Paul met Jane Asher in 1963 when she came to write a piece for Radio Times magazine on the Beatles appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. All four of them took a shine to Jane, as did most of the males in the Royal Albert Hall. She was delightful. When they first met her, the boys couldn’t get over her lovely red hair. They’d thought she was blonde because they had only seen her on black-and-white telly on shows like Juke Box Jury.
Gradually, I became closer to Paul than to any of the others. When he was going out with Jane, we were very close. He came to the office one day and told me that he had bought a farm in Scotland. He had had it for about four years and not done anything about it, let alone seen it. He asked me to go up and take a look to see where he could build a new farmhouse. I went up there on the overnight train and tramped around and discovered that the Scots had already built a house on the only suitable spot but the existing building was just about derelict. The farm hadn’t been lived in for five years. There were 400 acres of nothing but sheep and wind. I couldn’t understand how the poor creatures managed to stay upright in those endless gales. There was hardly anything inside the house except a very low toilet. Perhaps you’d be blown off a high one.
For Paul to build a new home up there, I said to him that he’d have to knock the old one down and build on the plot. He said the photos looked great, in fact ‘Really groovy’ were the words he used. He asked me to get some furniture, but everything had to be second-hand and old, except for the beds. ‘I want it to be really basic and Spartan,’ said Paul, who always had an affection for life at its most primitive. He was absolutely sick of luxury and wanted to get right back to basics. So I organised him a Formica table, three plastic dining chairs and a second-hand electric stove. He did insist on clean bedding, though, and there was no bath.
The three of us went up there. Paul, Jane and I flew to Macrihanish, which I discovered was a NATO airbase. It was run by the RAF so I rang the commanding officer and when I asked about the chances of landing a private plane there he said, ‘You have got to be kidding.’ That was one of the few times I used the Beatles fame. Mostly, I tried to keep them out of everything but I couldn’t see any other way of getting permission. I said actually it’s for Paul McCartney and, miraculously, permission was granted. When we landed for the first time all the staff were there. Paul signed autographs and chatted and went into the Mess. The base only consisted of two big runways off to the Atlantic, where I’d arranged for John, the local taxi driver, to pick us up. The road to the farm became more and more rugged and I could tell that they were becoming really excited at the thought of being able to walk outside without being mobbed by crowds of teenage girls. I was still a little apprehensive about what they might think of the place. It was very remote and basic and very cold. Lots of people are drawn to the idea of getting away from it all, but sometimes the reality is a little too rough to handle. But Paul and Jane fell in love with the place at first sight.
High Park seems to stand up in defiance of all the elements. Paul and Jane marvelled at the complete absence of luxury and even everyday modern conveniences. They spent the first hour there exploring and wandering around the farm and its tumbledown buildings. They kept squealing out in delight to each other when they found an old washtub or a piece of dead tractor. I never knew junk could be so interesting, but you could see this was exactly the escape they had both dreamed of. The farm hadn’t been used for years and there were piles of old bits of machinery lying around. The sheep that we saw grazing belonged to Paul, but they were looked after by High Park’s neighbour Ian, who lived at the rather more hospitable Low Park.
That evening, he paid us a call. Paul welcomed in this cheery chap with a weather-beaten face and an accent so strong that the three of us dared not look at each other for fear of offending our visitor with laughter. We kept nodding and saying ‘Yeah’ or ‘No’ in the hope that we would be able to penetrate his accent. Jane had to leave the room to stifle her giggles as Paul and I studied Ian’s face intently to see if we could comprehend at least the odd word. Eventually Paul gave in and said, ‘Ian, I’m sorry, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’ We all burst out laughing and Ian laughed the loudest of all. Jane came back from the other room still sobbing with mirth and Ian slowed down and straightened up his speech just enough for we foreign invaders to understand. He was kindness itself as he carefully advised us where to walk and where not to walk and promised that he and his housekeeper Isobel would be around if we needed any help.
We needed something to sit on. We wandered into the barn and up in the rafters was a filthy old mattress and piles and piles of old potato boxes, which had previously held Sharp’s Express potatoes. Paul said, ‘Let’s get that down. The mattress can be our sofa. We’ll have to give it a good beating to get the dust out. We can build the frame from the boxes.’
I was despatched into Cambeltown by taxi to buy a big bag of nails and a couple of hammers for this millionaire Beatle to start making furniture from the basic raw materials. ‘Get as many felt pens as you can as well because we’re going to doodle all over these horrible chocolate-brown walls.’
We hammered old boxes into the shape of the sofa base and then crudely hammered on a back. We threw the still filthy mattress on top and lo and behold we had our sofa. Paul instantly christened it our ‘Sharp’s Express’. But we didn’t stop there. The spirit of Chippendale and Hepple-white entered us and we made some cupboards to stand beside the beds and some more for under the kitchen sink, all out of boxes. The next time I went into town, I bought some paint for all the cupboards, but tastefully leaving our Sharp’s Express sofa as raw wood.
There were no carpets, just bare stone floors. Paul used to have endless battles with the elderly Aga that simply refused to light until he had been fiddling with it for several hours. Even when he got it going, it sent smoke billowing all over the kitchen. But Paul liked the atmosphere it produced so he insisted we always kept it burning. Jane cooked our meals on a horrible old electric cooker which we had picked up for virtually nothing. She was a super cook and you would never tell from the meals she served up what a basic kitchen she was working in. But they were both fervent vegetarians and sometimes it seemed that all we lived on was cauliflower cheese.
After a day or two, we decided we all needed a bath. We were determined to solve our own problems rather than sneak off to Ian’s house for home comforts. So we decided to use the big old milk tank that stood in the derelict dairy. It was a huge stainless steel tank that stood on a plinth. It was about three feet deep and Paul said, ‘I’ve got it. We’ll rig this up as a bath. All we need is a stepladder!’ The immersion heaters warmed up the water and we filled our enormous bath. We found a stepladder and took turns to go up into our bath. When you were inside you couldn’t see out but getting in was not exactly dignified. There was no one for miles around to see you but in those old-fashioned days Paul and I stood on guard against intruders with our backs to the bath when it was Jane’s turn to get inside. Well, I had my back to the bath anyway. It was a great place for a good old splash and a soak.
Mind you, Paul was not always quite as squeaky clean as he would have liked Jane to believe. He and I had taken Martha (Paul’s great, daft Old English sheepdog) for a walk in the fields and he turned to me and said, ‘You’ll have to go to the chemists in Cambeltown for me, mate. I’ve got an itch. I hope it’s not crabs. Get me something quick. I don’t want Jane to find out.’
Goodness knows who’d given him the crabs or whether he ever even had them. I suspect it was his paranoia, because he loved Jane and hadn’t strayed. Even being in love didn’t stop a Beatle from straying from the straight and narrow in those days. In the end, I had to get our solicitor Bob Graham to help me out. I phoned and told him it was for me and he said, ‘OK, mate, I’ll make sure some comes up.’ I’m pretty sure he knew it was for Paul because I had to stress secrecy. Eventually some pills arrived labelled ‘Sheep Dip’, so that Jane would not find out.
There was a simplicity and an innocence about High Park in those early visits that impressed even an old cynic like me. There were round-the-clock pressures involved in being a Beatle and High Park was a wonderful escape. Jane was famous in her own right as well, of course, and she loved the feeling of freedom that the isolation gave them. At the risk of sounding unbearably corny, I can’t recall ever seeing a young couple happier. It was a privilege to be around such a happy, generous pair. Mind you, they weren’t alone for long as Martha also loved life at High Park. The first time Paul suggested bringing her along, I was horrified. I said, ‘Paul, Martha has never been in a plane in her life. If she goes berserk on a small private plane, we’re in trouble.’
‘Don’t be a drag, Al,’ said Paul, ‘she’ll be all right.’
So off we set, the three of us and Martha. And she just sat there in the plane, bless her. She was as good as gold.
She might have been a city dog, born and bred in St John’s Wood, but she loved the wide open space and even tried to round up the sheep for dipping with a singular lack of success, as she finished up much more exhausted than the sheep although she did chase one sheep into a hedge.
I enjoyed many visits with Paul and Jane. Sometimes we would go and help Ian with his sheep, and at other times we’d just wander at random on the unspoilt acres. It was so remote and peaceful it was the perfect remedy from an attack of Beatlemania. There was even a huge stone, which was later used as a title for a classical piece of music called ‘Standing Stone’.
There was a little lake on Paul’s Scottish estate with a rowing boat tided up at the edge. One day, we decided on a boating trip and the three of us climbed in. Paul took the oars and we started to float slowly round. I dangled my hand in the water as I relaxed in the sunshine and caught hold of a weed. I pulled this waterlily plant out by its roots and I was just about to hurl it casually back when Jane suddenly launched into a fierce lecture. ‘Do you know that plants are living creatures and that you have just killed one?’ she screamed at me.
None of the other Beatles ever went there. I felt very close to Paul at this time. High Park was very special to him. It was a super-magical place. Once, we heard shotgun blasts. It turned out to be Ian warning off the junior reporter from the local paper. He had spotted him approaching the farm and let loose a couple of cartridges, mercifully well over his head. The poor lad had turned tail and run, apparently unprepared to dodge gunfire for a story. Paul felt so sorry for him afterwards that he gave him an exclusive interview.
Jane seemed to be the first woman that Paul took seriously. Until Jane, women were there to be had. They were just throwing themselves at the Beatles in those days. What healthy young man would not take advantage? Girls used to queue up for the chance of going to bed with the Beatles. Sex was so frequent and so bereft of any emotion that it became boring.
John Lennon said to me, ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to shag every attractive woman I saw. I used to dream that it would be great if you could just click your fingers and they would strip off and be ready for me. I would spend most of my teenage years fantasising about having this kind of power over women. The weird thing is, when the fantasies came true they were not nearly so much fun. One of my most frequent dreams was seducing two girls together, or even a mother and daughter. That happened in Hamburg a couple of times and the first time it was sensational. The second time it got to feel like I was giving a performance. You know how when you make love to a woman that the moment you come, you get a buzz of relief and just for a moment you don’t need anyone or anything. The more women I had, the more that buzz would turn into a horrible feeling of rejection and revulsion at what I’d been doing. As soon as I’d been with a woman, I wanted to get the hell out.’
The one woman John Lennon was most keen to bed was the French film star Brigitte Bardot. She had been a persistent fantasy figure for all the boys but Lennon being Lennon could not resist attempting to make his fantasy come true. He got Derek Taylor to organise a meeting with Brigitte when she was staying in London. She was interested in the idea and a date was fixed at her Mayfair hotel. But John was really nervous about the whole thing and decided unwisely to increase his confidence with a mixture of drugs and alcohol. He was completely out of his brain by the time he got into Brigitte’s room and by his own account totally incapable of rising to the occasion. The French sex symbol was apparently very let down by the whole incident and John was ribbed mercilessly by the other Beatles for weeks. John was inconsolable afterwards. He told me, ‘I’d been thinking about shagging Brigitte Bardot ever since I was at school. One of the first thoughts I ever had about Cyn was that she looked a bit like her. But when it came to it, I was ridiculously nervous. Getting the chance to shag a woman you wanked over for years does strange things. She was keen enough and we played around a bit but when I needed my biggest erection there was just … nothing. Very embarrassing. I tried to tell her it was nothing personal but what could be more personal than that?’
Brian could see the potential for disastrous publicity if details of lots of illicit sex hit the papers. They had an image to keep up. But it could be done quietly and covertly.
Brian’s way was the wholesome image. While The Who were wrecking hotel rooms and smashing things up, we never ever had any of our groups refused accommodation by a hotel. I did all the hotel booking and we never had a problem like that. They didn’t flaunt the fact that they’d had a stream of groupies in their rooms. But, boy, the Beatles could party. It’s just that Brian kept such a tight control on the Press. He had most of the writers in his pocket because there was such a flow of stories coming from his stable of artists that it would have been suicidal for any writer to start stirring up trouble.
The Beatles hated filming Help! early in 1965. All the endless hanging around waiting for a couple of minutes’ work bored them to tears. A Hard Day’s Night had been fun because it was the first and they did not know what to expect, but by the time Help!, the second of the three-film deal, came around, they knew that this was a directors’ medium which involved a lot of waiting for everyone else. It was at this point that they decided ‘Never again’, and that’s why the third film, Yellow Submarine, became animated. The Beatles had lost patience. As John put it one night, ‘Fuck off. We’re not going through that again.’ But on the bright side, they brought out Rubber Soul, which I thought was a great album.