Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (60 page)

Ticket prices were to be modest. Paul was less interested in enlarging his fortune than in playing to as many people as possible, partly because he and Lin wanted to use the concerts to proselytise vegetarianism and ecology. The tour schedule was arranged to coincide with the publication of Linda’s new vegetarian cookbook, with the 81-strong tour party served a meat-free diet backstage. Remarkably, audiences front of house wouldn’t be able to buy meaty snacks, not even hot dogs at Madison Square Garden. MPL banned such concessions, licensing instead the sale of veggie burgers. To accompany the tour, MPL commissioned a 100-page programme that included information about acid rain and deforestation, and exhortations to turn veggie. Unusually, the programme was given away free.

Alongside didactic articles about vegetarianism in the tour programme, Paul took the opportunity to tell his audiences his life story. A series of long interview features saw him correcting what he viewed as misinterpretations about the Beatles’ history. He made the point strongly that
he
, rather than John, was the Beatle most into the avant-garde in the Sixties. Paul was checking out the new music and meeting new writers along with his friend Barry Miles, ‘when [John] was living out in the suburbs by the golf club with Cynthia’. This was a foretaste of an authorised, putting-the-record straight biography Paul had started work on with Miles, who’d become a biographer of distinction in recent years, writing lives of his friend Allen Ginsberg and other counter-culture figures. Miles had come up with the idea of the book,
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
, agreeing to let Paul vet the manuscript and, perhaps surprisingly, retain 75 per cent of the royalties, meaning it was really going to be Paul’s book.

Other old friends found themselves back in Paul’s orbit as the world tour kicked off. Richard Lester had been hired to make a montage film introduction to the concerts, and to direct a full-length concert feature, the pedestrian
Get Back
. Linda’s artist friend Brian Clarke was commissioned to create the stage set, as he had the
Flowers in the Dirt
album cover. To publicise the tour, Paul hired a significant new associate, a likeable former tabloid newspaper journalist named Geoff Baker, whose qualifications for the job included boundless enthusiasm for Paul’s music, as well as sharing Paul and Linda’s fondness for dope and their zeal for vegetarianism.

Richard Ogden asked Paul what songs he was going to play on stage, urging him to perform his greatest hits, which meant Beatles songs as well as the likes of ‘Live and Let Die’. Up until now, Paul had never performed more than a handful of Beatles’ numbers in concert, but feeling the need to come back strongly after ten years away from the stage he drew up a set list that featured 14 Beatles tunes, approximately half the show. He had to learn to play many live for the first time, the Beatles never having performed them on stage, though paradoxically his sidemen had in other bands, Beatles songs having become common to all musicians. As Hamish Stuart observes, ‘some of them we knew better than Paul did’.

After warm-up shows in London and New York, the tour opened in Oslo on 26 September 1989, the first of a run of European arena concerts, after which Paul took his band to North America, returning to England in January 1990 to play Birmingham and London. To interject a brief personal note, the first Paul McCartney show I ever saw was on this tour, at London’s Wembley Arena in January 1990. McCartney’s solo career had made little impression on me so far. What I’d heard on the radio of his work with Wings and afterwards seemed lightweight, and I didn’t own any of his records. The Beatles were another matter. Although they were stars before I was born, the energy and creative brilliance of the band had captured my imagination, as with millions of others. The Beatles cross generations. I therefore attended my first McCartney show with mixed feelings, as I’m sure many others did during that tour. One was coming primarily because of the Beatles, rather than the music Paul had made since 1970, and hoping not to hear too much of the latter.

McCartney bounded on stage, chubby and grey at 47, but evidently eager to entertain us. His band seemed up for the challenge, too, though Linda appeared less engaged than Hamish, Robbie, Chris and Wix, sitting awkwardly at her keyboard, a Union flag draped next to her, periodically making V-signs as if impersonating Winston Churchill. When the show opened with ‘Figure of Eight’, one’s spirits sank. Were we to be subjected to a series of mediocre new songs? Thankfully, the friendly opening bars of ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ followed, the start of a sparkling stream of Beatles songs. To see and hear Paul McCartney perform these iconic songs was genuinely thrilling, and unlike his contemporary Bob Dylan who deliberately changes his songs live to keep the work fresh for himself and his audience, McCartney and his band were playing these classics like they sounded on the records, which is the way you want to hear them, at least the first time. ‘You owe something to the music to present it in as authentic a way as possible,’ comments Hamish Stuart. ‘I remember “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Robbie basically played the solo note for note, because that’s part of what was written.’ Although London audiences have a reputation in the rock industry for being reserved and undemonstrative, compared to elsewhere in the UK, and abroad, people were weeping with emotion, couples were embracing. ‘Sometimes it was hard to watch,’ says Hamish. ‘Look away or you get drawn in and forget what you’re doing.’

To perform ‘Fool on the Hill’ Paul brought an artefact of swinging London on stage, the multi-coloured piano that Binder, Edwards and Vaughan had painted for him in 1966. Paul played this fabulous Joanna on a platform that elevated and rotated as he sang, causing him to rename the instrument his Magic Piano. The crowning moment of the show came, however, in the encore when McCartney picked out the plangent opening chords of ‘Golden Slumbers’ on a Roland keyboard, going on to perform the complete
Abbey Road
medley, culminating in the sublime ‘The End’, the Beatles’ final exaltation to love one another proving enduringly powerful.

This spine-tingling moment was the closest one could get in 1990 to experiencing the magic of the Beatles live, and it was perhaps better than seeing the boys in the Sixties, in that Paul was performing a complex album piece the Beatles never staged, with state-of-the-art sound equipment and amplification, so it sounded great. I walked away from the show a convert to Paul McCartney as a live performer, and urged everybody I met who hadn’t seen McCartney in concert to do so.

Off stage, Paul and Linda were coping with a difficult family situation. As noted, Heather McCartney had long found the McCartney name a burden. If she was introduced simply as Heather, people showed little interest in her. ‘Then somebody would say McCartney and really emphasise it and I’d just watch their face change.’ For a fairly simple person who didn’t have a strong idea of herself, or what she meant to do in life, this turned into an identity crisis, and in 1988 the 25-year-old admitted herself to a private clinic in Sussex.

After her treatment, Heather went to the United States to spend time with her natural father, Mel See, whom she called Papa, and his girlfriend Beverly Wilk, who lived with Mel in an adobe on the opposite side of Tucson to the McCartney ranch. Mel continued to pursue his interest in anthropology, and he and Beverly took Heather with them to Mexico to visit native Hoichol Indians, who made a big impression on the young woman. Heather admired the Indians’ uncompromising way of life, living on the periphery of the modern world, and picked up design ideas for her new hobby of pottery. Back home in Rye, pottery was a long-established industry, with five potteries in the town at one time. Heather had gone to school with the son of one of the most eminent Rye potters, David Sharp, and worked for a time with another local potter.

During her visit to Arizona, Heather seemed a fragile, mixed-up girl to Mel and Beverly, who says: ‘I think she just needed to get away and find herself.’ Despite the effort Paul and Linda had put into parenting, and the public image they projected of a happy and successful family, it seemed Heather had been left emotionally scarred by her upbringing, first in an unhappy marriage, then with a stepfather who happened to be one of the most famous people in the world. ‘I guess if you had a dad who let someone else adopt you [that would be an issue], and then being in a family where you’re the odd girl out,’ comments Beverly. As a self-made man, Paul was ambitious for his children to build careers of their own, but Heather was a dreamy type, not academically bright, a girl who was content to potter about at home with her roll-ups and pets. She also seemed scared of being identified as a McCartney by members of the public, travelling in America under a
nom de plume
. One day, when Beverly took Heather to the bank in Tucson, the young woman emerged in an unsettled state saying that she’d signed for her money in the wrong name. ‘I don’t think she sometimes knew who she was - I thought,
Wow, what a way of living!
’

Although she enjoyed visiting Arizona, Heather soon returned to the family estate in Sussex, which she considered her real home, and here her emotional problems returned. During the early part of Paul’s world tour, the press reported that Heather had again been admitted to a clinic. ‘I think she has identity problems. It’s a lot of pressure on a child to have to live in the limelight all the time,’ Mel told a journalist; ‘she finds it difficult to be a member of such a famous family.’ Fortunately, Paul and Linda had arranged the European stage of their tour in such a way that they flew home most nights, meaning they could see Heather almost daily. As Heather got better, her parents felt confident enough to continue the tour further afield.

Paul took his band back to North America in February 1990, after which they played Japan, almost exactly ten years after Paul had been deported from the country. Then it was back to the USA, where MPL had cut an advantageous sponsorship deal with Visa. This involved the credit card company paying MPL $8.5 million (£5.5m), which covered most of the tour expenses, further agreeing to run nationwide television ads featuring Paul. The ads used snatches of his Wings and solo career songs, urging Visa card members to use their card to buy tickets for his concerts. (MPL had tried to get permission from Apple to use Beatles songs in the ads, but Apple refused, meaning George, Ritchie and Yoko wanted to limit the extent to which Paul could benefit from Beatles material.) The TV ads caused Paul’s ticket sales to rocket. From selling 20,000 tickets for an average city, there was demand for 100,000 tickets per stop, transforming an arena tour into a stadium tour, which Paul capped on 21 April 1990 by playing a record-breaking show before 184,000 people in Rio de Janeiro.

After South America, Paul returned to the UK to perform in Scotland and Liverpool, the latter show staged in the disused King’s Dock as a fundraiser for LIPA. Backstage, Paul was reunited with several old boys from the Inny, including Ian James who’d helped teach him how to play guitar when they were teenagers. When Paul became a star, Ian didn’t get in touch ‘because I didn’t feel it was right somehow, like taking advantage’. He hadn’t seen his mate for 30-odd years when Paul and Linda walked into the marquee. ‘It was like the King and Queen’s arrived,’ he recalls. Emphasising this quasi-regal feel, which became increasingly pronounced over the next few years, guests were invited up one at a time to be received by McCartney. Ian hung back, falling into conversation with Paul’s brother Mike. Then Paul saw Ian and all formality was forgotten: ‘as soon as he saw me he came over. We just hugged.’ Three decades had passed, the schoolboys had become middle-aged men, but their friendship was somehow unchanged. ‘So from that point onwards we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve been to a few things like his office Christmas party … Linda would always invite the wife and me. She was a lovely woman.’ It is worth emphasising again the paradox that almost everybody who knew Linda liked her, talking of a warm, unpretentious, friendly person, yet her public image was of a pushy opportunist who’d cheated Jane Asher out of her destiny. Part of the problem was that Linda didn’t come across well with the press, journalists finding her gauche and abrasive. She appeared that way on stage, too.

Two weeks after Ian James met the McCartneys backstage at the King’s Dock, Paul played a charity show at Knebworth, a country estate in Hertfordshire. The concert yielded a notorious tape of Linda singing backing vocals. As we have seen, it was never Linda’s desire to perform live with Paul; she did so to please him. As she became older, she felt less inclined to leave her home - where she was happy with the children and her animals - to perform, and she had to be cajoled into going on the road in 1989-91. She was particularly reluctant this time because Paul would be performing Beatles songs, which Linda had no part in creating, as opposed to her role in Wings. Comments Hamish Stuart:

I think she felt more at home back in the Wings incarnation because she was really a part of that thing. With this band it was a little broader in scope, because of the fact we were doing Beatles tunes and things like that and I think maybe she didn’t feel quite as comfortable. But everybody tried to make her feel comfortable, and Wix was very good at finding good [keyboard] parts for her that fit with what everybody else was doing … Sometimes she had it tough on the road when she wanted to be home.

Inevitably, Linda was criticised for touring with Paul, and it seems she was not held in universally high regard backstage. When they played the Knebworth Festival on 30 June 1990, a technician isolated Linda’s vocal and made a bootleg recording,
Linda McCartney Live at Knebworth
, that elicited hoots of laughter from almost everybody who heard it. Singing backing vocals to ‘Hey Jude’, Linda was heard droning the
na na na na-na-na nas
in the manner of somebody getting up in a pub on karaoke night. Band members defend Linda, saying anybody can sound rotten if you isolate them on stage, especially at an open-air gig like Knebworth, but the evidence is clear. Linda was a flat note in the band, slogging her way joylessly through these shows to keep Paul happy, and there was much more of this to come before she could go home to Sparky, Blankit and her other pets.