Paul McCartney (69 page)

His best birthday present of all was the TV reporter overheard doing a piece to camera against the noise of ‘20,000 people on their seats… Onstage there’s no John Lennon, no George Harrison, no Ringo Starr–just Paul McCartney and Wings. And for everyone here tonight, that seems to be plenty.’

‘Oi, Paul, you know that Mull of Kintyre? It’s fakking great!’

After 20 years, thanks largely to the Beatles–and one of them in particular–pop music appeared to have civilised itself. But in 1976–77, the process was violently thrown into reverse.

Britain by then had come a long way from the Swinging Sixties’ world-enchanting sounds and styles and the youthful optimism so perfectly caught in Paul songs like ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ or ‘Getting Better’ or ‘We Can Work It Out’ or ‘Good Day Sunshine’. Under James Callaghan’s impotent Labour government, the country was plagued by runaway inflation and despotic trade unions whose incessant strikes–sanctimoniously renamed ‘industrial action’–paralysed public transport, put the sick and vulnerable at risk without compunction and left mountains of uncollected garbage rotting in the streets.

Unlike the pampered, adulated children of the Sixties, young Britons in the Seventies grew up with pessimism and cynicism, feeling alienated from a society which seemed to have little to offer them but the dole-queue. And pop music, always hitherto the voice and solace of youth, became part of their alienation. In truth it didn’t seem to belong to them at all, but stayed firmly in the grip of the Sixties generation, now 30 years old and more. Britain’s biggest star bands in the mid-Seventies were exponents of so-called ‘symphonic’–or pomp–rock, like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, whose immensely long and earnest concept albums, the distant offspring of Sgt. Pepper, had titles such as Tales from Topographic Oceans and Brain Salad Surgery and whose drum solos alone could go on as long as 20 minutes. The singles charts, meanwhile, were clogged with twee novelty songs and knee-jerk rock ‘n’ roll pastiche.

Hence punk rock, a genre born a few years earlier in bohemian downtown New York, but now reshaped–or, rather, unshaped–to reflect the aggression and nihilism of late-Seventies British youth. Its founding band, the Sex Pistols, made their debut in October 1976 with a single entitled ‘Anarchy in the UK’ whose first words, in the shockingly unmusical voice of lead singer John Lydon–aka Johnny Rotten–were ‘I am the Antichrist!’

The Pistols sent a wave of revulsion through Britain like nothing since the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll 20 years earlier. In December, they ensured the loathing of the media and the adoration of their followers by using four-letter words on an early-evening TV chat show. After being dropped by the Beatles’ old record company, EMI, and getting kicked off another mainstream company, A&M, after just one week, they were signed by the fledgling Virgin label whose owner, Richard Branson, used to loiter so observantly around the Apple house.

Pop music changed overnight–and fashion, too, for punk rock brought with it a fully-evolved aesthetic created by the Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren and his designer girlfriend Vivienne Westwood mixing affected poverty with the taboo concepts of sexual fetishism and self-mutilation.

The long-lingering tailored Sixties look, another legacy from the Beatles, was obliterated, as were distinctions between male and female. Both sexes wore the same shaven heads with Mohican crests dyed fluorescent red or orange, the same torn T-shirts and jeans, army-style boots, S&M chains and spiked wristbands or neck-collars. In the first-ever recorded outbreak of mass masochism, boys and girls alike had metal ornamentation implanted in the tenderest areas of their flesh: rings through their noses, lips, nipples and navels, studs in their tongues and eyebrows and outsize safety-pins hanging from their cheeks.

Punk bands sprang up all over the country, needing as little to get started as the skiffle groups of Lennon and McCartney’s boyhood. The atmosphere was somewhat like the fall of the Bastille; the pomp rockers hiding in their mansions, with their redundant synthesisers and strobes, listening for the sound of the tumbril.

Early in 1977, the Sex Pistol’s bass guitarist, Glen Matlock, was sacked for having musical aspirations: he admired the Beatles and sought to model his bass style on Paul McCartney’s. In his place came 19-year-old John Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious, who couldn’t play a note and became as great a draw as Johnny Rotten, chiefly by stripping down to grubby underpants to reveal a torso striped with self-inflicted knife cuts and physically assaulting members of his audience.

Paul might have been expected to feel most threatened by punk rock’s Year Zero, yet he refused to join the chorus of revulsion and contempt. The antics of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were nothing he hadn’t seen from that proto-punk John Lennon during the Beatles’ Hamburg era. Besides, he recalled only too well the hostility of older ‘professional’ musicians in the mid-Fifties towards untutored boys like himself who wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll.

He and Linda took to using punk names: ‘Noxious Fumes’ and ‘Vile Lin’. When 13-year-old Heather started playing the Damned, Mum and Dad had to listen too, and Linda was later heard singing ‘Neat Neat Neat’ (‘No crime if there ain’t no law/ No more cops left to mess you around’). Paul wrote a joke punk song for Heather entitled ‘Boil Crisis’, about ‘a kid named Sid’ who gets ‘scarred with a rod in a pyramid’, though it had rather too much content and rhymed too exactly to carry real conviction.

Anarchy in the UK music business there might be but in Paul’s personal music business there was steady, methodical expansion and diversification.

In 1977, Paul McCartney Productions Ltd, now known as MPL, moved from its one-room office in Greek Street to Soho Square, the small green oasis separating Soho from the clamour of Oxford Street. The new premises were a six-storey Edwardian building on the north-west side of the square–not as elegant as the eighteenth-century houses that adjoined it but enjoying the McCartneyesque distinction of being number one.

Its interior was extensively renovated and decorated in art deco style by the designers of the Biba superstore in Kensington. The ground floor acquired a dark brown façade with an understated mpl and two curved plate-glass windows reminiscent of an old-fashioned shop, though showing no trace of the valuable merchandise within.

Paul’s office was on the second floor, a large, airy room with oak panelling and dark blue carpet and upholstery patterned with musical notes. In one corner stood a rainbow-hued Wurlitzer jukebox, stocked with classic rock ‘n’ roll hits. Round the walls hung a selection of Linda’s rock star photographs and two paintings by her father’s client and friend, Willem de Kooning. An arched window overlooked the square’s small central park with its faux-Tudor chalet and constant crowd of shopworkers, tourists, drug-dealers and meths-drinkers. Paul had always got his best song-ideas from simply looking out of windows, and the scene below promised plenty.

As head of his own company, he put into practice all the lessons he’d learned the hard way from Apple. One Soho Square would have none of the mad extravagance and parasitic hangers-on that had done for 3 Savile Row. Under managing director Brian Brolly, a small team, dealing both with Wings and MPL’s ever-accumulating other interests, was kept continually at full stretch. The most frivolous activity was the running of Wings’ fan club–known as ‘the Wings Fun Club’ to underline its family appeal. Its organiser, Sue Cavanaugh, sent out a newsletter called Club Sandwich that included a punningly-named letters page, ‘Sue’s Lettuce’, and a crossword compiled by Paul’s cousin, Bert Danher. Wings’ juvenile fans were encouraged to improve their word power just as he’d once been by his father and cousin Bert.

John, George and Ringo had by now finally rid themselves of Allen Klein, paying $4.2 million of the almost $19 million severance package Klein had sought. Paul played no part in the long drawn-out and costly legal process; when its conclusion was announced, he gave an interview to the Daily Express, reflecting with justifiable smugness on his foresight in 1969 and pooh-poohing the idea that Klein had made him a fortune along with his fellow Beatles. Merely between 1974 and 1976, he claimed to have earned more from Wings ‘than in all those other so-called boom years’.

Even so, deals that Klein had done for the future release of Beatles music added significantly to the income rolling into 1 Soho Square. In 1973, EMI issued two compilation albums, one covering the years 1962–66, the other 1967–70–known as the red and blue albums because of their covers–that topped the UK and American charts and would continue selling for the rest of the decade.

Further additional revenue derived from ATV/Northern Songs’ marketing of Lennon–McCartney compositions. In 1974, Liverpool playwright Willy Russell, who’d seen the Beatles at the Cavern as a schoolboy, scored a West End hit with John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert. The last-named was a fictitious member of the Quarrymen, seen in later life attending a Wings concert and fondly reflecting on the Fab Four’s career. Beatles music was licensed to the production, though performed by a single vocalist, Barbara Dickson.

Russell’s play had depicted the break-up accurately but a segment shown on television that Christmas was edited in such a way that Paul appeared solely responsible and blameworthy. He was highly incensed, and Russell’s assurance that the play had been misrepresented could not completely placate him. Later, when a film version was mooted, he used his influence with ATV to stop it.

In 1977, a show called Beatlemania, with Lennon–McCartney music licensed by ATV’s American division, became a Broadway smash hit. Paul greatly disliked the production and there were meetings between his lawyer and father-in-law, Lee Eastman, and ATV’s New York chief, Sam Trust, that seemed to foreshadow a withdrawal of his work. In the end, however, the ‘fabulous’ royalties accruing to MPL persuaded him to let the show run and run.

His own songs for the Beatles might not belong to him, but by now he owned an impressive collection of other people’s. Under the guidance of Lee Eastman, he had been steadily buying up American music-publishing companies, most of them controlling the old standards and show tunes his father had so loved. Classics of songwriting and musical theatre were little valued in the Seventies, so they could be had at bargain prices and also brought substantial tax advantages to the buyer.

The most satisfying such acquisition resulted from a chance meeting between his brother-in-law, John Eastman, and a lawyer friend on a New York bus. The friend mentioned he was in the process of selling the Nor-Va-Jak company, which published the songs of Paul’s teenage hero, Buddy Holly.

Nor-Va-Jak already had a prospective buyer, John Eastman’s friend said, but he was being exasperatingly slow to close the deal. His name: Allen Klein. Eastman recognised the typical Klein delaying tactics and jumped at this chance to score off his old adversary. ‘I said, “MPL will buy the company and if you come over to my office right now, we’ll sign the papers.” Paul got it for $150,000, which it soon earned back several times over every year.’

He thus came to own the songs which had most inspired him to perform and write, among them ‘That’ll Be the Day’, the Beatles’ first wobbly little recording together. So elated was he that in September 1976 he inaugurated a ‘Buddy Holly Week’ in London, to coincide with what would have been Holly’s fortieth birthday, inviting the subject’s former manager and producer, Norman Petty, over from New Mexico as guest of honour. At a welcome lunch, attended by music-biz VIPs and the media, Petty presented him with a slightly sick souvenir–the cufflinks Buddy had been wearing on that fatal plane trip with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in February 1959.

The first of what would be Paul’s only two record releases in 1977 seemed as far as he could possibly get from the punk pandemonium. In April, he finally put out Thrillington, the easy-listening instrumental version of the Ram album he’d produced six years previously, largely to please his father, but then shelved because of the formation of Wings. Thrillington sold only a handful of copies and the media were baffled as to why he should devote such effort to a project so removed from the screeching cockatoo-crested, nipple-pierced zeitgeist. Had he completely lost touch with popular taste, many commentators wondered–or just become too grand to pay it any heed?

Early in the year, he’d taken Wings back to Abbey Road to start the follow-up to Venus and Mars. But it soon became clear that everyone–himself included–was still drained by the Wings Over the World tour. Linda, now pregnant with their third child, had special need of rest and recreation. He therefore resumed the practice of recording in sunny foreign parts, this time choosing the American Virgin Islands on the recommendation of engineer Geoff Emerick, who’d recently worked there with another band. Denny Laine, who loved boats, persuaded him the album should be made actually at sea.

A large yacht, the Fair Carol, was chartered and a five-strong technical team, led by Emerick, flown out to convert its stern into a studio with a 24-track desk. Two support vessels were also engaged: the Samala, a converted minesweeper, to accommodate the band, roadies and catering facilities, and a trimaran, the El Toro, for Paul, Linda and the children. No other wives or girlfriends were invited.

For several weeks, the flotilla cruised around the islands of St Croix, St John and St Thomas, dropping anchor in pre-selected idyllic bays. The days were spent sunbathing, swimming, snorkelling and petting the dolphins who swam up to watch with the wondering eyes of old-time Beatles fans. Recording took place in the evenings, followed by drinking and jamming on the open decks in the velvety night. Paul wrote a mini-musical for Mary and Stella entitled ‘The Two Little Fairies’, which they performed with his piano accompaniment, to general rapture. Reflecting this family seaside holiday atmosphere, the album was provisionally named Water Wings.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, however: the improvised aquatic studio created numerous technical problems and a series of mishaps dogged Paul’s crew. Alan Crowder, his invaluable fixer and factotum, slipped down a companionway, broke a foot and had to hobble around on crutches. Denny Laine got severe sunstroke, Jimmy McCulloch went temporarily deaf, and the dangerous proximity of seawater and power cables resulted in Geoff Emerick receiving a nasty electric shock in one leg. Paul himself, attempting a too-ambitous jump from one vessel, landed badly and was lucky not to break something.