by Ken McNab
The stay was punctuated by long, awkward silences and stony stares. The sub-zero welcome followed him when he visited his aunt Annie and her husband, Charles Cadwaller, across the water on the Wirral. Annie, known to the family as Nanny, was even more outspoken than her sister. Her son, Mike, reportedly recalled one of several testy exchanges between aunt and nephew. ‘I remember Yoko commandeering the kitchen to prepare their meals, probably within earshot of my mother, who was unable to disguise her disapproval . . . “he can’t just eat beans . . . he needs a proper meal . . . he’s fading away . . . he’s all skin and bones . . . ”’
There was, possibly, a hint of racism behind the kitchen whispers directed at Yoko. Hurt though he was, Lennon preferred to play the diplomat.
By now, even he had realised the impracticality of driving all the way to Edinburgh and then a further three hundred-odd miles, including hazardous single-track roads, to Durness in a tiny Mini. So he summoned his chauffeur Les Anthony to drive to Liverpool with a newly bought Austin Maxi, one of the first off the production line, which the Lennons would then use to hit the high road across the border to Scotland.
After loading up the Maxi with suitcases on 29 June, they made their strained farewells – no kisses or hugs for Yoko – and headed in the direction of Scotland’s capital.
Edinburgh was a city full of fond memories for Lennon. Not least because it was where Stan lived. Both boys recalled lovingly how they would be taken to see the world-famous Edinburgh Tattoo, the skirl of the pipes leaving a lasting and nostalgic impression on the young Lennon. Also, it had always provided that brief stopover on his way to the Highland croft in Durness. Now Lennon was reliving that journey for the first time as an adult – and a driver.
The Parkes lived in Ormidale Terrace, a stone’s throw from Murrayfield Stadium that reflected the ostentatious standing of his aunt Mater and her second husband, a dentist named Bertie Sutherland. When the Lennons arrived, Mater was, coincidentally, in Durness, so they were greeted by Stan, who was six years John’s senior. Despite the age gap, the two men had always been close, more like brothers-in-arms than cousins as Stan helped Lennon navigate the tricky path of his fractured childhood. Yoko’s arrival, however, tested the bonds of their friendship. Stan readily admitted he could find nothing likeable about her.
‘I couldn’t see what he saw in her at all and I told him,’ recalled Stan, in a conversation we had before he passed away in 2016. ‘She hardly spoke to me. I got the impression she just wanted John for herself and she wanted to keep him away from his family. It was always about control. I couldn’t believe how he just seemed to do everything she said. I told him to stand up for himself more but he just laughed and said he knew what he was doing. But it was crazy to me. I didn’t like her from the start.’
Sensing which way the wind was blowing, John must have been disappointed not to have Stan in his corner. He was already resigned to the fact that Mater, arguably the most volatile of all the Stanley sisters, was queuing up to give her potty nephew a piece of her mind. To shovel salt into deep family wounds, he was also finding it tough to reconnect with Julian, who now only saw him as an absent dad who had fled the family home for another woman who clearly had little time for him. The perils of parenthood had never been clearer to both him and Yoko.
As the Maxi made its way north and west to Durness, once his idea of heaven on earth, he couldn’t escape the thought that the whole ‘fookin’ thing was turning into the fookin’ holiday from hell’. Twenty-four hours later, he would find himself on a Highland road to perdition.
*
Late was the hour when the phone rang in George Martin’s London home, an occurrence that was not unusual for a man used to unconventional working patterns. He picked up the receiver to hear a familiar Liverpool accent on the other end. Typically, Paul McCartney, after some brief social niceties, cut to the chase. ‘We want to make another album, and we want to do it the way we used to do it. Will you produce it?’
Martin let the request hang in the air for a brief moment, torn between curious contemplation and self-righteous indignation. In the space of a few seconds, bittersweet memories flitted into his mind’s eye. Memories of four streetwise but rough-hewn Liverpool lads giving him lip the first time they ventured into EMI Studios. Memories of the day he proudly told them they had just recorded their first number one single with ‘Please Please Me’. Memories of the groundbreaking music, from their debut LP to the White Album, they shaped together over the following six years. Memories of the shared moments incarcerated inside EMI’s Number Two studio until dawn that had turned them into an unlikely bond of brothers. Memories, now hurtful and sad, of how that bond had slowly splintered over the last eighteen months.
So it was by no means a straightforward case of yes or no. It meant stepping back onto a carousel that he firmly believed had come crashing off its moorings. It meant reconnecting fully with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to rediscover the alchemy that had transformed all their lives and redrawn the boundaries of popular music and culture.
Martin, moreover, still carried the scar tissue from being snubbed over ‘Get Back’. Now, five months down the line, McCartney was on the phone trying to reforge links in a familiar chain, using all his natural charm to persuade Martin to help them create that old Beatle magic once again. ‘An album like we used to . . .’ McCartney, repeating the same sales pitch he had made to Lennon a few days previously, made it sound so tempting: ‘We’ll put down the boxing gloves.’
Before committing himself, Martin was anxious to scan the small print. And in this case, that ensured securing the cooperation of Lennon, a man who had already made clear his distaste for Martin’s ability to turn The Beatles’ base metal into gold.
‘I didn’t think we would work again together after Let It Be and frankly I didn’t really want to. Let It Be was such an unhappy record and I thought that was the end of The Beatles and I thought I would never work with them again,’ recalled Martin. ‘And I thought it was such a shame to go out that way. So I was quite surprised when Paul rang me up and said, “We want to make another record, would you like to produce it?” And my immediate answer was, “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to do it.”
‘And he said “We do want to do that.” I said, “John included?” And he said, “Honestly, yes.” And I said, “Well, if you really want to do that, let’s get together again.”’
It spoke volumes for the trust he still had in McCartney’s ability to rally his bandmates and drag them out of the acrimonious quagmire that was ‘Get Back’. Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that a number of potential songs to form the spine of a new album were partly in the can, cold and unfinished leftovers from January and beyond. So he wasn’t looking at an epic six-month production like Pepper, more like six weeks. And then there was that lingering but unrealised ambition he had to ease The Beatles into a more symphonic-based terrain, to weave all their disparate song fragments into one long suite. An interesting proposition but could it be done?
Surprisingly, Lennon, the incurable rock ’n’ roller, had already given the project a green light. McCartney, always open to new pathways, was already on board. Harrison was prepared to tie up loose ends, and Starr, as always, just wanted to play with the boys.
All in, it looked like they would be doing one more for the road . . . Abbey Road.
© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
As The Beatles worked on Abbey Road, George Harrison became more immersed in the Hare Krishna movement. He oversaw a recording of the Hare Krishna mantra, which eventually reached Number Twelve in the UK single charts.
JULY 1969
The first day of July saw McCartney back at work doing what he had always done in a way, shaping The Beatles’ musical future for good or bad. In his mid-June conversations with Lennon he had notionally mentioned 1 July as a possible date to kickstart the sessions proper for a new album. McCartney, keen to dial back on the bossiness t
hat had fractured the ‘Get Back’ sessions, made it clear that the plan was not laid down in stone. Which was just as well, because Lennon had no intention of pitching up at EMI Studios on that day. He was still enjoying taking time out with Yoko, Kyoko and trying to repair his relationship with Julian on their Highland holiday. Harrison, while cautiously committing to the sessions, wasn’t yet ready to snap to attention when the headmaster clicked his fingers. Starr, flying back from France with Maureen after another vacation in the millionaires’ playground of Cannes, made up the third truant.
The date was, nevertheless, important. Informally or otherwise, it drew a line under the ramshackle ‘Get Back’ project and initiated work on their next album and what McCartney and Martin hoped would be a period of proper focus to achieve their goal of finishing a new album, probably their last.
Some nine tracks, including ‘Something’, ‘Golden Slumbers’, ‘Carry That Weight’, ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’, ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, were already good works in progress, though none had yet acquired The Beatle quality kite mark. And then there was that intriguing notion, still being kicked around between McCartney, Lennon and Martin, of stitching together a medley from the patchwork quilt of musical cast-offs they both had lying around.
There was undoubtedly a lot riding on the project. Lennon, his cultural antenna always fixed to the winds of change blowing through music, was fearful that The Beatles were in danger of becoming relics. McCartney, though, was convinced that the band was still musically relevant.
Studio Two had been block-booked for the entire month and into August as well, if they needed it. Six weeks to find out whether to stick or twist. But the plans were thrown into immediate chaos when a call was put through to McCartney from a shaken Derek Taylor. Lennon, Yoko and their two kids were currently laid up in a remote Scottish hospital. Lennon, he reported, had driven his Maxi into a ditch on a road outside the small village of Tongue, almost ninety miles north of Inverness. The accident happened as the couple, having stopped off at a tearoom, were on their way back to Durness, taking in the scenic route round Loch Eriboll. The roads there are notoriously narrow and Lennon had already forgotten the sage advice of Stan Parkes when he set off from Edinburgh: ‘Don’t forget the Highland etiquette on single-track roads of letting another driver pass.’ When Lennon saw another car, reportedly driven by a German tourist, on the road ahead, he panicked, knowing there wasn’t room enough for both of them. Instead of pulling over to the side, he steered the car off the road where it came to rest at a 45-degree angle.
Luckily, no one was seriously injured. Lennon had a gash on his jawline, which would eventually require seventeen stitches while Yoko also needed stitches in her forehead. The two children were suffering from no more than shock. An ambulance took the injured party to the Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie, little more than a country clinic. Naturally, the staff were shocked to see a bleeding Beatle walking among them, looking somewhat sheepish but nevertheless displaying the good manners that Aunt Mimi had long ago instilled in him.
‘He was not in the least demanding,’ said Dr David Milne, who treated the couple’s injuries. ‘He was slightly embarrassed at the predicament he found himself in but apart from that he was a model patient. There was a bit of commotion when they were first brought in. They were quite shaken up.’
It was Lennon who put in the call to Apple, which was then relayed to Paul in North London. It was clear that he would be out of action for the foreseeable future. Still, McCartney reckoned, there was no point in cancelling the sessions already in the EMI diary.
The next day, he was joined by Harrison and Starr and for the next six days the ‘Threetles’ – an eerie portent of what was to come twenty-five years down the line – laid down tracks and overdubs for ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘Carry That Weight’, while Harrison finally took the wrappers off ‘Here Comes The Sun’, the second of what would become his major contributions to the next album.
Devoid of the preachy overtones that weighed down some of his more recent songs, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ was warm, exuberant and brimful of optimism with a chorus that was delightfully infectious. On hearing it for the first time, McCartney must have winced at its effortless-sounding melody, one that could just as easily have sprung from his own well.
As with ‘Something’, Harrison had a clearly defined vision for how the song – his song – should sound. Diplomatically, McCartney adopted the position of almost a session musician and retreated to the margins as Harrison taught him and Starr their parts for ‘Here Comes The Sun’. Even at this early stage, the song presented tricky percussive challenges for a drummer. Heard inside the Studio Two echo chamber, it was already a subtle confluence of laidback Western folk music and complex Eastern ragas based mainly on an Indian polyrhythmic technique called a tihai. It consists of three equal repetitions of a rhythmic pattern, followed by two equal rests, adding up to the time signature that sounds weird to Western ears. The result was wonderfully exotic.
Harrison may not have known it himself, but the song’s time signatures switched from 11/8, 4/4 and 7/8 on the bridge. Starr spotted it immediately and rose to the challenge as he, Harrison and McCartney laid down backing tracks on what was the drummer’s twenty-ninth birthday.
Indeed, it was a happy harbinger of Starr’s drumming, which over the next six weeks would scale impressive new heights. A contributing factor was his old drum-heads, relics from the far-off days of Beatlemania, finally being replaced.
He said, ‘The drum sound on the record was the result of having new calf-heads. There’s a lot of tom-tom work on that record. I got the new heads on the drum and I naturally used them a lot – they were so great. The magic of real records is that they showed the tom-toms were so good. I don’t believe that magic is there now because there is so much manipulation.’
Starr also benefited hugely from the leap forward in recording techniques and the recent installation of a transistorised mixing console at the EMI Studios, notwithstanding the fact that every track was now being recorded in stereo, despite The Beatles’ own belief that they always sounded better in mono. Studio engineer Geoff Emerick said, ‘This was the first time I was able to record Ringo’s kit in stereo because we were using 8-track instead of 4-track. Because of this, I had more mic inputs, so I could mic from underneath the toms, place more mics around the kit – the sound of his drums were finally captured in full. I think when he heard this, he kind of perked up and played more forcefully on the toms, and with more creativity.’
Starr was front and centre on ‘Carry That Weight’, the McCartney song that segued directly from ‘Golden Slumbers’. Paul had always intended for the songs to be linked when they were first aired in Twickenham in January. Now, months later, they needed next to no reworking, but the drumming on ‘Carry That Weight’ gave the song a palpable sense of renewed energy. With Lennon absent, the vocal duties were shared between all three Beatles, but it was Starr’s distinctive nasal baritone that gave ‘Carry That Weight’, an early comment on the growing meltdown at Apple even before Klein’s arrival, its sullen forecast of a lifetime burden shared by four closely linked individuals.
McCartney said, ‘I’m generally quite upbeat but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can’t be upbeat any more and that was one of the times . . . “Carry that weight a long time” like forever! That’s what I meant.’
‘Golden Slumbers’ also touched on the same melancholy that was evident in ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘Two Of Us’ and ‘Every Night’, each song proof nevertheless that despondence can create great art even in an eternal optimist like McCartney. Written at the tail end of 1968, the lyrics to ‘Golden Slumbers’ were ‘borrowed’ from a ballad by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Dekker after Paul saw the ballad’s sheet music propped up on the piano at his father’s home in Heswall, Cheshire. Most of the words remained unaltered exce
pt the tell-tale intro that was pure McCartney.
McCartney recalled: ‘I can’t read music and I couldn’t remember the old tune, so I just started playing my own tune to it. I liked the words so I kept them and it fitted with another bit of song that I had [“Carry That Weight”]. I remember trying to get a very strong vocal on it, because it was such a gentle theme, so I worked on the strength of the vocal on it, and ended up quite pleased with it.’
Away from the business entanglements, in the studio, things went better between McCartney, Harrison and Starr without Lennon and definitely without Yoko. The tension was palpably absent. It didn’t necessarily guarantee a stress-free zone but it did mean by and large a smoother vibe. There were no unwelcome asides from the touchline or awkward silences as everyone – studio staff included – tiptoed round the double-strength tag team of John and Yoko.
Engineer John Kurlander told me: ‘The mood was very good from what I can recall. I’m not saying they didn’t occasionally disagree but there was no slamming doors or finger pointing. Right from the start of July they seemed to be very focused. John wasn’t there at the start so that might have had something to do with it. But right from the start you could tell they had brought their A game to the studio. Musically, it was gelling very well and we could all hear that.’
Beneath the studio bonhomie, however, lurked the ever-present spectre of broken business alliances. Nems had been lost and the battle for Northern Songs with ATV seemed equally to be a lost cause. For McCartney, guilt could only be apportioned in one direction. But the future had still to be written and McCartney was convinced that Apple could yet be salvaged. Conditional on that was persuading Starr and Harrison that Klein would destroy them all. His first point of influence was Ringo.
