by Ken McNab
The couple were joined by Magic Alex Mardas and his wife of just over a year. Mardas, who had retained his membership of Lennon’s own magic circle despite being banished from Apple by Klein, delighted in showing his celebrity chums round his home city. Later, they chartered a yacht for a cruise round the Aegean islands, which included a stopover on Spetses, a picture-postcard bolthole popular with the rich and famous.
The break served a three-fold purpose: it helped them both draw a line under Yoko’s miscarriage; it stiffened John’s resolve over his decision to leave The Beatles; and it persuaded him to reset and widen the bandwidth of their peace campaign. There was, he believed, simply no going back. Only Paul McCartney remained a puzzle Lennon couldn’t fully solve. The ties that had bound them so close for so long were not easily broken. But the differences between them – musical, business and personal – were now just too great to overcome. Lennon hadn’t spoken to his erstwhile songwriting partner in weeks, their friendship having been replaced by a sense of Schadenfreude on his part. While McCartney was wallowing in self-pity in Scotland, Lennon was ploughing forward, and ready to further strip away the veneer of his Beatle past. His talent for shock had never waned – The Beatles are bigger than Jesus; the drugs; ditching his Liverpool wife and their young son for a weird artist; posing in the buff for an album cover; and the bed-ins that surely laid bare his eccentricity to a public that reckoned he’d lost his mind. The only thing he hadn’t done was to expand his net of notoriety to include the Royal Family.
He put that right on 25 November, the day after returning from Greece. For four years, the MBE he’d been awarded had been given pride of place in his Aunt Mimi’s seaside bungalow in Poole, Dorset, a symbol of royal patronage. It was a small payback for the woman who more than anyone had tried to steer him through a difficult childhood and even trickier adolescence. In Lennon’s mind, however, the medal was a symbol of the sickening hypocrisy he had been forced to endure as a Beatle, bowing and scraping to an empirical class system he detested. But while sunning himself in the Aegean, he had hit upon a novel way to extricate himself from the phoniness of his decision in accepting it in the first place – Brian Epstein and Paul had made sure he did – and wringing out every last drop of self-publicity for him and Yoko. He would send his royal bauble back to the Palace and use it as another platform to highlight the insanity of war.
He had already mulled over the possibility in September with Derek Taylor. Of course, he couldn’t face wrenching the medal off the top of Mimi’s TV set himself, so his chauffeur Les Anthony was summarily dispatched to carry out the deed and deliver the medal back to Buckingham Palace, accompanied by a cheeky message from Lennon. Mimi was outraged, but she had no say in the matter. Nor did she know why her nephew wanted it back. She found out the next day when Lennon’s letter to the Queen was splashed across every newspaper in Britain alongside several frosty editorials.
In his note to Her Majesty, a far cry from McCartney’s charming little love song to the sovereign that was tacked on to the end of Abbey Road, he said he was ‘returning my MBE as a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts’. The flippant reference to his latest single was archetypal Lennon and guaranteed the stunt would generate just as much controversy as when he accepted it four years earlier.
Indignant old colonels queued up to berate him, but Lennon’s remonstration over Britain’s role in Biafra was well founded. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was under fire for supporting the Nigerian junta which was engaged in a form of ethnic cleansing against its African neighbours, sparking a humanitarian crisis. Britain’s support for Nigeria was rooted in a vital commodity – the country’s untapped reserves of crude oil.
Explaining his decision, Lennon pointed to the absurdity behind the initial decision to give them the MBE. ‘Lots of people who complained about us getting the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war. They got them for killing people. We deserved ours for not killing people. In a way it was hypocritical of me to accept it, but I’m glad I did, really, because it meant that four years later I was able to use it to make a gesture.’
He went on to accuse the British of covering up the atrocities carried out among the Biafran population in Her Majesty’s name, saying it tore at his patriotic heart. ‘All the press, TV and radio slant all the news from Biafra. All the stuff I learned about Biafra from journalists was a different story and I began to feel ashamed at being British and I’m a patriotic nationalist.’
He bristled at suggestions that his latest attempt at gesture politics insulted the Queen. ‘It won’t spoil her corn flakes,’ he said flatly.
None of the other Beatles were told in advance of Lennon’s intentions for the simple reason that he didn’t have to tell them. Approached by one persistent reporter, Starr said, ‘Look, he’s not crazy, he’s just being John . . . I don’t mind him sending his MBE back. The MBE was awarded to John for peaceful efforts and it was returned as a peaceful effort. That seems to be the full circle.’
Amazingly, despite the slew of interviews, Lennon still held back from spilling the beans on the biggest story of them all. Which might suggest that he hadn’t fully decided to withdraw life support from The Beatles. He couldn’t announce the break-up of the world’s biggest band and then days later go back on his word and open himself up to further ridicule.
Yet, incredibly, the Big Reveal was already in the public domain, delivered by McCartney to a reporter and photographer from Life magazine anxious to lay to rest once and for all the ongoing froth over his mortality.
Writer Dorothy Bacon and photographer Robert Graham were dispatched from London to brave the harshness of a wintry Scottish terrain to track down the ‘dead’ Beatle. Tramping through bogs and clambering over fences at High Farm, their cover was quickly blown. McCartney and Linda were alerted to their intrusive presence by the barking of their sheepdog, Martha. There was no turning back now, though. They eventually came face to face with their quarry only to find, unsurprisingly, an irate Beatle on the warpath. Seeing them approach, McCartney reached for the first thing that came to hand – a bucket of filthy rainwater – and duly hurled it at Bacon and Graham, who photographed the whole thing. Right away, McCartney realised it was a public relations disaster, which could put him at risk of further media encroachment.
Chasing after them in his Land Rover, he struck a deal. In return for a two-minute interview and family snaps, Graham would agree not to publish the offensive images and everyone could go home happy. The subsequent account appeared in the issue of Life that came out on 7 November under the small heading: ‘The case of the missing Beatle – Paul is still with us’. The cover shot was a black-and-white image of the McCartneys huddled together, smiling awkwardly – Paul, Linda, baby Mary and Heather, holding a walking stick – with the rolling hills of Argyll in the background.
Turning on the charm honed by hundreds of press conferences, McCartney patiently explained the reasons for swapping the bright lights of London for the solitude of Scotland and called the Paul-is-dead farrago ‘bloody stupid’. He said, ‘On Abbey Road we were wearing our ordinary clothes. I was walking barefoot because it was a hot day. The Volkswagen just happened to be parked there. Perhaps the rumour started because I haven’t been much in the press lately. I have done enough press for a lifetime, and I don’t have anything to say these days. I am happy to be with my family and I will work when I work. I was switched on for ten years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days . . . the people who are making up these rumours should look to themselves a little more. There is not enough time in life. They should worry about themselves instead of worrying whether I am dead or not.’
But it was his next sentence that carried the real story: ‘I would rather do what I began doing, which is making music. We make good music and we want to go on making g
ood music. But the Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people. We are individuals – all different. John married Yoko, I married Linda. We didn’t marry the same girl.’
‘The Beatle thing is over.’ Buried in the text they may have been, but McCartney’s remarks, the last interview he gave during the Sixties, should not have been open to casual misinterpretation. Yet they went unnoticed by the world’s Beatle-hungry media. This was perhaps due to the fact that Life was a weekly general interest magazine tailored to a specific audience, valued more for the quality of its photography than its words. It didn’t enjoy the mass circulation that newspapers carried, but here was a story the whole world was clamouring for – and its revelation stayed below the radar. When asked about The Beatles splitting up, Lennon was still keeping quiet about his intentions and would continue to do so for months to come. But here was McCartney delivering the news.
One man who couldn’t fail to miss the shocking message inside the article was Derek Taylor. Sitting in his wicker-backed chair at Savile Row, Taylor’s razor-sharp journalistic instincts quickly kicked into gear the moment he became aware of the Life article. The rest of the press office was put on high alert to start fielding what he felt would be an avalanche of phone calls . . . but they never came. Relieved yet puzzled, Taylor nevertheless felt duty-bound to inform Klein that McCartney may have kicked over the Apple cart on The Beatles’ future. It was the last thing the American, also then embroiled in legal warfare with the Rolling Stones, needed to hear. His relationship with McCartney remained Arctic cold. The bitter aftermath of the Northern Songs debacle and the battle with Grade continued to ripple into November, the only thing that now kept Lennon and McCartney on the same page, artistically and financially.
On 20 November, the two Beatles, through Maclen Music, issued a High Court writ against Northern Songs – now owned by ATV – demanding an audit of the books, the underlying message being that they still felt screwed by the deal. The claim centred on payments due to Northern by sub-publishers all over the world. It was an accountant’s worst nightmare, a multi-layered paper trail across three continents, Europe, America and Australia.
Insulated from all this animus – since neither was a shareholder in Northern – were Starr and Harrison, who were both striding hopefully into the future. On 6 November, Starr pitched up at Wessex Sound Studios in London to record, irony notwithstanding, his version of the 1933 torch song, ‘Stormy Weather’, the second track he would commit to tape for his first solo offering. The surroundings were strange but George Martin was again on hand to lend an air of familiarity and authority to the session. Backed by an eighteen-piece ensemble that included trombones, trumpets, saxophones, Starr again received the big-band treatment. But not even this budget-busting ensemble could rescue his lacklustre vocal, which was lost anyway amid the brass orchestration. (The song would be left off the finished album.)
Three weeks later, he finally found his voice at Abbey Road with a much improved rendition of the Hoagy Carmichael/Mitchell Parish classic, ‘Stardust’. Sticking with the sweeping orchestral textures, and using an arrangement he later credited to McCartney, Starr upped his game to deliver a performance that at least didn’t expose him to public mockery from his rock contemporaries and those Beatle fans hoping to hear something resembling ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. His choice of material seemed bizarre. Just who was it aimed at in an era when heavy rock was in serious vogue and nostalgia for big-band music had long left the building?
In contrast, Harrison had no such worries about musical mis-steps. Apple’s original mission statement was to help new acts gain a foothold on the ladder. Mary Hopkin, James Taylor and Badfinger had already benefited from McCartney’s sure-footed mentoring skills before the rot set in. Edgier artistes, however, gravitated towards Harrison, who was already developing impressive skills in the role filled for The Beatles by George Martin.
Earlier in the year, he had produced and played on acclaimed albums by Jackie Lomax and Billy Preston. Then there was Doris Troy, an American R&B singer who had moved to London in 1968 and who quickly found her vocal and songwriting talents in big demand. In the summer, she had sung back-up on a Preston session for his album, and was surprised to find a Beatle in the producer’s chair.
Knocked out by her performance, Harrison, with one swish of a Savile Row pen, quickly got her signature on an Apple contract. Their paths had briefly crossed once before when she had appeared on an episode of Ready, Steady, Go! alongside him and John in 1965. Troy, who was also being courted by the Rolling Stones, couldn’t believe her luck. Not only had she landed a rock-star mentor who seemed to eschew rock-star behaviour, they were also in tune spiritually.
Troy, the daughter of a Baptist preacher, recalled: ‘He was into this spiritual life – that was who he was. He wasn’t a partying person. He always appeared to be really cool and really calm, he never cursed anybody. He was just a good guy – the child was serious.’
By late November, Harrison was patiently steering Troy through the choppy waters of her first proper album. They even wrote one track together, the soul-tinged ‘Ain’t That Cute’, which would be released as the album’s lead single and for which Harrison recruited the likes of twenty-year-old guitar whizz Peter Frampton, Klaus Voormann, Preston and, reportedly, Starr. Co-written it may have been, but the song’s lyrics were pure Harrison, echoing the same, slightly world-weary theme as ‘I Me Mine’, which had been slated for Let It Be, and ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, rejected in January by The Beatles, though it differed from these songs thanks to an uplifting slice of Memphis soul and a rollicking good tune.
But for all his earnest dedication to production duties, Harrison couldn’t pull off a commercial hit the way McCartney had with Hopkin and would do again with Badfinger. For all its quality, ‘Ain’t That Cute’ would fail to trouble the charts on either side of the Atlantic on its release in February 1970.
Harrison may have been unable to help his artistes make the breakthrough to the mainstream market. But, with every session for those at the margins of The Beatles’ circle, the Quiet Beatle was becoming a big noise among his contemporaries. At the same time, he was honing his own musical sensibilities for the solo album taking shape in his mind.
Lennon, meanwhile, made a rare foray back to Abbey Road on 26 November, the day after he handed back his MBE, on an unusual raiding mission. Very few Beatle tracks languished in the can, with the obvious exception being the car crash that was the ‘Get Back’ tapes. Falling into the same desultory category was ‘What’s The New Mary Jane’, a trippy, acoustic curiosity recorded mainly by Lennon, Harrison and Yoko while sitting cross-legged on the floor of Studio Two in August 1968. It was never going to earn McCartney’s approval as a Beatle track but Lennon was not ready to consign it fully to the scrapheap. It was an ideal fit for the Plastic Ono Band template. Late at night, he and Yoko stole into the studio to add overdubs on to the original acetate, augmenting the vocals with whoever happened to be in the studio at the time, mainly EMI staffers and friends. The plan was to rush-release it as a Plastic Ono Band single, with ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’, another discarded oddity, but for whatever reason it never saw the light of day, remaining buried in the vaults until it was eventually dug up for the Beatles Anthology project in 1995.
It was Lennon’s only appearance at Abbey Road all November, but it belied the fact that he and Yoko had by now released two singles and three albums in 1969. Each one, however, was the sound of Lennon with one hand clapping, stepping further and further away musically from the band that had, up to now, defined his life. Walking beside him, subconsciously or not, were Harrison and Starr as the curtain of the Sixties drew to a close behind them.
Up in Scotland, McCartney was reluctantly starting down the same path. There was no longer any argument. The sum of the parts, once so symbolic, was broken. From now on, for every minute in the studio, for every press conference, for every m
eeting at Apple, for every decision in the future, it was every Beatle for himself.
© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
George Harrison, the Beatle who most loathed touring, suddenly found himself back on the road as part of the Delaney and Bonnie band that also included Eric Clapton and a cast of stellar musicians. Clapton, Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett and Harrison are pictured here backstage at Birmingham Town Hall on 4 December.
DECEMBER 1969
December brought its own winter solstice for The Beatles and the decade they had helped to shape and define. The chilly fog that enveloped the Twickenham ‘Get Back’ sessions had never fully lifted. By December they were a band officially still on life support but unofficially in extremis. Apple, once a beacon of counterculture optimism, had turned into Bleak House, with its own characters and subplots, and with Allen Klein as the omniscient narrator. Preserving the myth, though, was Abbey Road, still imperiously perched atop the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic and across the rest of the world. But for those who had the inside track, there was little point in denying the game was up.
As publisher of The Beatles Monthly, a Brian Epstein-sanctioned fanzine dedicated to the band, Sean O’Mahoney had enjoyed unfettered access to the group since the first edition hit the shelves in August 1963. Circulation peaked at 330,000 a month worldwide, thanks to a format that guaranteed slavish devotion to ‘the boys’, almost like a Beatle version of Pravda.
A blind eye was turned when the band dabbled in drugs, and when sexual infidelities had tainted their lovable ‘moptop’ image, not to mention the whole Johnandyoko soap opera. The Beatles had long outgrown their cute images, but their in-house magazine remained stubbornly entrenched in the past. Eventually, though, not even O’Mahoney could paper over the cracks.
