witty worked to create the British Record Industry Trust (BRIT) School in Croydon, which was established with the help of George Martin and others. Now he wanted a new project.

Although Mark had met many famous people working on the BRIT School, when Paul walked through the door at MPL the entrepreneur was overwhelmed.

You are trying to carry on a reasonable conversation, but one half of your mind is saying,
I don’t bloody believe it. I just don’t believe it. I’m actually talking to Paul McCartney!
Over years of course that’s completely gone, but at the time I was just amazed … I’ve seen the same reaction with other people.

Despite Mark’s being star-struck, the meeting went well. It was agreed that the entrepreneur would approach Liverpool City Council with Paul’s backing to see if it was feasible to turn the Inny into what Paul wanted to call the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). To show he was serious, Paul pledged £1 million ($1.53m) of his own money, but, shrewd as ever, he didn’t hand it over all at once. He advanced Featherstone-Witty small sums initially. ‘It was £30,000 [$45,900].
Let’s see what you can do with it
. So it was to some extent payment by achievement really. Also the payment needed to be matched with a payment, not simply from him, but from other people. He was never going to be the sole funder.’ Still, having started the process, Paul committed himself to a project that would take up a lot of his time, and require much more of his money, over the next few years, while Mark discovered that the charming superstar he met on day one could also be ‘a right bastard’.

BACK ON THE ROAD

The first single from
Flowers in the Dirt
was released in May 1989, the catchy but unfulfilling ‘My Brave Face’. Though it wasn’t a hit, the LP was greeted as a return to form featuring several strong songs such as ‘Rough Ride’ and ‘We Got Married’, which seemed to document Paul’s early relationship with Linda,
vis-à-vis
John and Yoko, ‘the other team’. The LP went to number one in the UK, with Paul appearing on TV shows to promote it prior to his first tour since 1979.