Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  The new Wings fell together quickly and painlessly. But it was the first time McCartney had been backed by essentially jobbing musicians, for hire for anyone from Cleo Laine to Kiki Dee, who perhaps lacked the musical character of his former bandmates, however turbulent his relationships with them had been. Later, Paul admitted as much. ‘Even though they were good players,’ he said, ‘my enthusiasm had peaked.’

  This Mk III version of the group first convened in June 1978 at the Scottish barn studio, now named Spirit of Ranachan. Unlike several of their predecessors, Juber and Holley weren’t at all sniffy about being asked to live and work in such a far-flung and relatively unrefined environment. The drummer, who acknowledges that he was still fairly green at the time, says, ‘I didn’t really know how anything worked in the music business at that level, so for me it was a complete surprise.’ The guitarist, who had a little more experience, notes, ‘There were some creature comforts there, but nonetheless it was a converted barn.’

  The pair were clearly just thrilled to be working with McCartney. There were early indications, however, that things weren’t quite right. One evening at the barn, Linda confided to Holley that she really didn’t want to be in the band any more. ‘All I truly want,’ she told the drummer, ‘is to be here with my family.’ Denny, meanwhile, could suddenly pull rank in unpleasant ways. Holley says that he’d written the heavy, loping guitar riff for what became ‘Old Siam, Sir’ in rehearsals one day, before Denny picked up on it, aped it, and claimed it as his own when Paul arrived. An argument, verging on a fist-fight, broke out between Laine and Holley, which had to calmed by McCartney, who, perhaps through loyalty, sided with Denny.

  Holley was given a strong indication of the level of dedication required from him now that he was a member of Wings when, out of the blue, he was called by Jimmy McCulloch, asking him to play on his first solo album. Not knowing exactly what the deal was now regarding his extracurricular playing, not least with someone who had split from McCartney not so long ago, the drummer asked Alan Crowder at MPL how he thought this information might go down with Paul. ‘I remember it not being well received,’ Holley remembers. ‘He said to me, “You’d be out of your mind to do that.”’

  As the making of the album moved south to England, Paul and Linda began looking for a place to work that was an easy commute from their home at Peasmarsh, rather than forcing them to schlep up to London every day. Lympne Castle in Kent seemed to provide the answer, continuing their ritual of recording in unusual locations while being within an easy drive of their home. A medieval castle with arched Gothic windows and spiralling stone staircases, it brought a sense of otherness to the proceedings. ‘It had battlements and even a ghost,’ says Juber. The band set up in the ballroom, snaking their cables up the medieval stairwells to the drawing-room turned control room upstairs.

  Paul threw everything into the record that was to become the maligned Back To The Egg, recording dozens of songs that ranged from rattling new wave-ish rockers like ‘Spin It On’ (which still sounded too smoothed out to be truly edgy) and the power-popping, Squeeze-echoing ‘Getting Closer’ to the old-timey crooner swing of ‘Baby’s Request’. There were weird – and not in a good way – collages of spoken word by Lympne Castle owners Mr and Mrs Margary, who quoted obscure literary texts over funky grooves (‘Reception’) or faux-classical arrangements (‘The Broadcast’). There was too much material, and yet not enough of it to gel into a cohesive album.

  For their part, the two new musicians might have started to sense that Paul was a touch jaded about the whole affair. ‘Jaded is a loaded word,’ points out Juber. ‘But you have Paul’s work ethic, which is just to keep working. The goal was productivity.’

  ‘If he was jaded,’ Holley argues, ‘well, how could you not be? He’d achieved so much. There was a disappointment that was evident in a lot of areas.’

  It was coming to the end of the 1970s, and just like the low, fuggy mood that had surrounded the close of the previous decade, there was a feeling that, for McCartney and his generation of 1960s musicians who had survived the subsequent years, a familiar kind of hangover was beginning to kick in.

  This became all too dramatically evident at the beginning of September 1978, in the wake of what had been established as the annual Buddy Holly week, inaugurated by McCartney three years earlier. For Paul, this yearly occurrence worked on two levels – he was able to pay tribute to one of his formative musical heroes and, since he’d bought Holly’s song catalogue back in 1971 as an investment at the urging of Lee Eastman, he was able subtly to promote his business interests.

  The first event, in September 1976, after Wings had returned from their US tour, saw producer Norman Petty ceremonially present McCartney with the cuff-links Buddy Holly had been wearing on his fatal flight in 1959. In 1977, the late singer’s former backing band The Crickets reunited for a performance. This year would be marked by the British premiere of the Gary Busey-starring biopic The Buddy Holly Story at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square. The guests, including David Frost, Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton, members of Roxy Music, and Keith Moon, wearing a black leather jacket and Wings T-shirt, were treated to dinner beforehand at the voguish Covent Garden restaurant Peppermint Park.

  Moon, who was sober at this point, but who had been snorting cocaine earlier in the evening, looked both wired and weary, and older than his 32 years. He fell ill during the screening and left. Along with his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax, he returned to the Curzon Place flat in Mayfair that he was borrowing from Harry Nilsson. Four years earlier, the flat had been the scene of the death from heart failure of Mama Cass of The Mamas and the Papas.

  The Who’s drummer, after scarfing down a sedative called Heminevrin to take the edge off his alcohol withdrawal, fell asleep in bed in front of the TV while watching the Vincent Price horror flick The Abominable Dr Phibes. In the morning, Moon woke and ate a breakfast of steak and eggs made by Walter-Lax after an argument during which he had told her to ‘fuck off. He popped more pills, watched the rest of the film and nodded out. At 3.40 p.m. on the afternoon of 7 September, his girlfriend woke to find him dead.

  Less than four weeks after his death, Keith Moon was the ghost at the scene of McCartney’s next grand venture. As if a cocky display by Paul and his contemporaries to celebrate the fact that they’d survived the tumultuous 1970s, Rockestra found McCartney conducting his musician mates as they made a big noise. On 3 October, at Abbey Road, he assembled this mock-orchestra of premier-league bassists, guitarists, keyboard-players and drummers to create the ‘Rockestra Theme’.

  Those who accepted the invitation and made up the numbers included musicians who had come up alongside McCartney (Hank Marvin, Pete Townshend), those who had followed (Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, John Bonham and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin) and even a sole representative of the new-wave community (bassist Bruce Thomas of Elvis Costello’s band The Attractions). Among the no-shows were Jimmy Page (although a roadie did set up his amp ready for his arrival), Jeff Beck (who didn’t like the idea that he had no control over the final track) and Eric Clapton. ‘He didn’t feel like it,’ Paul commented tersely on the non-appearance of Clapton.

  The resulting, largely instrumental track, a chugging, bluesy rocker aspiring to the grand movements of big-band swing, was nailed in five takes, sounding like it was perhaps more fun to play than to hear. There was certainly no shortage of high-jinks on the day, including, according to Jo Jo Patrie, a line of coked-up rock stars queuing up to use the men’s room. Even with the spectre of Keith Moon haunting the proceedings, the party went on. The comedown, however, was to be a long one. Two years later, John Bonham, too, was to die, choking on his own vomit after a heavy drinking binge.

  Denny Laine’s own indulgences were worsening, though he still found time to get married, on a yacht in Boston harbour on 5 November, to Jo Jo. The bride in particular was a bit put out that the McCartneys didn’t show for the ceremony, only weeks later se
nding the happy couple a silk bedding set, unwrapped, in a shopping bag, with no card. There was clearly still no love lost between the McCartneys and the untameable former groupie.

  Paul and Linda were, at the same time, being surprisingly profligate in other respects. In preparing the cover for the forthcoming hits compilation album Wings Greatest, a design team was flown to the Swiss Alps to shoot a figurine of a burlesque dancer – with her arms outstretched, as if ready to take to the air – positioned in the snow. It became something of a ridiculous endeavour: a snowdrift was artificially created, shots were taken from a helicopter. Ultimately, the image used might have been captured in any decent photographic studio back in London for far less than the $8,000 it cost to create the sleeve of Wings Greatest. ‘It really did not need that degree of money and time and effort spent on it,’ reckoned photographer Robert Ellis. ‘It was a complete and utter obscenity.’

  The spending didn’t stop there. Becoming irked by the fact that he was frequently unable to book his spiritual recording home at Abbey Road, with entire months at the facility having been blocked out by EMI’s new darling, Kate Bush, McCartney, at great expense, turned the basement at MPL into a facsimile of the studio, pointedly naming it Replica. The making of Back To The Egg continued there, running over into the first weeks of 1979. It was becoming clear, though, that Denny Laine, never one for spending days and weeks poring over takes and mixes, was growing weary of the endless recording. ‘I’m desperate to be on tour,’ he said. ‘I get twitchy sitting around in a studio. I’m quite sure we’ll be touring soon, otherwise I honestly feel that I wouldn’t be able to stay in Wings.’

  McCartney still drove himself relentlessly onwards. ‘It was hard to get Paul not to work,’ says Laurence Juber. ‘I remember being in Replica studios when he had a lousy cold and he was still at it. It took a lot for Paul to call the session off and say, “I just don’t feel up to it.”’ In many ways, McCartney was striving for the breakthrough that never came. Even when he’d bagged the Latin-tinged dance-floor groove of the naggingly catchy ‘Goodnight Tonight’, an obvious single, Paul had reservations about the track. Still searching for a likely hit, at the close of one fruitless session at Replica he threw down a challenge to the other members of Wings: come up with a song over the weekend, and we’ll consider it for the next single. Obviously, for the other musicians, this was a potentially lucrative opportunity. Separately, Juber, Holley, Laine and even Linda got their heads into writing mode over the weekend, only for Paul to arrive at the studio on Monday and trump them all with ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’, a song he’d written himself over the previous two days. It was as if, missing the games of creative one-upmanship he’d enjoyed playing with Lennon, McCartney was manufacturing a false sense of rivalry.

  Indecision set in again, this time over whether ‘Goodnight Tonight’ or ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’ – mixed and remixed nearly 50 times – should be the A-side, with Paul doubting the firm opinion of the others that the former was the clearly superior song. ‘We sat around for years – well, it seemed like years – discussing it,’ McCartney said. ‘The normal soul-searching you go through. And we decided, No, it isn’t right, we won’t put it out. And about a week later, I played the record again. I thought, That’s crazy, we’ve made it . . . why not put it out?’

  As the tracks for Back To The Egg were being completed, McCartney turned to David Bowie, himself nearing the end of a peerlessly inspired 1970s, to ask for his opinion of the new songs. Chris Thomas recalled that Bowie sat there saying, ‘Like this . . . not that . . . this is good . . . keep this . . . not that one’, doubtless relishing the novelty of being required to critique an ex-Beatle. His art-rock-slanted views were perhaps not to be trusted, however. Bowie, mischievously, suggested that the abstract, minute-and-a-half-long ‘The Broadcast’ should be Paul’s next single.

  Instead, Wings released ‘Goodnight Tonight’, complete with a video shot at London’s Hammersmith Palais, featuring the band sporting 1930s garb – black suits and dickie bows, their hair slicked back with gel. Fooling around on the stage during the long day, the group ran through rock’n’roll standards including the enduring ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, McCartney’s acid test for any band. But this was a more vanilla and conservative outfit in many ways, lacking the wildness of spirit that Jimmy McCulloch, Henry McCullough or even Geoff Britton had brought to the party. Holley, unable to find the make-up artist at the end of the shoot, was even nervous about being forced to drive home with his hair pinned and greased, wearing thick foundation. ‘I just thought, I hope to God I don’t get stopped,’ he says.

  McCartney had just signed a new US record deal, fuelling the procrastination over the first single to be released by the new if not entirely improved Wings. His contract with Capitol having lapsed, he moved over to Columbia, cutting himself a money-hoovering deal that made him the highest-paid recording artist in the world, with a $2 million advance on his future albums and an unparalleled 22 per cent royalty, at least four per cent more than any of his rivals had secured. The president of the company, Walter Yetnikoff, even threw in a clause that allowed Paul and Linda the use of the company’s private jet.

  Paul was a prestige signing for the record label. When he first visited Columbia’s offices in New York for a grip-and-grin meeting with its employees, some of them shook with nerves, as if they were being granted an audience with the Queen. Still, there were those at the company who felt that the deal was over the top. Later, one anonymous employee was to say, ‘It was too much money for an artist who was obviously past his prime. We knew we would have to really work our asses off to try to earn some of that money back.’

  At the same time as business was booming for McCartney, Allen Klein was being jailed in New York. Found guilty of tax evasion, he was given a two-year sentence, of which he would only have to serve two months. Commenting at the time, Paul tried not to sound too pleased. ‘I feel sorry for him now,’ he said. ‘But I was caught in his net once, and that panicked me. I really wanted to do everything to get him. I was contemplating going to where he lives and walking outside his house with placards. I was really crazy at that time.’

  With the villain of the piece in jail, the ex-Beatles seemed to be in a more playful mood. At the 19 May 1979 wedding celebration thrown by Eric Clapton at his home in Surrey to toast his marriage to Patti Boyd – notably, of course, George Harrison’s first wife, the two friends having reached some kind of peace in the aftermath of the difficult affair – the former bandmates were practically on frolicsome form. Paul described Ringo and George as ‘two old flames’ as he called them to the stage in the marquee pitched on the lawn of the estate, and along with Clapton they drunkenly hammered through some old rock’n’roll standards and even a few Beatles numbers, including ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and ‘Get Back’. ‘The music was terrible, absolute rubbish,’ said Denny Laine, who watched this impromptu and over-refreshed three-quarters Beatles reunion from the audience of party-goers. ‘It’s lucky nobody made a tape.’

  Back To The Egg was launched with a surreal press call held in the hallowed Studio Two at Abbey Road, its interior decked out as if it were the inside of a giant frying-pan. Journalists sat at tables under parasols made to resemble enormous fried eggs. Asked about his future intentions, Paul, unsurprisingly, said he was planning to take this new line-up of the band on the road.

  The marketing budget for the album, underwritten by Columbia, was far higher than for any of the previous Wings albums. The band returned to Lympne Castle to shoot a number of expensive promo videos, including one for the ballad ‘Winter Rose’, which the production team decided needed a snowy setting, requiring them to spray gallons of white foam over two areas of the grounds. ‘They’d promised the Margarys, the owners of the castle, that it wouldn’t damage any of the grass or foliage,’ Steve Holley remembers. ‘But then it washed away and it had turned everything brown.’

  A minute-long TV ad, screened during prime-
time, announced Back To The Egg as ‘a timeless rock’n’roll flight through twelve superbly produced new songs on an album that really is perfection’. It was certainly an album made by a perfectionist, even if he was one unable to wholly trust his creative instincts.

  Upon its release in May, ‘Goodnight Tonight’ reached a respectable number 5 in both the UK and the US. The album followed, peaking at six in Britain and, disappointingly, eight in America. Back To The Egg sold more than a million copies in the US, a respectable figure in the middle of the economic recession of 1979, but this didn’t quite satisfy McCartney’s investors at Columbia. Part of the problem was that – in a practice that harked back to the 1960s, when it was thought that not putting a single on its parent LP offered value for money – Paul had argued against including ‘Goodnight Tonight’ on the album. But times had moved on and, particularly in the US, every album release needed a radio hit, or two, to push sales. By not featuring the hit single on the album, opined one record executive, Paul had shot himself in the foot, particularly when the follow-ups released from Back To The Egg in the States – the chiming, upbeat ‘Getting Closer’ and the tailored-for-FM-radio Philly soul homage ‘Arrow Through Me’ – failed to even puncture the Top Twenty.

  Acknowledging its relatively poor sales, Paul joked that it was less a concept album and more a ‘bomb-cept’ album.

  Unperturbed, and flush with the proceeds of the Columbia deal, that summer the McCartneys bought the property neighbouring their Sussex home, Lower Gate Farm, for £250,000, planning at some point in the future to knock down its semi-derelict farmhouse, perched on a hill, and build in its place a house designed by Paul. The plan was purposely modest. A five-bedroomed house, which provided each of the kids with their own room, it was not overly expansive. The couple hated the idea of living in some huge, posh country home where the children might be ‘rattling around in the east wing, and you never see them’.