Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  He met the press at the gates of Blossom Wood Farm. ‘I’d prefer to forget this incident right now,’ he told them. Asked whether he was now planning to get back to ‘the English way of life’ and spend time with his family, Paul tetchily responded, ‘Yeah, if you fellas would leave me alone, that would be possible.’

  The last thing Paul wanted to do, it seemed, was to get back rehearsing with the group. ‘It sucked the momentum out of Wings,’ says Juber. This was partly as a result of a sudden rift between McCartney and the long-serving Denny Laine, who in the wake of the debacle had returned to the UK and spent most of his time at Rock City Studios in Shepperton, recording his own solo album. Indicating his ambivalent feelings about the drama, Laine called it Japanese Tears, after the opening song which found him comforting a Wings fan distraught about the cancelled tour. Throughout, it transpired, the band had still been paid their weekly wage retainers, but had each lost out in the region of £50,000 in tour profits. Laine admitted he was miffed: ‘I felt I was entitled to an explanation, but I never got one. He felt very sorry for himself when he came out of prison but he didn’t seem to understand he’d upset a lot of people.’

  McCartney next resurfaced on 30 January, when he filmed a prerecorded tribute for a forthcoming edition of the TV show This is Your Life, dedicated to George Martin. Later, he talked to Paul Gambaccini for Rolling Stone, saying that his Japanese arrest had reminded him of when, as a kid, he would get on a train in Liverpool with a second-class ticket and sneak into a first-class compartment. ‘And I always got caught,’ he stressed.

  It was clear that Paul’s freewheeling years were over. ‘I suppose I was treated this way because I am Paul McCartney,’ he reflected, not acknowledging the fact that anyone who had tried to smuggle half a pound of dope through Japanese Customs would have been treated the same way, and, moreover, that his fame had saved him from a long prison sentence. ‘It’s not bad for you to be humiliated at times,’ he reckoned. ‘It’s sort of cleansing.’ At the same time, this new-found notoriety upped his cool, Rolling Stone naming him ‘the world’s most famous pot smoker’.

  Looking back now, he refuses even to entertain thoughts of whether or not he could have endured a seven-year stretch in a Japanese prison.

  ‘I’d prefer to not even let that question go round my brain,’ he sighs. ‘I’ve put it away and it’s over with now.’

  What effect did John dying have on you personally?

  It was just a huge loss. As it was to all his mates and, in actual fact, to the rest of the world. It was a combination of the fact that he wasn’t coming back, the circumstances in which he’d died, the whole futility of it all. I don’t know if you ever get over those things.

  14

  The Wake-up Call

  Linda was coming up the driveway of the Sussex farm, returning from the school run, when Paul emerged from the house. As soon as she saw his face she knew something was wrong. He was sobbing; he looked desperate. She’d never seen him in this state before.

  It was the morning of Tuesday, 9 December 1980. ‘He told me what had happened,’ she remembered, ‘and then we were both crying.’

  For all their carping and sniping, bitterness and petty disgruntlement, Paul and John had been getting on better. Their relationship had progressed via a series of infrequent telephone calls that had become warmer than their scattered bursts of sharp words in the media might have suggested. During the small-talk and trivia of one conversation, early in 1980, McCartney casually asked Lennon whether he was writing songs. ‘Just out of my curiosity,’ Paul explained. ‘He told me he was finished doing that.’

  In May, McCartney II was released, intended as a double but, perhaps sensibly, edited down to a single album. Exploring new possibilities in video technology, Paul shot a promo for ‘Coming Up’, in which he played all the parts of a group named, with a nod to new wave, The Plastic Macs. Lennon would later point out that it was an ideal fantasy scenario for McCartney, since he’d essentially always wanted to be a one-man band.

  For the clip, Paul dived into the dressing-up box to play out various rock archetypes: the hairy Neanderthal drummer, the spaced-out hippie guitarist, the four members of a greaser horn section. On keyboards, he mimicked the discomfitingly expressionless Ron Mael of Sparks; on second guitar, the grinning, thick-horn-rimmed Hank Marvin of The Shadows. On bass, most surprisingly, in collarless jacket and mop-top, pumping away at his old violin-shaped Höfner, he reinhabited the character of Beatle Paul, with all the woos and cutesy hair-tosses.

  It was a stranger experience than he might have anticipated. ‘I almost chickened out,’ he admitted. ‘But once I put on the old uniform, I thought, Ah well, it’s a laugh, what the hell.’ On the body of the bass he found taped an old Beatles set-list from their final 1966 tour that he’d forgotten was there, instantly zapping him back fourteen years. As he walked on to the set dressed as Beatle Paul, the mood among the studio technicians instantly turned buzzy; some suddenly asked him for his autograph. He found it ‘a very kind of weird, exciting feeling really. I felt like I was at a TV show twenty years ago. It felt exactly the same.’

  Only in the days after did he realise that, for him, it had been an exorcism of sorts. ‘I’d actually gone and broken the whole voodoo of The Beatles,’ he said, ‘’cause I’d been him again and it didn’t feel bad.’

  Lennon was being driven by Fred Seaman through Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, when he first heard ‘Coming Up’ on the radio. ‘Fuck a pig, it’s Paul,’ he exclaimed, before turning up the volume and nodding along. ‘Not bad,’ he decided at the song’s conclusion. He asked Seaman to buy him a copy of McCartney II and set up a new stereo system in his bedroom specifically so he could listen to it. The next day, ‘Coming Up’ was still rattling around John’s head. ‘It’s driving me crackers,’ he told Seaman, before venturing the opinion that even if its parent album was patchy, at least Paul was back trying to do something eclectic and experimental.

  While Lennon had apparently retired and disappeared, McCartney maintained his public profile and began to pile up the awards: he was named Outstanding Music Personality at the British Rock and Pop Awards, won Best Instrumental for ‘Rockestra Theme’ at the Grammys, and was presented with an Ivor Novello award by Yul Brynner, the star of The Magnificent Seven and The King and I. Even Linda was picking up some belated recognition, with Argentinian director Oscar Grillo’s animation for her single ‘Seaside Woman’, released three years earlier, bagging the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes. The McCartneys slipped into the cinema unannounced and watched the screening, quietly touched by the unexpected applause it prompted.

  In France, McCartney held a press launch of sorts for McCartney II, handing out free LPs to journalists. He was asked by one if there was ever the chance of new Lennon/McCartney material. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say there would be, actually,’ he replied, explaining that John had told him he had no interest in making music. ‘Most of us do our jobs to arrive at a point where we no longer have to do our jobs,’ he reasoned, ‘and we can put our feet up and enjoy life for a change. I think John’s probably reached that point.’

  Secretly, in fact, John was writing again, his dormant competitive rivalry with Paul awakened after hearing McCartney II. In Bermuda, over the summer, the songs began to pour out of him. First came the eerily prophetic reggae of ‘Borrowed Time’, to be followed by the narky, fame-rejecting ‘I Don’t Wanna Face It’ and the serene, absence-explaining ‘Watching The Wheels’. If the passing of time had softened his edges, there was real self-awareness and maturity surfacing in his music, beyond the sloganeering and abstract aphorisms of the past. It was his last creative surge.

  Meanwhile, Paul was still on the campaign trail. In June he shot the strange fantasy video for ‘Waterfalls’, in which he appeared oddly straight, his hair trimmed like a banker’s, sporting beige cords and Fair Isle waistcoat, backdropped by multi-coloured fountains of water and at one point sharing the set with an eight-foot po
lar bear named Olaf. Revealingly, because of the Cannes success of ‘Seaside Woman’, Linda was on the promotional treadmill too. She informed Woman’s Own that she and Paul were yet to make wills. Elsewhere, she told the Daily Mirror that the couple saved money by cutting one another’s hair.

  In the meantime, Paul talked to Southern Television’s weekday local news programme Day by Day, the interviewer taking an unsettlingly prescient line of questioning in the light of what was to come, asking the singer about the problems of being an ageing rock star. No one could escape growing older, said McCartney.

  ‘Except people like Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley,’ the presenter pointed out, before hastily adding, ‘Hopefully nothing like that will happen to you.’

  ‘Sorry, what do you mean by that?’ Paul interjected sharply.

  ‘I mean they were stopped in their prime by death, right?’ the presenter blundered on. ‘For that reason they will always be remembered. In a sense, they’re immortalised.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I know,’ Paul replied, before turning gently facetious. ‘I mean, I’d rather stick around and get old than, like, be terrific and famous and die young. Myself, y’know. Some people like going out in a blaze of glory. I’m not one of them.’

  From there, the interviewer segued into the obligatory Beatles reunion question. There was currently no chance of it, according to Paul. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t think John would ever be interested in getting the group back together again.’

  For his part, around the same time, in the press John dismissed the notion of a Beatles reunion as ‘an illusion’. As ever, Lennon’s feelings towards McCartney were highly erratic. He confessed he’d liked ‘Coming Up’, but thought Paul ‘sounded like he was depressed’ on ‘Waterfalls’. ‘I don’t follow Wings,’ he curtly told Newsweek. ‘I don’t give a shit what Wings are doing.’ The journalist then apparently quoted Paul saying that, in his opinion, Lennon had gone to ground because he had done everything else in his life ‘apart from be himself’. At this, Lennon exploded. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ he roared, accusing Paul of knowing nothing about his life during his house-husband years. ‘He was as curious as everybody else was. It’s ten years since I really communicated with him. I know as much about him as he knows about me, which is zilch.’

  It wasn’t entirely true, since the pair would still sometimes call one another up. On 9 October, John’s 40th birthday, Lennon and McCartney talked for the last time on the phone. John had just completed most of his return album, Double Fantasy. Paul called in the evening and the pair – Lennon perhaps regretting his most recent caustic comments – discussed how they were always being baited to put one another down in the press.

  ‘Do they play me against you like they play you against me?’ John wondered.

  ‘Yeah, they do,’ said Paul.

  In June, six months after their last rehearsals, Wings got back together for two weeks in the abandoned concert hall at Finston Manor, Tenterton, Kent. It was a lacklustre affair that found them jamming a heap of songs for possible inclusion on an album called Hot Hits, Cold Cuts, to be part old singles, part new tunes. It was never to be released. Instead, most of the new McCartney material was tested out in a rudimentary fashion before being squirrelled away by Paul for use on his future solo albums. Denny Laine, bored, announced he was going out on tour on his own.

  Meanwhile, Paul decided to return to cartoon land, entering AIR Studios in central London and reuniting with George Martin, for the first time since ‘Live And Let Die’, to begin work on the soundtrack for a planned animation centred on the check-trousered Daily Express comic-strip character Rupert Bear. Songs worked on included Ram outtake ‘Sunshine Sometime’ and others with the kid-friendly, slightly stoned-sounding titles ‘Tippi Tippi Toes’ and ‘Flying Horses’. Paul even revived ‘The Castle Of The King Of The Birds’, an ornate piano piece first tinkered around with in January 1969, during the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions in Twickenham.

  In the gaps, McCartney half-heartedly started work on a Wings album at home in Hog Hill Mill Studios. The sessions were due to relocate in the new year to George Martin’s newly completed AIR studio on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. With the old Beatles producer back on the team, rumours perhaps inevitably began to percolate that John was due to join Paul there in the early months of 1981.

  Not one ever to stray too far from a TV camera during this period, Paul, sitting next to Linda, made a high-profile appearance on the coast-to-coast US breakfast show Good Morning America, relayed live from their Sussex home. During the interview, as the power failed and the lights continually cut in and out, the McCartneys said much to host David Hartman but revealed little beyond trivialities.

  Did they celebrate Thanksgiving? Yes, they did, due to Linda being American, but as vegetarians, they had a ‘macaroni turkey’. Who was ‘Yesterday’ written about? ‘Your wife,’ quipped Paul, ribbing the host. Had Linda idolised Paul before she met him? No, she actually preferred John. ‘No accounting for taste,’ McCartney tutted. ‘These women. I mean, what can you do, Dave?’ How, in the face of his status as a top-flight rock star, did the family manage to maintain a reasonably normal lifestyle? ‘We’ve got a ridiculously small house with four kids in two bedrooms, would you believe?’ Paul volunteered, referring to the circular Waterfall house where the six were still living as they waited for McCartney’s plans for the new-build to be approved. ‘So by doing things like that, just not living with a big style, it seems to naturally keep pretty close and intimate.’

  It was 27 November, only twelve days before the looming tragedy. The interviewer turned to the subject of Lennon’s apparently lingering resentment of McCartney. Recognising the fact that John might be up and watching at home in New York, Paul’s response was cautious, and at the same time untypically frank.

  ‘After all of that stuff that has gone down over the years,’ he said, ‘I actually kinda keep a bit quiet now. ’Cause, I mean, anything I say, he gets resentful of. So I dunno, really, it’s just a weird one. I don’t quite know why he thinks like that. I mean, what do you do about that?’

  On 8 December, his final day, Lennon, doing an interview for RKO Radio, performed a public volte-face as regards McCartney, recognising him, along with Ono, as being the major creative collaborator of his life. ‘There’s only been two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than a one-night stand, as it were,’ he said. ‘That’s Paul McCartney and Yoko. I think that’s a pretty damn good choice. As a talent scout, I’ve done pretty damn well.’

  Later there would be some comfort found in the fact that his final words on Paul were ones of positivity, approaching some kind of love.

  The call came in just before nine on the morning of the ninth. Steve Shrimpton from MPL phoned Paul in Sussex to break the horrific news that John had been murdered in New York, just under five hours earlier; shot by a deranged fan on the street outside the Dakota, before taking his last, stumbling steps into the concierge’s office. The details, at this point, remained sketchy.

  The news had first flashed up on Reuters at 4.55 a.m. UK time. Five minutes later, grave announcements were made in the 5 a.m. radio bulletins.

  Neither of the McCartneys could ever quite remember the words Paul used when breaking the news to Linda. ‘I just sort of see the image,’ Linda said later. ‘It’s like a picture . . . a snapshot. Soul’s camera.’

  McCartney, distraught, phoned his brother Mike. ‘Paul was too distressed to talk properly,’ he recalled. ‘He just said, “Keep sending the good vibes down from Liverpool”, to help him through the day.’

  Paul didn’t know what to do with himself. Dazed, and due to be recording in AIR London with George Martin that day, he made the decision to go ahead with the session. At 11.30 a.m. he was driven out of the gates of Blossom Wood Farm, telling the waiting reporters ‘I just can’t take it in at the moment.’ Later he would try to explain why he’d thought it was appropriate to travel to the studio: ‘I was in shock. We all went
to work that day . . . to not be sitting at home, is the truth.’

  Upon arrival at AIR, McCartney and George Martin, as the latter remembered, ‘fell on each other’s shoulders, and we poured ourselves tea and whisky and sat around and drank and talked and talked.’ Clearly, for Paul, there was some security to be found in being with his and Lennon’s one-time father figure. ‘We grieved for John all day,’ said Martin, ‘and it helped.’

  Denny Laine was there, and naturally had wondered whether McCartney would show up at all. A physically shaken Paul told him, ‘I just don’t know what to think.’ Always utterly thrown by death, he was in a state of emotional paralysis. ‘Even at the best of times,’ said Denny, ‘he wasn’t really too articulate when it came to expressing how he felt about things.’ As ever, McCartney turned to his music.

  Everyone attempted to do some work on a track, the appropriately titled ‘Rainclouds’, the lyric of which found the singer pleading for the dark formations above his head to be blown away. Of course, little progress was made with the recording. Paddy Moloney of traditional Irish folk group The Chieftains had flown in from Dublin that day to add uilleann pipes to the song. Paul said to him that Lennon’s death was ‘tragic and useless and didn’t make sense’, while looking utterly stunned.

  ‘There was a kind of unspoken sadness,’ Moloney said. ‘It was subtle, and there wasn’t any crying or moping about. I don’t think it had really sunk in yet. I don’t think at the end of the session that it had really penetrated either . . . that John was dead, gone forever.’

  At the end of one attempt at a take, McCartney and Laine were standing beside an enormous floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Oxford Circus when a green lorry painted with the words Lennon’s Furnishings passed by below.

  ‘Oh God, look at that,’ said Denny, before noticing McCartney’s eyes were filling with tears.