Paul’s legal action was launched on New Year’s Eve 1970, in the Chancery division of the High Court in London. A writ issued in his name against the other three Beatles and Apple Corps sought ‘a declaration that the partnership business carried on by the plaintiff and the defendants under the name of the Beatles and Co., and constituted by a deed of partnership dated 19 April, 1967, ought to be dissolved and that accordingly the same be dissolved’.
In an accompanying personal affidavit, Paul said he’d been ‘driven to make this application because (a) the Beatles have long since ceased to perform as a group, (b) the defendants have sought to impose on me a manager who is unacceptable to me, (c) my artistic freedom is liable to be interfered with as long as the partnership continues and (d) no partnership accounts have been prepared since the Deed of Partnership was entered into’.
His writ further sought the appointment of an official receiver–a measure normally adopted in bankruptcy cases–to take charge of the Beatles’ finances pending a final resolution of the case. The implication, therefore, was that Apple was insolvent and Allen Klein unfit to handle the Beatles’ finances. ‘It was the only way to get the money out of Klein’s hands,’ John Eastman says. ‘Dissolving the partnership, I knew, would be pretty straightforward, but getting a receiver in a case like that was a very rare and extreme measure. At the beginning, no British lawyer I approached would take the case.’
Eastman rose to the challenge, feeling more than his brother-in-law’s finances to be at stake. ‘I knew that if I failed, it would be the end of my career… this preppy journeyman lawyer from New York had been seen off by the British establishment. So I set out to get us the imprimatur of the British establishment.’
Though Paul’s resources at this point were anything but bottomless, Eastman persuaded one of the City of London’s most powerful and exclusive merchant banks, N.M. Rothschild, to act as his bankers in the case. ‘They agreed to do it on the basis of £1.5 million in loan stock Paul held that wasn’t due to mature for five years.’ With that unbeatable imprimatur, Eastman began to assemble a legal team headed by a newly-qualified Queen’s Counsel, or ‘silk’, named David Hirst, a libel specialist who’d never taken on a commercial brief before.
The six months the case took to prepare seemed to confirm that the Beatles’ creative partnership was no more. In that time, each of the others released an album under his own name which seemed as much a declaration of independence as McCartney had been–but enjoyed notably greater critical success.
September had brought Ringo’s second solo album, Beaucoups of Blues, actually a collection of country songs which one American critic ranked with Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. In November came George’s monumental triple-disc All Things Must Pass, marrying Indian mysticism with cool mainstream rock, which, like its single, ‘My Sweet Lord’, became a global, multifaith hit.
‘All things must pass’ might have been a comment on the transience of earthly fame, even a thankful farewell to the ordeals of Beatledom, but actually had an earthier connotation. George himself compared it to recovering from constipation after years of having his songs clog up inside him while Lennon and McCartney’s enjoyed perpetual motion.
Then, in December, came John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band–produced by Phil Spector with not a mushy violin to be heard–in which John employed the techniques of his recent Primal Therapy to howl out his childhood insecurities, his final repudiation of the middle-class world into which he’d been born and his absolute commitment to Yoko. The track simply called ‘God’, which listed all that he now rejected and detested, provided yet further ammunition to John Eastman’s legal team. ‘I don’t believe in Bea-tles…’ he sang, almost retching on the name (and omitting its definite article as Yoko so much annoyed Paul by doing).
Not content with that, he gave a marathon interview to Rolling Stone, excoriating his former life as a Beatle and the others for their treatment of Yoko, the first instalment of which appeared just as Paul’s High Court action was launched. Time magazine combined the two stories under a headline echoing Wagner’s epic opera about the twilight of the gods: ‘Beatledammerung’. Compared with the spleen he vented throughout the rest of the interview, John’s references to Paul were strangely muted. His belated verdict on the McCartney album adopted the tone of a master sadly watching a former pupil go astray: ‘I was surprised it was so poor… I expected just a little more because if Paul and I are sort of disagreeing and I feel weak, I think he must feel strong… Not that we’ve had much physical disagreement.’
According to John, the errant pupil’s best hope was that the Plastic Ono Band’s album would ‘scare him into doing something decent and then he’ll scare me into doing something decent… I think he’s capable of great work’. After all the complaints about digs at Yoko, Linda came in for one over her family snapshots on the McCartney cover–an idea John said had been copied from Yoko and himself. ‘They do exactly what I do, a year or so later… They’re imitators, you know.’
Paul did not respond to the interview, publicly or privately, but Linda wrote John a protest letter on behalf of them both. He replied with six handwritten pages, pointedly addressed to ‘Linda and Paul’, saying that his remarks had been mild compared to the ‘shit you and the rest of my kind, unselfish friends laid on Yoko and me’, and railing against what he called Linda’s ‘petty little perversion of a mind’ and the ‘petty shit from your insane family [Lee and John Eastman]… In spite of it all’, he concluded, ‘love to you both from us two’, then added an angry PS because Linda’s letter hadn’t been addressed jointly to Yoko and him.
Calmly resolute though Paul seemed on the outside, he felt a permanent knot of anxiety in his stomach at the thought of the legal machinery he’d set in motion. ‘Not only were the Beatles, that fabbest of groups and those nicest of people, breaking up but the other three Beatles, those truest of friends of mine, were now my enemies overnight,’ he would remember. ‘I’d grown up in this group, they were my school, my family, my life… I was just trying to… keep it low-key but I couldn’t. It was either that or letting Klein have the whole thing.’
To shut out the anxiety as much as possible, he’d begun work on a new album with which he was determined to win the unqualified praise McCartney had been denied. This one was to see Linda credited jointly with him: she had collaborated on around half the tracks and was to sing harmonies throughout.
Responding to the criticisms of McCartney as too rough and home-obsessed, he decided to begin the recording in New York, using the best session musicians the city could provide. Rather than fly, he and Linda crossed the Atlantic on Cunard’s new liner, the QE2, taking Mary and Heather with them. Throughout their five-day crossing, Paul was never seen without dark glasses–a sure way of attracting notice he might otherwise have avoided in the crowded seaborne hotel. It earned him what was supposed to be a withering rebuke from a female table-neighbour in the swanky Columbia Restaurant.
‘Elizabeth Taylor’s on this boat and she doesn’t wear them,’ the woman said.
‘I’m not Elizabeth Taylor,’ Paul pointed out.
In New York, he and Linda advertised for session musicians without giving their names or the nature of the work. Six-foot-two Denny Seiwell, one of the city’s top drummers, answered a call to make ‘a demo’ at an address on the West Side. ‘It was at this brownstone house that looked as if it was about to be demolished,’ Seiwell remembers. ‘I went down into the basement, thinking I was going to get mugged at any moment, and there was Paul McCartney.’
Seiwell got the gig, along with guitarist David Spinozza (who’d later also appear on John’s Mind Games album), and the sessions duly took place at the Columbia and A&R recording studios, with supernumeraries that would include the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Nobody would be able to say this one sounded like Paul had made it in his living-room.
The 11-day hearing of McCartney vs. Lennon, Harrison, Starkey and Apple Corps opened on 19 February 1971 at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, before Mr Justice Stamp. The British pop business had engendered other legal battles but none that riveted the nation’s attention as this one did. Every newspaper carried daily reports, even The Times–though still clinging to its archaic formula of calling the participants ‘Mr McCartney’, ‘Mr Lennon’ or ‘Mr Starkey’.
This being a civil action not a trial, the leading players weren’t required to give evidence other than in statements read out by their lawyers, or even to attend court. But on John Eastman’s advice, Paul turned up every morning with Linda, who was now pregnant again, and sat attentively through the whole day’s proceedings. None of the other Beatles ever put in an appearance. ‘The message was clear,’ Eastman says. ‘He was the only one who cared enough to be there in person.’
His brother-in-law gave him another piece of advice he also followed scrupulously. ‘I said, “This is going to be theatre, so you have to treat it like theatre. Wear a suit.”’ He chose the dark blue double-breasted pinstripe of the Abbey Road cover, but didn’t wear a tie for fear of looking too deliberately conformist. It would have been obscured, anyway, by the heavy black beard which he had regrown.
He would later recall how on his first day in court, surveying his bewigged and gowned counsel, David Hirst QC, and a three-foot-high pile of supporting documents, he found himself wondering all over again if he really was doing the right thing. ‘Anyone else suing the Beatles would have been immoral, but for one of the Beatles to sue them… it was almost as if I was committing an unholy act.’
Allen Klein was not named in the action, but essentially it was all about his management–and himself. He, too, was in court every day, seated a few feet from Paul; the bogeyman dentist of so many recent nightmares, now reduced to podgy life-size, and wearing one of his trademark grubby turtlenecks. The two never exchanged a word.
Born performer that Paul was, he knew he had Mr Justice Stamp’s attention from the beginning. Whenever a statement was made that he particularly disagreed with, he gave a little shake of his head, certain it had registered with the bench. Klein was later to remark bitterly that ‘the judge got Beatlemania’.
His QC David Hirst’s opening address expanded on his three main complaints against Klein. Under the head of interference with his artistic freedom, there had been the remixing of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and the attempt to block the McCartney album on the grounds that it breached the Beatles’ partnership agreement. In fact, Hirst said, the agreement allowed for solo albums, prohibiting only solo appearances–a clause John had many times disregarded, first in live performances with Yoko, then fronting the Plastic Ono Band.
Over and above his affidavit, Paul accused Klein of financial malpractice, made possible by Apple’s chaotic business affairs. In the four years since the Beatles’ partnership had come into being, he said, he’d never once seen a copy of its accounts. As a result, his advisers were warning the Beatles might not have enough in their collective coffers to meet an imminent tax bill of between half and three-quarters of a million. Latterly, when he’d tried to investigate Apple’s financial position, he said, Klein had instructed the company’s accountants not to give him information. However, he’d gleaned sufficient to accuse Klein of deducting excessive management commission, to the tune of some half a million pounds.
David Hirst attacked Klein as ‘a man of bad commercial reputation’, citing his multifarious exploits across the Atlantic. And during the trial, still more evidence came to hand. ‘We heard that, from sheer stupidity and negligence, he’d been convicted on 10 charges of failing to file tax returns in New York District Federal Court,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘David knew that Justice Stamp always adjourned at one o’clock sharp. So I got a certified copy of the judgement in Klein’s tax case and at 12.55 David handed it up to the judge to read during lunch. He came up with this great line: “Mr Klein has as little respect for the British Inland Revenue as for the US Internal Revenue Service.”’
Klein mounted an aggressive defence, albeit by proxy. Apple’s counsel, Morris Finer QC, read an affidavit from a senior accountant saying that in two years under ABKCO’s management the Beatles’ assets had increased from just over £1 million to £6.5 million and that Apple was now solvent and fully able to meet its tax liabilities.
Finer stoically went on to read a 46-page statement from Klein himself, justifying everything he had done since May 1969. The failure to produce accounts for the Beatles’ partnership back to 1967 he blamed on ‘obstruction’ from Lee and John Eastman–i.e. it had been Paul’s fault. Far from taking more commission than his entitlement, he claimed often to have taken less. He also pointed out the benefits Paul enjoyed under the partnership agreement, especially now that another solo Beatle was so strongly outshining him. Under its royalty-pooling system, he got 25 per cent of George’s global blockbuster All Things Must Pass–by implication, a lot more worth having than George’s quarter-share of the McCartney album.
John, George and Ringo were each heard from in statements whose stilted language, read in a posh lawyer’s voice, sounded bizarrely unlike them. John’s gave Klein back some points for clearing the ‘spongers and hustlers’ out of Apple. It also downplayed Paul’s grievances, saying that there’d always been conflict within the Beatles but that, far from undermining them, it had made them stronger:
From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred ‘pop type’ music and we preferred what is now called ‘underground’. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrasts in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm musically speaking and contributed to our success.
When it came to Klein’s appointment against Paul’s wishes, John uttered a blatant untruth–that, historically, band decisions had often been taken on a majority vote. As he knew better than anyone, the pre-Klein Beatles had been an unshakable democracy: nothing was done without the consent of all four. He ended by accusing Paul of behaving ‘selfishly and unreasonably’.
George’s and Ringo’s statements, too, spoke of their previous ability to resolve their internal problems. George described how his own walk-out during the Let It Be sessions–the result of ‘the superior attitude which for years past Paul has shown towards me musically’–had quickly been patched up. ‘Since the row, Paul has treated me more as a musical equal. I think this whole episode shows how a disagreement could be worked out so that we all benefited.’
Ringo instanced the even worse contretemps when he’d delivered the news that McCartney’s release was to be postponed so as not to clash with Let It Be, and Paul had ordered him out of the house, jabbing fingers at his face. He still felt that the band’s disagreements ‘contributed to really great products’ and that ‘all four of us together could even yet work out everything satisfactorily’.
Paul’s statement was read last. It recalled how Klein had been brought in by John after the Beatles’ apparent acceptance of Lee and John Eastman as managers, and how despite his misgivings–borne out by Klein’s derailing of the NEMS purchase deal–he’d initially gone along with the majority vote. He recalled how Klein had tried to win his favour by belittling John, at one point confiding, ‘You know why John’s angry with you, don’t you? It’s because you came off better than he did in Let It Be.’ And at another: ‘The real problem is Yoko. She’s the one with ambition.’
David Hirst had remained impressively on the ball, picking up pointers to the partnership’s disintegration from All Things Must Pass as well as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. ‘One has only to look at recent recordings by John or George,’ Paul’s deposition continued, ‘to see that neither thinks of himself as a Beatle.’ He ended by rejecting John’s assertion that band decisions had ever been carried by a majority vote: ‘I know of [none] taken on a three-to-one basis.’
With the evidence all in, and only lawyers’ closing submissions to come, there was no further point in attending court, so Paul and Linda returned to America to complete their joint album, now transferring operations from New York to Sound Recorders studios in Los Angeles.
But the stress of the case seemed to have impaired Paul’s usual focus and the work dragged on indecisively. ‘I tried getting him together with Jim Guercio, who produced and managed my first big music clients, Chicago, and had just won a Grammy for his work with Blood, Sweat and Tears,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘Jim was so keen to work with Paul that he put off his honeymoon.’
Together they laid down a track called ‘Dear Boy’, which both chided and thanked Linda’s former husband, Mel See, for not holding on to her. However, even the turbocharged Guercio seemed unable to galvanise Paul back into his old efficiency: he would block-book the studio, not turn up until evening and then only want to smoke a joint and jam. Recording ‘Dear Boy’ alone took five separate sessions. ‘After about three days, I got a call from each of them, saying it wasn’t working,’ Eastman remembers.
The McCartneys were still in LA when, on 12 March, after a week of deliberation, Mr Justice Stamp delivered his verdict in the Court of Chancery. The judge found in Paul’s favour on every count, ruling that the Beatles had ‘long since ceased to perform as a group’, that Apple was not ‘a Frankenstein set up to control the individual partners’ and that the situation with regard to the partnership accounts was ‘quite intolerable’.
Allen Klein incurred withering personal condemnation for having taken commission ‘grossly in excess’ of what he was entitled to. His claim to have taken less than his due, the judge added, was ‘like the irresponsible patter of a second-rate salesman’. Since neither the Beatles’ manager nor anyone else around them seemed competent to handle their finances, Paul’s application for an official receiver would be granted.
Four days later, at the annual Grammys ceremony in Hollywood, Let It Be won the award for Best Movie Soundtrack. John, Paul and George were named joint recipients, but only Paul went onstage to collect all three statuettes, firmly leading three-months-pregnant Linda by the hand. Neither of them had bothered to dress up for the occasion; indeed, they looked oddly like a pair of runaways, a brighter-coloured version of John and Yoko two years earlier.
Paul responded to the half-mourning applause with just a ‘Thank you! Goodnight!’ and they vanished into the darkness again. The accidental symbolism was impossible to miss. And also that his true triumph had lain in not letting it be.
The moment Judge Stamp’s verdict was announced, Morris Finer QC lodged an appeal on John, George and Ringo’s behalf. But on 26 April, it was withdrawn. As Finer explained to the Court of Appeal, ‘My clients now consider, in the unhappy circumstances which have arisen, that it is in the common interest to explore… a means whereby the plaintiff may disengage himself from the partnership by agreement.’
Paul was effectively free of Apple, his one-time passion, other than in an obligation to release his records through Apple Music until 1975. And the Beatles were officially no more. ‘When we heard we’d won, we didn’t yell and throw our hats in the air,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘We just looked at each other and sort of went “uh!” After that, I think I slept for 36 hours.’
While the case was still going on, Paul had put out his first solo single, ‘Another Day’, written and unsuccessfully tried out with the Beatles and finally recorded with Linda in New York the previous January.
It was another of his ‘short story’ songs, about a lonely woman trapped in a soulless office job and living for the occasional visits of a feckless lover–in fact, very much how the protagonist of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ might have ended up with her ‘man from the motor trade’. This one had even deeper empathy with the implicitly ageing, faded figure who ‘takes a morning bath and wets her hair… slipping into stockings, slipping into shoes, dipping in the pockets of her raincoat’.
Although Paul’s name alone appeared on the single, it came in a picture cover showing him and Linda together and she was credited as his co-writer. For all that, it seemed a throwback to the Beatles, even using the sound effects of voices and laughter so familiar from Sgt. Pepper and ‘Revolution 9’. Just then, record-buyers wanted nothing more than a throwback to the Beatles, so it easily jumped to number two in Britain and five in America.
The signs thus could not have been better for the album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney which followed on 17 May. At High Park Farm, they now had a flock of 200 Highland blackface sheep whose wool was sold commercially. Ever-practical Paul had become adept at shearing, handling even the aggressive rams with their dangerous downturned horns.
One day, driving north from Glasgow with Linda, he decided Ram was a perfect title for their album because ‘it was strong and male… and succinct. Once you heard it, you weren’t going to forget it. Then there was the idea of ramming… pushing ahead strongly.’ The front cover was taken from a Linda photograph of him straddling one of the beasts in question and gripping its horns as if taking part in some non-equine rodeo.
‘Another Day’ did not appear on Ram, but the single taken from the album for US release only, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, employed its Beatle carry-over formula with even greater success. This was a medley of Abbey Road-style song-fragments, built around Paul’s own Uncle Albert and full of ‘Yellow Submarine’-style comic voices–ringing telephones, bird-calls, rain-showers and thunderstorms. It reached number one on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies and later won Paul a Grammy for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists.
The album was likewise a commercial smash, reaching number one in the UK and two in America. But it was slaughtered by the critics whose approval Paul so desperately sought. Rolling Stone called it ‘incredibly inconsequential’, ‘monumentally irrelevant’ and ‘emotionally vacuous’, noting how John Lennon had ‘always held the reins in on McCartney’s cutesey-pie, florid attempts at pure rock Muzak’. The Village Voice called it ‘a classic form/content mismatch’. Playboy accused Paul of ‘substitut[ing] facility for substance’ and likened the effect to ‘watching someone juggle five guitars… it’s fairly impressive but you keep wondering why he bothers’.
Worse consequences were to follow. The track called ‘Too Many People’ contained several references to John, albeit so oblique that they went unnoticed in the media. ‘Too many people preaching practices’ meant the Yoko-inspired peace campaign and all the other attention-seeking crusades which Paul thought ‘a little bit hypocritical’. ‘You took your lucky break/ And broke it in two’ (toned down from ‘Yoko took your lucky break…’) reproached John for giving over his life to someone who didn’t even say ‘the Beatles’. In the repeated phrase ‘piece of cake’, the first two words were slurred into ‘piss off’. The very album-artwork featured its own little sidelong, symbolic dig, a back-cover picture of two beetles copulating. Translation: You tried to fuck me over and look what happened.
Even allowing that his and John’s relationship had always been based on such schoolboyish stuff, it’s hard to reconcile with the subtle intelligence of ‘Another Day’. And, coming so soon after his High Court victory, it was obviously asking for trouble.
In fact, John not only picked up every slur on Yoko and himself, and himself singly in ‘Too Many People’, but others on different tracks that Paul had never intended. ‘Dear Boy’, the song about Linda’s ex-husband, he decided was all about him even though it contained not a single line that could be so interpreted. Also on the list were ‘3 Legs’ (‘Well, I thought you was my friend…’), ‘Smile Away’ (‘Man, I can smell your breath a mile away…’) and ‘The Back Seat of My Car’, a song actually dating from Paul’s pre-Linda affair with Maggie McGivern (‘We believe we can’t be wrong’).
John at the time was making his first solo album without the Plastic Ono Band, whose title track was a plea to ‘imagine all the people, living life in peace’. To this he now added a venomous ‘answer’ song entitled ‘How Do You Sleep?’, with help on the lyrics from Yoko, and even Allen Klein, and George, that other disgruntled co-litigant, playing slide guitar.
The title was nonsensical; Paul had done nothing to lose sleep over. But fairness was not on John’s agenda. With withering contempt, intensified by faux-blues diction, he lampooned his old friend for ‘liv[ing] with straights’ and ‘jump [ing] when your momma [Linda] tell you anything’. Some of the barbs were unintentionally self-revealing. A whiff of envy of Paul’s looks accompanied the dismissal of his solo career with ‘A pretty face may last a year or two/ But pretty soon they’ll see what you can do’. Rancour over his recent hit single surfaced in ‘Since you’re gone you’re just another day’.
Ringo was also around during the song’s gestation, feeling more and more uncomfortable as John’s rant lost any touch with reality: ‘Those freaks was right when they said you was dead’ (i.e. in the rumour-epidemic of 1969), ‘The sound you make is Muzak to my ears’ and, most monstrously, ‘The only thing you done was Yesterday’. This last was meant to be followed by a scream of ‘You prob’ly pinched that bitch, anyway!’ but Klein ordered it to be cut, fearing Paul might sue for libel.
The nuclearly disproportionate tit-for-tat also included an answer to the copulating beetles on Ram’s back cover. Inside John’s Imagine album was a postcard on which he parodied Paul’s parody-rodeo pose with the blackface ram, but wrestling a pig instead.
Far from having second thoughts about what he’d done, he positively gloried in it, publicly thanking Allen Klein for contributing the ‘just another day’ jibe. ‘Some people don’t see the funny side of it,’ he complained in a self-review for Crawdaddy magazine. ‘It’s what you might call an angry letter–sung. Get it?’
Paul responded in an interview with Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth, prefacing most of his answers with ‘Don’t print this’ but still plainly on the record throughout. ‘Everyone thinks I’m the aggressor but I’m not, you know. I just want out… I just want the four of us to get together somewhere and sign a piece of paper saying it’s all over and we want to divide the money four ways. No one else would be involved, not even Linda or Yoko or Allen Klein. We’d just sign the paper and hand it to the business people and let them sort it out… but John won’t do it.
‘“How Do You Sleep?” I think it’s silly. So what if I live with straights? I like straights. I have straight babies… He says the only thing I did was “Yesterday”. He knows that’s wrong. I used to sit in the studio and play, and he’d really dig some of the stuff I played to him. He can’t say all I did was “Yesterday” because he knows and I know it’s not true.’
At one point, the mild, conciliatory tone gave way to a defiant twirl of the matador’s cape. ‘John and Yoko are not cool in what they are doing. I saw them on television the other night, and thought that what they’re saying about what they want to do together is basically the same as what Linda and I want to do.’
John demanded equal space in the MM to reply, and did so in a letter addressed to ‘Paul, Linda et all the wee McCartneys’, from which a section had to be cut for fear of libel.
‘It’s all very well playing “simple ole honest Paul” in Melody Maker, but you know damn well we can’t just sign a piece of paper. You say “John won’t do it”, but I will if you indemnify us against the Tax man.
‘If YOU’RE not the aggressor (as you claim) who the hell took us to court and shat all over us in public?… As I’ve said before, have you ever thought that you might POSSIBLY be wrong about something? Your conceit about us and Klein is incredible. You say… “we secretly feel that you’re right” [about Klein]. Good God! You must know we’re secretly right about Eastman.
‘… Wanna put your photo on the [album cover] like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Ain’t ya got no shame?) If we’re not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU?
‘No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same… whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.’
But Paul didn’t.
That summer of 1971, two of the New York session musicians who’d played on Ram, drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Hugh McCracken, were invited to visit him and Linda in Scotland. Thinking they’d merely been offered a holiday, Seiwell and McCracken brought along their respective wives, Monique and Holly.
The two couples were put up at Campbeltown’s best hotel, the Argyll Arms, and given a tour of High Park Farm, where Paul’s latest DIY project had been to turn its tumbledown outbuilding into a recording studio with a four-track machine sent up from London by EMI. He called it Rude Studio, which it certainly was, though the word was meant in the reggae sense of cockily rebellious.
As the visitors were leaving, Linda took Seiwell and McCracken aside and asked if they’d return the following day without their wives ‘to play some music’. Only then did they realise why they were there.
The idea had come to Paul in between sheep-shearing or mowing fields on the tractor Linda had given him. ‘Instead of thinking “After the Beatles, it’s got to be important… super musicians… let’s just find ourselves”… One night, I said to Linda, “I’m going to form a band, do you want to be in it?” [and] with some trepidation, she said, “Er, yes”.… She and I knew she was a novice while I was a veteran… But I liked the tone of her voice [because] I’d never sung with a woman before. All my harmonies to that date had been with males.’
The musical chemistry with Seiwell and McCracken proved just as immediate with real rams ripping at grass and covering ewes just a few yards away. Unfortunately, Monique Seiwell and Holly McCracken chafed at being left to their own devices at the Argyll Arms, where the food was poor and the rooms were so cold they needed hot-water bottles in their beds even in June.
In any case, this particular line-up was never going to work. McCracken had two small children by his previous wife back in America and couldn’t contemplate moving to Britain permanently. After a few days, he decided to return to New York. Denny Seiwell also left, to visit Monique’s family in France, but offered to return when Paul found another guitarist.
This he soon did in Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, who’d voiced the Birmingham band’s huge 1964 single ‘Go Now’. The ‘Moodies’ had often supported the Beatles on tours, including their last UK one in 1965, and known them well socially. A talented guitarist and keyboard-player, Laine had gone on to leading roles with the Incredible String Band and Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and written several successful songs, notably ‘Say You Don’t Mind’ for Colin Blunstone.
It was significant that Paul should have chosen someone with established form in every area where he’d lately enjoyed autonomy: singing, soloing and songwriting. Since 1957, he’d been accustomed to working with a strong, stimulating musical partner; even though Linda had officially succeeded to that role, he also felt he needed something by way of a John-substitute.
Denny Laine just then happened to be at a low ebb, without a regular band and reduced to sleeping in his manager’s office. ‘Paul phoned me up out of the blue and said, “Hey, man, what are you up to now?”’ he recalls. ‘I said, “Nothing.” “Why don’t you come up to Scotland then?” Paul said. “We’ll just jam around and see what happens.”’
The two Dennys, Laine and Seiwell, were each put on a weekly retainer of £70, and rehearsals in Rude Studio began. As an old friend of Paul’s, Laine stayed at High Park while the Seiwells rented a farmhouse with its own 300 acres at Kilkenzie-by-Campbeltown. ‘We started with old rock ‘n’ roll numbers, Buddy Holly, Elvis and them, and it all just felt right,’ Laine recalls. ‘Nobody knew we were there, and no one around there knew who we were. There was no publicity… no pressure.’
Linda–by now heavily pregnant–had been having piano lessons from a neighbour in Cavendish Avenue. ‘Now and then Paul would show her something on the organ, but Denny and I had no idea that she was going to be in the band,’ says Laine. ‘She just organised him and the two kids and did the cooking.’
In August, George Harrison mobilised friends like Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell to join him onstage at New York’s Madison Square Garden in a benefit concert for the victims of famine, flood and genocide in newly-created Bangladesh. (Paul was invited to appear but declined, fearing it would make the event look like a Beatles reunion.) With the Concert for Bangladesh added to All Things Must Pass and ‘My Sweet Lord’, George found himself not only rock’s biggest performer of the new decade but also its first saint.
Meanwhile, in a shed on a sheep-dotted hillside in Kintyre, eight tracks had been laid down–five of them in a single take–by a band which as yet had no name. Denny Seiwell tried to persuade Paul to bring in a keyboard-player named Paul Harris, who’d backed top-notch names like ex-Lovin’ Spoonful John Sebastian. ‘That’s when he told me he was going to teach Linda how to play. I was used to working with the best in the world, and here I am working with the best in the world, and suddenly we’re going to have an amateur on keyboards. But what could I say?’
The band still lacked a name in early September, when Paul and Linda returned to London for the birth of their second child. On the 13th, Linda went into labour and was taken to King’s College Hospital. There she was found to be suffering from placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta is situated too close to the uterus, complicating the delivery process and causing heavy bleeding.
An emergency Caesarian section had to be performed and, for a time, both mother and baby were in serious danger. Paul later recalled ‘praying like mad’, and being answered by a further vision from his midwife mum that named his band before his new–and perfectly healthy–daughter, Stella Nina.
As if angels hovered around Mother Mary, he seemed to see a multitude of golden, spreading… wings.