The conversation took place before a luncheon in London in October 1994. ‘At some point I’d mentioned my mother was Jewish, probably to try and cement some sort of solidarity with Linda, mistakenly,’ says Mark Featherstone-Witty, who says he then listened with bewilderment as Paul told him that his late father had once advised him that Jews made good businessmen, but he hadn’t found it invariably true. ‘He went on to note a line of Jews who had failed him in his business life, notably Brian Epstein and Allen Klein,’ Mark recalled, ‘and rounded the list off by saying, “And now I’ve got you.” I wondered what had prompted this reflection and concluded that it was probably the overspend on the building, which was clearly worrying him more than I had anticipated.’ Paul’s comment was odd, especially so considering he’d married into a Jewish family and benefited from the Eastmans’ advice all these years. His comments also seemed to echo the time Paul’s manager had apparently harangued Mark for bringing a ‘gay’ friend to an MPL party.
Reflecting on the luncheon conversation about Jews, Mark says he hasn’t ‘got the foggiest’ idea whether Paul is anti-Semitic, noting that it would be remarkable if he was. If one took Jews, and gays, out of show business the industry would be seriously depleted. Thinking over what Paul had said, Mark could only conclude that his Lead Patron was just looking for ways in which to vent his doubts about LIPA, and about Mark himself, while Mark had no choice other than to take the abuse. ‘I’m always conscious you’re not nasty to people who can’t answer back [and] I couldn’t risk him backing off from it. It was a sort of nightmare really if he did decide that [he wanted to pull out].’ Mark got his own back in a small way when he published a little-read 2008 memoir, Optimistic, Even Then, in which he recapped these awkward moments with Paul and his staff. He sent Paul a copy. In reply, McCartney acknowledged that he could be ‘a right bastard’ sometimes, which Mark interprets as an apology. ‘That doesn’t stop him being a right bastard, of course.’ Despite awkward moments like this, Paul continued to help Mark raise money for LIPA, bending his own rules to accept a £25,000 cheque ($38,250) from the Hard Rock Café, something he fretted about because the restaurant serves meat. Fortunately, veggie burgers were also on the menu. Paul agreed to receive the presentation cheque when the words ‘in recognition of the sale of Linda McCartney’s veggie burgers’ were added.
Paul would have to re-open his own cheque book to make LIPA a reality. Although he was keen to raise as much money from others first, his underlying commitment to LIPA shows a generous side to his character that is often overlooked or underplayed by his critics. Paul is tight-fisted, they say. There are in fact numerous examples of the star being very generous, such as when a call came through to Hog Hill Mill in 1994 from Horst Fascher, the German pugilist the Beatles had knocked about with in Hamburg. In recent years Horst had taken up with a Hungarian girl, who had given birth to their daughter, Marie-Sophie, that February. German doctors warned Horst that Marie-Sophie would not live long because of a heart defect. Horst had already suffered the death of one child. ‘So in my angst that I lose a second child I called Paul. I thought Paul has better doctors in England,’ says Horst, who wept on the phone to one of Paul’s assistants, saying he had to speak to the star. ‘Then after 20 minutes he called me back. And he said, “What’s happened?” I said, “Paul, can you help me?” He was saying, “Horst, whatever I can do for you, I do for you.”’ True to his word, Paul arranged to have the Faschers flown from Hamburg to London in January 1995, and accommodated in the capital while 11-month Marie-Sophie was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital. A team of American surgeons were then flown in to operate on the child. Despite the best treatment, she died 13 days later. ‘Then it came to the payment. Paul said, “I take care of everything. You don’t have to [worry],”’ says Fascher. ‘And he flew us back and all of that.’ Horst believed the whole thing cost about $190,000. ‘I said, “Paul, how can I pay you back?” He said, “Horst, forget it. Only don’t tell anybody, because I don’t want the big Can you help us?”’
This wasn’t an isolated example of Paul’s philanthropy. For some time Paul and Linda had backed a campaign to re-open their local NHS cottage hospital in Rye, which had closed in 1990 when a new district hospital opened in Hastings. Local people thought Hastings too far to travel and, after Paul and Linda had marched with their neighbours, and donated almost a million pounds to the cause, a new 19-bed cottage hospital and care centre was opened in Rye, with a ‘Strawberry Fields’ day room. In a quieter way, Paul and Lin helped out with many local charitable causes, in Sussex and Kintyre, earning respect and affection in the communities.
A year on from recording ‘Free as a Bird’, Paul invited George and Ritchie back to Hog Hill Mill in 1995 to record another ‘new’ Beatles song, based on a second demo tape Yoko Ono had supplied, Jeff Lynne again producing. ‘Real Love’ was another slow love song, this time with all the words in place, which made it less of a challenge and thereby less fun for Paul, who nonetheless wanted to continue with this reunion project, eager to complete a third Lennon track. George Harrison said no. He wasn’t even sure ‘Real Love’ was good enough to release (he was right, but it was nonetheless in 1996) and he didn’t want to make any more records with Paul and Ritchie, which Paul thought odd considering the Anthology had been created partly to help George. So the three-quarters Beatles reunion was over. But now that the grave had been exhumed, the ghosts of the past were not easily put back to rest.
James McCartney had reached an age when he was asking his father about the Sixties. A discussion about the song ‘My Dark Hour’, which Paul had made with Steve Miller during the rancorous end days of the Beatles, led McCartney to hook up with Miller again, at his home studio in Sun Valley, Idaho, to record a song titled ‘Young Boy’, the lyrics of which express the sort of conversation Paul and Lin may have had about their son as he approached adulthood. The track worked well. Later in the year, Miller came to Hog Hill to record a second song with Paul, a sloppy blues they named ‘Used to Be Bad’. This also turned out successfully. Paul brought Jeff Lynne in to produce a series of other new songs he’d been working on recently, including ‘The Song We Were Singing’, which described Paul’s working relationship with John, and ‘The World Tonight’, which also referred to their past. These were some of the best songs Paul had written in years, though it would be some time before the public heard them.
At the same time, Paul was continuing to compose orchestral music, no longer with Carl Davis, but with a friend and colleague of Davis’s, the English composer and arranger David Matthews. ‘I know after Liverpool Oratorio Paul felt he’d like to do more things himself,’ says Matthews. ‘Carl felt perhaps [he] wasn’t sufficiently acknowledged as a co-composer … they did have a slight falling out.’ As a young man, David worked as an assistant to Benjamin Britten, whose music Paul enjoyed, Matthews becoming a prolific and well-regarded composer in his own right, publishing a number of symphonies and concertos, and working on a celebrated arrangement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, which Mahler left unfinished at his death. Matthews strove to make his additions to the score sound like Mahler, rather than his own work. This was also true of his collaboration with McCartney.
Their first meeting, at Hog Hill Mill on 17 January 1995, was very pleasant. Says Matthews, who was a year younger than Paul and had developed an appreciation and respect for the Beatles’ music in his youth, as many serious composers did in the Sixties:Well, certainly he’s very nice and very friendly, and very easy to talk to and very modest. I remember him saying, ‘I’m Paul McCartney.’ I thought, Well, yes, I do know that! [laughs] He would say things like, ‘We did an album called Sgt. Pepper.’ ‘Oh yes!’ … I learned he was writing a symphonic piece of some kind, which at this stage he was quite vague about.
It gradually emerged that Paul was working on a piece titled Spiral, inspired by his interest in Celtic mythology, a subject he also explored in painting; the history fascinated Paul because it was the story of his own a
ncestry. Paul had recorded a demo on piano, getting an assistant to transcribe the music. He now wanted to develop the score with Matthews. Creating orchestral music in this way was slow work. And what exactly was McCartney trying to achieve?
‘When I met him I thought, What does he really want to be? He wants to be a composer. OK. See if I can try to get him to do it all himself …
My business was writing the score down and suggesting things that he wouldn’t necessarily think of,’ explains Matthews.
I had to make him aware of the whole range of dynamics, how a [piece of music] can be phrased. Take this, [hums a piece of orchestral music they made together] da-da-dar, how is that to be phrased? Should it be da-da-dar [staccato] or should it be dar-larrrr, and if it’s da-da-dar you put staccato dots over the notes and if it’s dar-larrrr you put a line over it, and you see that’s not something he would know from playing music by ear.
Paul was also using other arrangers. The result of a collaboration with the American composer Jonathan Tunick resulted in a piano prelude titled A Leaf, premièred in March 1995 as part of An Evening with Paul McCartney and Friends in front of the Prince of Wales at St James’ Palace. The event was in aid of the Royal College of Music. In a varied programme, Paul also performed ‘One After 909’ with Elvis Costello, and new arrangements of ‘For No One’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yesterday’ with the Brodsky Quartet. At the end, Prince Charles awarded McCartney an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Music, further assimilating him into the English Establishment and the classical world Paul clearly aspired to join. ‘Unlike most people in the rock world he’s ambitious to do new things all the time,’ says David Matthews, comparing McCartney approvingly to rock stars who ‘are content with recycling their early stuff …’
Paul didn’t confine himself to conventional orchestral music. Reminiscing with Barry Miles had re-awakened his interest in the avant-garde, with the result that he accompanied their mutual friend Allen Ginsberg on guitar at a poetry reading at the Albert Hall in the autumn of 1995. Ginsberg came down to see Paul at Blossom Farm first. During their rehearsals for the show Paul asked Allen if he could recommend someone who might help him polish up an epic poem he had written on a Celtic theme, a work titled ‘Standing Stone’. Ginsberg referred McCartney to the British poet Tom Pickard, who took on the job, which would form the basis of Paul’s next major orchestral work.
More in the mainstream, Paul found time to record a charity cover of ‘Come Together’ at Abbey Road Studios with Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher of Oasis. The record did well, reminding Paul that working with John at Abbey Road had been his peak. ‘I think he always realised that the really great days [were with] the Beatles - he’s always talking about the Beatles - [and] it’s never been quite the same since he stopped collaborating with John,’ observes David Matthews, who was spending a lot of time with McCartney now. ‘That produced all their really great work and I think he must know that really. Nothing’s quite been the same, has it?’ There was another reminder of that career-defining partnership in the spring of 1995 when two Liverpool brothers, Charlie and Reg Hodgson, were clearing out their mother’s house in Allerton, just around the corner from where Paul used to live in Forthlin Road, and found an old Grundig tape recorder. Many years ago Paul had borrowed the machine from the Hodgsons to make home recordings with John, George and Stuart Sutcliffe. There was an ancient tape with the machine. When the brothers played the spool, they heard McCartney singing ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’ and other songs. After making contact with MPL, Reg’s son Peter was invited to Hog Hill Mill with the tape so Paul could listen to it. ‘I still remember him standing there singing to the [songs],’ says Peter of the moment McCartney heard his teenage self again. ‘He remembered the words to songs he hadn’t sung in years [like] “I’ll Follow the Sun”.’ There was a banging in the background. ‘That’s Our Mike banging [his] drum,’ explained McCartney, who bought the tape from the Hodgsons for £260,000 ($397,800).
Making orchestral music became easier for Paul in May 1995 when he acquired a computer that generated sheet music from notes played on a keyboard. Paul gave reams of print-out to David Matthews, who dutifully transcribed them. Paul’s compositions became increasingly ambitious and eccentric from this point, as if he wanted to reach back beyond the conventional orchestral music he’d made with Carl Davis to his more experimental Sixties self. One of the first works McCartney and Matthews produced with the aid of the computer was what David describes as ‘a crazy piece’ Paul titled Pissed, possibly because ‘he was pissed when he did it’, then renamed Inebriation. It is challenging music, sounding like discordant Erik Satie. ‘Not your normal McCartney, is it?’ asks Matthews, playing a section on the piano at his London home. ‘That’s the most extreme he got, I think.’
As they worked together, Matthews found himself drawn deeper into Paul’s world. One night he and his wife were invited for supper to Blossom Farm, where they got to know Linda a little: a strong woman ‘obsessed with her vegetarian ideas’. That said, it was a delightful evening, Linda serving dinner at the kitchen table in what was a remarkably unostentatious family home. The McCartneys were almost like any other middle-class, middle-aged couple, if one forgot their fame and their wealth, and the thousand private acres outside the window with estate workers watching for the determined, sometimes crazed Beatles fans who regularly came down the lane from Peasmarsh looking for Paul.
The kids were growing up and becoming more independent of Mum and Dad. Heather had moved into a cottage on the southern border of the Sussex estate, with an outhouse in which she did her pottery. She established a company, Heather McCartney Designs, in 1995. Sister Mary was still working for Dad at MPL in London, while Stelly graduated from St Martin’s College with a degree in fashion design in 1995, her clothes modelled at her graduation show by celebrity friends Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. Paul and Lin came to support their daughter along with the rest of the family and the veteran model Twiggy, one of their oldest and closest friends. Paul created a celebratory piece of music, ‘Stella May Day’, helping launch his youngest daughter on what became a very successful career in the fashion industry.
Their youngest, James, was still living full time at home. A quiet boy of 17, with Paul’s cherubic features and his mother’s straw-blond hair and pale complexion, James frightened his parents again in 1995 when he overturned a Land Rover on the Sussex estate. He got trapped underneath and had to be rescued by the Fire Brigade. In other words it was normal family life at Blossom Farm, the kids both a source of delight and worry to Mum and Dad. Above all the McCartneys were a close family. ‘To see them together with [their] kids, I’ve never seen such a loving family,’ comments Barry Miles, recalling his visits to Blossom Farm around this time.
They would all hug each other and stuff. It was a very touchy-feely kind of family. They were always telling each other they loved each other. When the girls left to drive back to town or something they would all [wave them off]. It seemed pretty good actually. Obviously tempestuous, you know, four kids and that rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, so obviously there were problems from time to time, but I would have thought a very happy marriage.
The Beatles’ Anthology premièred on ABC television in the United States on 19 November 1995, and five days later in the UK, then in 100 countries around the world. The original TV series ran to approximately five hours, long by normal standards, but nevertheless perfunctory for such an epic story with so many fascinating characters and incidents. The story was better told in subsequent, expanded video and DVD releases, the final version stretching to more than 11 hours. Well received at the time, the series remains the definitive televisual history of the Beatles, as Neil Aspinall had set out to make it, even if sensitive parts of the story were soft-pedalled to appease the protagonists. Paul didn’t want to go into the whys and wherefores of who broke up the band, for instance, so there wasn’t a word about his High Court action to dissolve the partnership. As with
any ‘authorised’ biographical project, including Paul’s forthcoming book with Miles, the Anthology was a glossing over of the truth, with key areas of the story ignored. But to hear Paul, George and Ringo talk directly at length about the amazing experiences they had shared was compensation.
A couple of days after the show was broadcast, the first of three double CDs of hitherto officially unreleased Beatles music went on sale. This included what George Martin termed a ‘rather grotty’ home recording of ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’, ‘You’ll be Mine’ and ‘Cayenne’, all featuring Stuart Sutcliffe. These were the tapes found recently in a Liverpool attic. Beautifully produced, with excellent liner notes by Mark Lewisohn, Anthology Vol. 1 quickly sold more than two million units in the USA alone. One of those who benefited from the runaway success was Pete Best who, like Stuart Sutcliffe, appeared for the very first time on an official Beatles record. Pete was on tracks recorded in Hamburg in 1961, at the Decca audition in London on New Year’s Day 1962, and at EMI that June. As a result, Pete - who had worked in a Liverpool unemployment office in recent years, as well as playing his drums for Beatles fans - received his first substantial pay day from the band who sacked him, making him a rich man finally at 54. There was, however, a last indignity. The cover of the first volume of the Anthology features an early band picture of the Beatles. Pete’s face had been deliberately torn out, replaced by that of Ringo Starr.
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