by Tom Doyle
Inevitably, perhaps, once it was published, the Daily Mail pounced on this quote and reprinted it under the sleight-of-hand headline ‘Sir Paul McCartney Admits Marriage to Heather Mills Was His “Biggest Mistake”’. Of course, this was entirely beyond my control, and, through a writer friend, I heard that even though Paul was irked by it, he didn’t blame me.
Increasingly, a more informal tone began to characterise our conversations, often conducted via phone when he had half an hour spare, shooting from somewhere to somewhere in the back of a car in Europe or America. Once I had to wait in for almost an entire dreary week, his publicist telling me that Paul – on holiday at the time and so virtually impossible to pin down – would call me between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. on any number of given days. Another time, we spoke for ten minutes two days before Christmas and both of us had colds, and it was clear that neither of us was really in the mood.
At the end of one call in the middle of his summer holiday in the Hamptons, he seemed at a loose end and clearly wanted to carry on nattering away, talking about what we both had planned for the rest of the day.
‘You know what?’ he said, making the rest of his day sound a touch more idyllic than mine. ‘I’m actually going to have a sail on my wee sailboat. It’s a nice day here and it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon.’
I told him that a long-lens shot had appeared in that morning’s papers, strangely enough, of him posing behind a dress hanging on a clothes-line. It turned out that he and his then girlfriend, now third wife, Nancy Shevell had been wandering past a clothes stall when Paul spotted a shifty photographer.
‘It’s weird, ’cause I saw him and I thought, I bet that’s a pap,’ he said. ‘And I thought, Nah, I’m being paranoid. But my instincts are too damn good on that stuff and I was right. I sort of went up to him, but he was a coward and he drove off.
‘I did say to Nancy, “D’you know what? Look, it’s us having fun on holiday, we’re having a laugh.” Y’know, standing behind a dress. I was originally trying to get her to stand behind it to see if it fitted her. So I got behind it and I must admit, as I did it, I thought, He’s gonna get this, this’ll be the one.’
Still, he admitted that on numerous occasions such a laissez-faire attitude to the paparazzi is hard to maintain. He comically fumed that he finds it hard to relax on a beach, lest a concealed snapper grab a few frames of him looking paunchy. He recalled enviously spying another bloke of a similar age on holiday one time. ‘Just a family man and his belly was hanging out,’ he said wistfully. ‘He didn’t give a shit, he’s playing with his kids. But I’m looking to see who’s in the hotel room with a long lens.’
Talking to him on the phone over three nights in spring 2013, as he rather nervously drove himself to the studio in Los Angeles in ‘a low-slung sports car . . . I’m used to a big, high, strong SUV’, he swung between bursts of annoyance about the intrusions caused by his celebrity and being gently tickled by the notion that he has one of the most famous faces on earth. He broke off our conversation at one point, having been spotted by a fan, to bark under his breath, ‘Oi! No. Pfff-fucking hell. Everyone’s got a camera these days.’
At another point he suddenly began killing himself laughing for no apparent reason. ‘I’ve got a funny thing happening here, Tom,’ he explained. ‘I’m driving along, and right behind me there’s one of those buses doing the Star Tours. I always want to stop and get out and go, “Hey, guys, how’re you doing?” I love the irony of it. They’re going around, saying, “Oh, here’s so and so, here’s so and so.” And I’m right under their noses, man.’
He arrived at the studio and seemed to be having a bit of trouble parking the sports car. ‘Whoops,’ he cried out. ‘I’ve just clunked me car. Shit. Hold on. It’s a lesson in parking – how to not hit things in front of you.’
In Los Angeles, against his better judgement, he’ll find himself jumping red lights in an effort to escape the paps. ‘You think, This is dangerous,’ he said. ‘It’s like a spy chase and you think, Spies get killed doing this. And I didn’t do anything.’
In New York, more gallingly, he’ll try to placate tailing photographers only to have his peace offering thrown back in his face. He’ll pull the car over and three or four others will screech to a halt behind him. He’ll get out and make them a deal: take your picture, then leave me alone.
‘These days, of course, they’ve even got video cameras,’ he pointed out, ‘which is embarrassing ’cause I used to love gritting my teeth and going, “I hate you but I’m smiling.” So I say, “OK, guys, that’s it, you’ve got your picture.” Get back in the car and they just keep on following.’
‘Ever hit a photographer?’ I asked him.
‘Nah,’ he said, softly and without any real conviction, before changing his mind. ‘Well, I have, actually. But it didn’t get reported. I got lucky. I think he thought he deserved it.
‘But I always remember the famous story that gives you pause for thought, which was Mick Jagger was allegedly in Paris one night and he comes out of a nightclub and there was a photographer. Mick went up to the guy to clock him one. The guy turned out to be into karate. Went foo-foo-foo-foo-foom. Got Mick on the floor, then took a picture.’
Only once did I witness McCartney dealing with photographers first-hand. I was charged with chaperoning him at the Q Awards in 2010, where he was picking up an award for the remastered Band On The Run. Arrangements had been made for him to arrive at the service entrance at the back of the Grosvenor House Hotel, to save him having to negotiate the red-carpet rat-run beloved of artists with a record to plug.
He arrived, with only one security guard in tow, in a car driven by his long-time personal assistant, former Wings guitar tech John Hammel, and good-naturedly elbowed his way through a clot of snappers and fans who had made a hasty dash the few yards down from the gate where the other attendees were shuffling in.
Once I’d ushered him inside and into an ante-room reserved for him by the organisers, he was chipper, if a touch confused – as is sometimes the way up in the dizzy altitudes of the superstar – by the exact nature of the do. ‘Is this the Q Awards or the GQ Awards? Are there film stars out there or just musicians?’ he asked me, trying on a couple of jackets and seeking my approval and Hammel’s, before settling on a navy-blue number with matching epaulettes.
Ten minutes later followed a bizarre moment when myself, Hammel, the security guy and a couple of the awards organisers marched down the corridors in convoy, like a presidential procession, to show the former Beatle where he could take a leak.
En route, a bloke who claimed to be from Q (though I’d never seen him before) stopped McCartney, grabbed his hand and nervously burbled, ‘Oh wow hi Paul I just wanted to say it’s a total honour to meet you,’ as McCartney calmly and politely responded – as he has doubtless done thousands of times – ‘Well, thanks, great to meet you too.’
But then the guy wouldn’t let go of his hand, continuing to shake it maniacally, visibly tightening his grip. The disbelief began to spread across McCartney’s face. From what I’ve seen and experienced, one of the worst things you can do when meeting a famous person is lose the plot in the manner of a frothing, hyperventilating fan (fan, of course, being short for fanatic).
‘I’ll let you go then,’ said the bloke, sensing McCartney’s discomfort and finally loosening his grasp.
As we continued on our way down the corridor, Paul, in a revealing moment, turned to me, laughing, completely at ease, and said, ‘That was fucking big of him to let me go, wasn’t it?’
An hour or so later, onstage, in front of an assemblage comprising, as he put it, ‘All the younger bands . . . which is pretty much everybody,’ McCartney accepted the award for Classic Album for Band On The Run, dedicating it to Linda in a characteristically jocular though properly heartfelt speech.
‘The Beatles were a pretty hard act to follow and we were gonna follow them,’ he said into the microphone, to whoops and cheers. ‘Linda was getti
ng slagged off for being in my band. I was getting slagged off for letting her in the band. This album was quite a struggle to make.’
If any word sums up Paul McCartney in the 1970s, it is struggle. Another is escape.
In essence, he spent the decade struggling to escape the shadow of The Beatles, effectively becoming an outlaw hippie millionaire, hiding out on his Scottish farmhouse, before travelling the world with makeshift bands and barefoot children. It was a time of numerous drug busts and brilliant, banned and sometimes baffling records. For McCartney, it was an edgy, liberating, sometimes frightening period of his life that has largely been forgotten.
When discussing this period in depth with him, a notion sparked in my head that led to the writing of this book. For me, a very different figure was beginning to emerge, in sharp contrast to the oft-perceived slightly cosy, head-wobbling (inter)national treasure who these days opens the Olympics or performs for the Queen.
Between 1969 and 1981, Paul McCartney was a man on the run – from his recent past as a Beatle, from his horrendous split from his bandmates, from the towering expectation that surrounded his every move. Behind his lasting image during that period as a Bambi-eyed soft-rock balladeer, he was actually a far more counter-culturally leaning individual (albeit one overshadowed by the light-sucking Lennon) than he was ever given credit for – freewheeling in his hippiefied way, taking to the road with a ‘bunch of nutters’ for an impromptu, disorganised university tour with the proto-Wings, viewing the world though perma-stoned eyes and defiantly continuing to flick two fingers at authorities the world over who sought to criminalise him, all the while adopting a shrugging, amused attitude to it all.
These days he marvels at a photograph taken of him carrying the naked infant Mary through Dublin Airport in the early 1970s (‘I could not imagine that now’), yet he is still slightly disbelieving of the Victorian attitudes that saw him being forced to put swimsuits on his nude, pool-diving children by the staff of an exclusive country club in Lagos during the making of Band On The Run. ‘I’m going, “You’re kidding? They’re aged nothing.”’
If there was one key insight that struck me during my conversations with McCartney and the research and writing of this book, it was his eccentricity, which often gets lost behind his deceptive façade of straightness. As his devoted 1970s Wings sidekick Denny Laine told me, ‘Paul is a bit eccentric, and whatever he wants he usually gets.’
This eccentricity is perhaps the key to everything – from the release of the bewildering ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ single to his 1972 European tour in a gaudily painted open-topped bus, to the beautifully dreamy, softly psychedelic US number one written about his uncle Albert, to his incarceration in Japan in 1980 after attempting to sneak half a pound of marijuana into the country.
In this way, Man on the Run sets out to tell the tale of a man living outwith normal society and, for better or for worse, acting on his own tangential whims, during a chaotic and fascinating period of his life.
Back in the late 1960s, much to Lennon’s delight, his Beatle band-mate had come up with the idea of recording a wholly experimental album entitled Paul McCartney Goes Too Far. While that never came to pass, in many ways, in the 1970s, Paul McCartney did go too far, and not always in the right directions.
‘You have to be honest about your past,’ he confessed to me at one point. ‘I was such a daring young thing. We were on this wacky adventure.’
Your first solo album, McCartney. You recorded that at home, in secret, in the midst of all of your wrangles with The Beatles.
Yeah. It was really . . . kind of . . . therapy through hell. It was one of the worst times of my life.
1
On the Run
He knew he was in trouble the morning he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. He awoke, face down, his skull feeling like a useless dead weight. A dark thought flashed through his mind: if he couldn’t make the effort to pull himself up, he’d suffocate right there and then.
Somehow, as if it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, he summoned the energy to move. He flipped over on to his back and thought, Jesus . . . that was a bit near.
Day by day, week by week, his condition had been steadily worsening. His often sleepless nights were spent shaking with anxiety, while his days, which he was finding harder and harder to face, were characterised by heavy drinking and self-sedation with marijuana. He found himself chain-smoking his untipped, lung-blackening Senior Service cigarettes one after another after another.
Later, he would look back on this period and tell everyone that he’d almost had a nervous breakdown. From the outside, there appeared to be no ‘almost’ about it.
For the first time in his life, he felt utterly worthless. Everything he had been since the age of fifteen had been wrapped up in the band. Now, even though he couldn’t tell the world, that period of his life was almost certainly over.
It was as if he’d suddenly and unexpectedly lost his job, been made entirely redundant. He was 27 and of no use to anyone any more. Even the money he’d earned up to this point was no comfort, made no real difference. This was an identity crisis in extremis: who exactly was he if he wasn’t Beatle Paul McCartney?
On the mornings when he forced himself to rise, he’d sit on the edge of his bed for a while before defeatedly crawling back under the covers. When he did get up and out of bed he’d reach straight for the whisky, his drinking creeping earlier and earlier into the day. By three in the afternoon, he was usually out of it.
‘I hit the bottle,’ he admits. ‘I hit the substances.’
He was eaten up with anger – at himself, at the outside world. He could only describe it as a barrelling, empty feeling rolling across his soul.
Out of work and with nothing to distract him, the ghosts from his past would rise up, whispering in his head, telling him, in spite of everything he’d achieved, that they knew he’d never really amount to anything. That he should have got a proper job in the first place, just as they’d always said.
He realised that up until this point he’d been a ‘cocky sod’. And now there was this: the first serious blow to his confidence he’d ever experienced. Even when he was fourteen and the mastectomy couldn’t save his mother’s life, he had known that that horrific event had been outwith his control. Somehow, now, in the depths of his muddied thinking, he was starting to believe that everything that was happening was nobody’s fault but his own.
His wife of less than a year felt the situation was ‘frightening beyond belief’. Within a matter of months, her new partner had gone from being a sparky, driven, world-famous rock star to a broken man who didn’t want to set foot out of their bedroom. But even if Linda was scared, she knew she couldn’t give up on Paul. She recognised that her husband was sinking into emotional quicksand, and she knew that it was down to her alone to pull him out before he went under for good.
‘Linda saved me,’ he says. ‘And it was all done in a sort of domestic setting.’
It had been two years since they’d first met at the Bag O’ Nails nightclub in Soho, four days later being seen deep in conversation at the press launch for Sgt. Pepper. It was only a year since they’d managed to float unnoticed together through the streets of New York (where, in Chinatown, he had comically tried to pull her into a temple offering Buddhist weddings), before flying from coast to coast, landing in Los Angeles and disappearing for days into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was still only six months since they’d giggled their way through their wedding ceremony at Marylebone registry office in London, amid a fog of seething female jealousy that seemed to spread across the world.
He had been the last single Beatle, the one seen about town, haunting the clubs and hanging with the artsy crowd. She was the American single-mother divorcee who had earned some renown as a rock photographer and who had apparently had flings with Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. To Paul, Linda appeared deeper than the frothy, starry-eyed girls who tended to flock around him, less buttoned
-up than his then paramour, actress Jane Asher.
Linda would take Paul out on long drives, saying ‘Let’s get lost’ in her drawly, stoney way, showing him a new kind of freedom. She had surprised him by telling him, ‘I could make you a nice home.’
Now it was autumn 1969, and the McCartneys were in Scotland, ‘hiding away in the mists’ as Paul puts it. They had escaped here, far from London and the heavy weather of intra-Beatle feuding that refused to lift.
But High Park Farm was no rock-star country pile. Paul had bought the run-down farmhouse, set on a hill overlooking Skeroblin Loch in 183 acres of rough Scottish landscape, back in June 1966, the year he became a millionaire. His accountant had suggested that McCartney invest in property to wrestle some of his earnings away from the clutches of Harold Wilson and his Labour government’s painful 95 per cent super-taxing of high earners.
The ever frugal Paul, of course, leaped at such an opportunity, picking High Park Farm out of the reams of property documents his accountant sent him. The asking price was a not insubstantial £35,000, more than ten times the cost of the average family home in the mid-1960s. It was, says Paul, ‘wee’, consisting of only three rooms: a bedroom at either end separated by its kitchen-cum-living area. The hole in the roof of the farmhouse was included in the deal.
But it was another eighteen months after the purchase, in December 1967, before Paul, with Jane Asher in tow, made the trip north to check out his new investment. High Park was set more than a mile up a bumpy single track, and visitors unprepared for the terrain would moan that the drive would virtually wreck their offroad-unworthy vehicles.
The sorely neglected property was in a wild and windswept location, fourteen miles from the southern tip of the remote Kintyre peninsula. Three miles west from the hill lay the six-mile sweep of beach at Machrihanish Bay. A five-mile drive south-east down the A83 sat the small fishing port of Campbeltown and the closest amenities.
