Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (63 page)

23

MUSIC IS MUSIC

THE LIVERPOOL ORATORIO

Back in 1988, Carla Lane had persuaded the McCartneys to make a guest appearance in an episode of her television show,
Bread
. The storyline was that Linda was opening an animal rescue centre in Liverpool. During filming Paul and Lin met the actress Jean Boht, who played the matriarch Nellie Boswell in the series and was married in real life to the composer Carl Davis. When Carl, Carla and Jean subsequently collaborated on a short orchestral work,
The Pigeon’s Progress
, staged at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Paul and Linda sent a telegram of support - ‘Here’s to you and all the pigeons in the world’ - which caused Carl to think about writing music with Paul. During a visit to the McCartneys’ farm in Sussex, the composer asked if Paul would like to collaborate on an orchestral piece for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, for whom he was guest conductor, and which was due to celebrate its 150th anniversary. The idea of creating music with a Liverpool theme appealed to Paul, who began telling Carl his life story, starting with how he’d been born in Liverpool during the Second World War. ‘That’s good!’ remarked Davis brightly, seeing the beginning of an oratorio - a word Paul wasn’t familiar with.

‘Is this a symphony we’re writing?’

‘No, that’s slightly different.’

‘Is is a concerto then?’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Davis, explaining that an oratorio is a piece of music based on a religious story, sung by soloists and chorus; Elgar’s
The Dream of Gerontius
for example. The outcome of Davis’s and McCartney’s collaboration - the
Liverpool Oratorio
- was indeed to contain an element of pluralistic religiosity, but had much more to do with Paul’s life.

The story starts with a character named Shanty, like Paul born in Liverpool during the last war, and having the same good fortune to attend the Liverpool Institute, which is evoked fondly in the second movement, with a reference to Paul’s Spanish teacher Miss Inkley teaching the boys a rhyme about three rabbits. The story then veers off into a confusing section about Shanty meeting a ghost named Mary, who assumes corporeal form and becomes Shanty’s wife in the fifth movement, their marriage reaching a crisis when Mary falls pregnant and Shanty takes to drink (wouldn’t
you
if you married a ghost named after your mum!), their problems resolved in the final movement when husband and wife praise the overarching importance of family life. With a movement devoted to Shanty’s father, and references to a kindly nurse, the oratorio gathered together the talismans of Paul’s early life in a typically sentimental 90-minute work.

To take on such a project showed ambition, some might say hubris, on Paul’s part, and was a surprising departure from rock. In his childhood, the McCartneys turned off the wireless when classical music came on the air. In the Sixties, Paul dipped into Berio and Stockhausen, as we have seen, becoming sufficiently enthused by their experimental compositions to create avant-garde music of his own. He also became friendly with Stockhausen and Tavener. He’d never shown much interest in mainstream ‘classical’ music, though. On the contrary, Paul and Linda walked out of a New York production of
La Bohème
when they were courting because they were bored. When the journalist Ray Connolly interviewed Wings at the time of
Back to the Egg
, he asked if anyone in the band liked classical music; Denny Laine nodded vigorously, which as Coleman noted ‘contrasted strongly with Paul’s bemused frown’. Yet an appreciation of classical music often develops with maturity - Paul chose Benjamin Britten’s
Country Dances
as one of his records on the BBC radio show
Desert Island Discs
a couple of years later in 1982 - and there is no reason why an innately musical person shouldn’t like, understand and indeed make orchestral music as well as pop, which is not necessarily a lesser form. Music is music, as Alban Berg observed, while another modernist composer, Gunther Schuller, called for a blending of traditional and pop, ‘in a beautiful brotherhood/ sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other’. This is what Paul proceeded to do.

There was a problem, however. When Paul needed to create music for players who went by notes on a page, he had to employ an amanuensis to orchestrate his music. George Martin had filled that role in the Beatles and afterwards. It was George who scored ‘Yesterday’,
The Family Way
and the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence in
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, among other pieces with Paul’s name attached, raising the question of how much credit is actually due to McCartney on such projects. Modest man that he is, Martin has always been content to stand in the background. Carl Davis was a different personality. An American, born in New York in 1936, one like Linda who’d made his home in England, Carl had enjoyed a long and successful career, best known for his 1980 score for the revived silent movie
Napoleon
, and he was used to getting due credit. He assumed he would at least
share
co-credit with Paul on their oratorio, which he had suggested and would essentially write, because Paul couldn’t. ‘I naturally assumed it would be
The Liverpool Oratorio
by McCartney and Davis.’ So Carl was ‘very taken aback when he [Paul] said, quite emphatically, that he wanted it to be called
Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio
’.

Work on the oratorio started around the time of Paul’s 1989/90 world tour, after which the star had a live album to oversee, the serviceable
Tripping the Live Fantastic
, and other projects to attend to, including campaigning with Linda to save their local cottage hospital in Sussex. He also helped Lin launch a range of frozen veggie food; and sat for interviews with Barry Miles for their forthcoming book,
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
. In addition to these and other commitments, Paul found time to meet Carl Davis regularly, supplying him with the essential story of the oratorio, humming and playing tunes for it on the piano. It was Carl’s task to transcribe these tunes, and do the detailed work of scoring the piece, Paul coming back with comments.

By January 1991, the composers had been working together in this way for two years, with the première of the oratorio scheduled for June. During final preparations, a documentary camera team followed Paul, the footage revealing tensions between McCartney and Davis, with Paul overruling his partner in a polite but firm way that must have been difficult for Davis to take, being so much more knowledgeable about the world that he, like Virgil with Dante, was leading Paul into. At the same time, Paul was capable of rolling out melodies on the piano that sounded so delightful Davis was scrabbling around for a pencil to note them down before Paul moved on to something else. Davis, who already had the look of a Mad Professor, appeared increasingly frazzled by the experience of working with a man who didn’t technically know what he was doing, but knew exactly what he wanted, and wasn’t to be brooked in argument. After all, Paul was paying for everything, giving him a crushing financial grip on proceedings. Paul’s unassailable economic strength, by dint of which almost everybody working with him is in his pocket, becomes ever more pronounced as we move into the latter part of his career.

Even more than when he was a young man, the mature McCartney was also characterised by his habit of doing many things at once, which is why the MPL logo depicts a juggler. While working with Carl Davis on the oratorio, Paul was involved in various campaigns; working with Mark Featherstone-Witty on establishing LIPA; discussing animation projects - mostly films about little furry animals - with Geoff Dunbar; attending to Apple and MPL business; and working with his rock band on a new album in advance of another world tour. The band remained much as it was during the last tour, featuring Hamish Stuart, Robbie McIntosh and Wix Wickens, with a new (vegetarian) drummer named Blair Cunningham. One of the first projects they undertook together was the MTV show
Unplugged
.

MTV had become a significant force in the entertainment industry in the past few years, with Paul embracing the concept of video films to promote his songs, often commissioning lavish productions, such as the 1983 video for his single ‘Pipes of Peace’, in which Paul played both a British and German soldier in the trenches of the First World War, the video shot to feature-film standard with 100 extras. Recently, MTV had pioneered a spin-off concert series, whereby rock acts who normally used amplified equipment played live in front of small audiences using only acoustic instruments. Previous MTV
Unplugged
guests hadn’t adhered strictly to the format, using electric pick-ups, even some fully amplified instruments. ‘Paul decided this was cheating and [we] would do it absolutely straight, which was technically very challenging,’ says Robbie McIntosh; ‘there were no pick-ups, everything was done on microphone.’ Hamish Stuart recalls: ‘I had an acoustic bass. I had to be very static - if you move
that
much away from the [mike] the bottom would drop out of the band.’ Paul rehearsed with his band for three weeks in advance of the recording in London on 25 January 1991, and the show turned out to be one of the most enjoyable he’d played in a long time. McCartney helped make it special by choosing to début the very first song he wrote, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, all one minute thirteen seconds of it. Rock ’n’ roll favourites and selections from his solo career and the Beatles also featured. By dint of being forced to put over old songs in a new format, the likes of ‘And I Love Her’ were rejuvenated. Paul was so pleased with the result that he asked for a recording of the event to be put out as an
Unplugged
album, the first of what became a very successful series of such records, with contemporaries including Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan following. So successful was the MTV experience that Paul took his band out on the road that summer to play a series of small gigs, in such out of the way places as St Austell in Cornwall, which included an ‘unplugged’, that is to say acoustic, set.

Linda continued to play with the band, though she was very much in the background during
Unplugged
, where mistakes would have been glaringly obvious. With the kids growing up (the youngest, James, was now 13), Linda’s energies outside the home were concentrated on her relentless ‘go veggie’ crusade, which had taken on a surprising commercial dimension. On the back of the success of
Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking
, reportedly the best-selling veggie cookbook ever, Linda had, as touched upon, linked up with Ross Young, a division of United Biscuits, to market a line of Linda McCartney frozen dinners, which she launched at the Savoy Hotel in April 1991. Consequently, Linda spent a great deal of time in her kitchen creating and testing new veggie recipes, giving samples of her meals to friends, family and neighbours to gain their reaction and, hopefully, convert them to a non-meat diet. Reactions were muted. On a trip to Kintyre, Linda gave the McCartneys’ vet, Alastair Cousin, samples of her veggie sausages. ‘I didn’t like them at all to be honest, but I didn’t say as much.’ Mike Robbins recalls an evening when Paul and Lin visited him and his wife Betton the Wirral, then walked down the lane with them to visit Joe and Joan McCartney.

[Paul] linked arms with [Bett] in the dark walking down the pavement, down the village, and I walked behind with Linda and she said, because she was always plugging, ‘When you going to go veggie, Mike?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ve never tried it. I’m always open to [the idea].’ ‘Oh you’ve gotta try veggie.’ A week went by, a bloody big van arrived at the front door with a box
that
big. It was all her products that she did, Linda McCartney products,
every
one, and we lived off it for about a week. As [Bett] said, ‘It’s all very nice but you’re still bloody hungry after veggie food.’ … So we ate it all and never went veggie, couldn’t be bothered.

Despite apathy from friends and family, Linda’s veggie food proved surprisingly successful with the British public, becoming a multi-million-pound business that made a rich woman even wealthier over the next few years. There were hiccups, notably when traces of meat were discovered in her pies in 1992, apparently an act of sabotage, while Ross Young found that Linda could be a demanding business partner. One day when Carla Lane was visiting Blossom Farm, she mentioned to Linda that a friend of hers had tried the veggie sausages and found them ‘a bit greasy’. Linda picked up the phone immediately.

She said, ‘Hi, is that Richard? OK. I want the sausages
off
.’ And he must have said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, OFF - O, double F!’ Then he must have said ‘Why?’ ‘Never mind why.’ Then a pause. ‘No, now. Not tomorrow. Now. Off the shelves. OK? I’ll be back with you. OK. Bye.’ And that was it. That’s how fast she moved when there was anything she was keen about. Off they came and they came back with less grease, apparently. It’s amazing how she did it [laughs] - she gave that man the Devil.

It was a different woman who sat in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral listening to a rehearsal of Paul’s oratorio in the spring of 1991, tears coursing down her handsome face as she allowed herself to be swept up in the music, causing daughter Mary (now an attractive young woman of 21, working for Dad at MPL) to look at Mum in surprise. Linda shrugged unapologetically.

The family were attending a full-scale run-through of Paul’s
Liverpool Oratorio
three months in advance of its première, Paul having decreed that he had to hear a performance because he couldn’t get the music from the score. This way he could change anything he didn’t like. Aunt Joan was one of the Liverpool ‘relies’ invited to the demo. ‘Who would ever have thought it would come to this? A McCartney in the cathedral! ’ she was heard to exclaim approvingly, looking around at the great building. Paul beamed back. Having achieved so much, he still felt the need to prove himself in front of his family. He was clever. He
was
talented. Look, he’d even written a
noratorio
, as he deliberately mispronounced the word in a self-mocking reference to his initial ignorance.