During the first years of his marriage to Linda, Paul’s life had struck a seemingly perfect balance between his farm in the Scottish wilds and his London home in St John’s Wood, with culture and sophistication near at hand whenever he needed a restorative draught of one or the other, and Abbey Road studios just around the corner. But with Wings’ accelerating success, and the resultant touring and recording schedule, it was no longer as easy as it once had been to bury himself in Kintyre for weeks, even months on end. At the same time, 7 Cavendish Avenue was starting to feel the strain of the household he now headed.
Thanks to Linda, that former elegant bachelor establishment had taken on the look of an urban farm. The back garden contained rabbits, ducks and chickens with a cockerel whose crowing, not confined to sunrise, could be heard by Test Match crowds at nearby Lord’s cricket ground. Beside the geodesic glass meditation temple, with the circular bed that had once belonged to Groucho Marx, stretched a large vegetable-patch. The old stabling at the bottom had been restored to accommodate four horses, for Sunday-morning rides up to Primrose Hill and Hampstead.
The McCartneys’ animals were allowed the same free rein as their children. One night when Paul accidentally left a window of his Rolls-Royce open, some chickens gained entry and did £6000-worth of damage. ‘And there was a duck named Quacky that used to be allowed in the house,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘It used to sit on the sofa with the kids.’
In addition, a pack of dogs created a constant uproar like the one he’d grown up with from the police dog training school over his garden fence. Martha the Old English sheepdog had been joined by Jet the black Labrador commemorated on Band on the Run, a yellow Labrador named Poppy and a Dalmatian named Lucky. When Martha, rather late in life, found romance in Scotland and gave birth to a litter of mongrel puppies, Linda insisted on keeping them all.
The incessant barking endeared Paul even less to other Cavendish Avenue residents than the eternal traffic of fans to his front gate. One of his neighbours, a Mrs Griswold, went so far as to complain to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that the dogs were left alone in the house when he and Linda went away. However, an RSPCA investigation found that Paul’s housekeeper, Rose Martin, was always there and regularly employed some of the better-behaved fan-pickets to walk the dogs on Hampstead Heath.
The episode underlined his need of a weekend bolt-hole from London where he, Linda and the children could enjoy the same freedom and privacy they did in Scotland without having to trek all the way up there. So in June 1973, he had paid £42,000 for a property named Waterfall Cottage in Peasmarsh, East Sussex.
The location could hardly have been more suitable. Situated three miles to the north-west of Rye and close to the Sussex–Kent border, Peasmarsh was a postcard-perfect village dominated by the Norman church of St Peter and St Paul (a fortuitous combination of Paul’s name and that of the Merseyside church where he and John first met). True to the Rye area’s strong literary heritage, it had once been home to the Very Reverend H.G. Liddell whose daughter, Alice, inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Waterfall Cottage was situated just outside the village, at the end of a long unmarked track called Starvecrow Lane. The house itself was a modest two-bedroom affair dating only from the 1930s with a circular shape recalling the oast houses, or hop-drying kilns, to be found throughout neighbouring Kent. But with it came approximately 100 acres of woodland mapped with ancient names like Four Acre Wood, Dinglesden Wood, Sluts Wood and Waterfall Wood, in which could be found the stream tumbling over perpendicular rocks that gave the property its name.
Surrounded by protective armies of trees, it was almost as remote and secluded as High Park Farm. Yet London was only an hour away by road and Lydd Airport, with its access to Paris and the Continent, just 25 minutes. But for now, Waterfall Cottage would be used only for spur-of-the-moment weekend breaks. Paul’s main home and first love continued to be Kintyre, as he showed by repeatedly purchasing large tracts of it.
This expansion stemmed from his discovery that High Park was not as impregnably private as it had seemed. The first fan to run him to earth there was a young Mormon woman from Utah who’d already been tenaciously doorstepping him in London for about three years. In 1971, she was found to be camped with a female friend in a small wood on the slope above the farm, both of them spying on it through binoculars. Paul drove up to confront them in person and, recognising his long-time persecutor from Cavendish, made little of his usual effort to be nice. The Mormon later went to Campbeltown police claiming that he’d struck her across the face, but he denied it and no formal charge was ever brought.
To stop others camping in the wood, he purchased it outright and from then on began systematically acquiring other properties and land around High Park to create one vast, continuous McCartney exclusion-zone. Low Ranachan Farm, bought on the retirement of his neighbour Archie Revie, added a further 304 acres to his domain, as well as the barn where Wings rehearsed Band on the Run and the cottage where Jo Jo Laine went into labour. The addition of Low Park Farm, also known as Skeroblinraid, with its similar acreage, completed the circle; now one could not even see High Park without trespassing on Paul’s land.
His ownership had an immediate beneficial effect on the environment, something for which conventional farmers in those days cared little. At Linda’s prompting, most of the walls and fences which had formerly divided the properties were removed, effectively creating a nature reserve where fauna and flora flourished as never before. The Highland red deer which had largely deserted the area–fearful of stalkers of their own–returned in abundance.
All the satellite farmhouses and cottages were in a poor state of repair when Paul acquired them, and needed extensive modernisation which he oversaw with his usual practical flair and restrained good taste. Yet, strangely, no such effort and expense went into the heart of his empire. He seemed to prefer High Park looking half-finished, with stacks of timber and corrugated iron lying around everywhere but never used. His daughter, Mary, would recall playing with her sisters in what seemed like ‘one big lumber-yard’.
Linda in Scotland was unrecognisable as the reluctantly glammed-up figure who accompanied Paul in Wings, still attracting almost universal hostility and ridicule. ‘Mother and wife is it for me,’ she admitted in a complete U-turn from the feminism she’d once pioneered. ‘And riding my horse and animals is it for me.’
One of the locals who got to know her best was Campbeltown taxi-driver Reggie McManus, who regularly drove the family to and from the airport and ferried Linda and the children down to Cheshire to visit Paul’s father. McManus remembers a woman utterly devoid of the airs and graces one would expect from a rock megastar’s wife. ‘Both she and Paul always called me “Mr McManus”, which I used to appreciate,’ he recalls. ‘Paul was very likeable, but I think he was always holding back a little bit. With Linda, well, she wore her heart on her sleeve.’
After all the stories of Beatle millions he’d read, the McCartneys’ simple lifestyle came as a revelation. ‘Every so often, I would go to Glasgow to pick up a parcel of clothes Linda had ordered, mostly for the children. There was never any of this designer stuff–just the kind of wee dresses you could get in Woolworths back in those days. Simple kids’ stuff.’
Linda’s great pride, McManus recalls, was her vegetable-patch. ‘One day when I was there with my wife, she asked if we’d like some vegetables to take home. The next thing, she was down on her hands and knees pulling up carrots, then she asked if we’d like some potatoes and before you could stop her she had both hands deep in the soil. I said, “Stop, use a fork,” but she was having none of it and as she clawed at the soil she said, “This is the best way, Mr McManus.” Her hands were filthy but she didn’t care.’
Here, too, she had time for photography, her first love and undisputed talent, finding subjects very different from the rock stars and backstage courtiers who used to be her main material.
At Low Ranachan Cottage, Paul set up the first real studio she’d ever had. But she preferred to wander the streets of Campbeltown snapping local characters like the colloquy of elderly men in flat caps, known locally as ‘the Mill Dam Midges’, who always gathered on the same street-corner, putting the world to rights. Her other favourite subjects were small children in prams or strollers. Years later, leafing through her various books of photographs, adult Campbeltonians would come upon their infant faces juxtaposed with Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger.
Her adoration of animals became a local legend. When one of Martha’s mongrel puppies was kicked by a horse and suffered a broken leg, it was taken by taxi for treatment at Glasgow Veterinary Hospital, a round-trip of 280 miles. By the time the pup was returned to High Park, Paul and Linda had departed for London, so it was then flown down to join them. On an even more famous occasion, the Campbeltown vet found himself called to High Park Farm to treat a duck with a broken leg.
Despite Linda’s pride in her home-grown veg, the cuisine at High Park still remained largely meat-based. But there were already signs of wavering. One Christmas time, she asked Reggie McManus to go to Glasgow and collect a goose she’d ordered as a change from turkey for the festive meal. McManus expected the bird to be already plucked and dressed but found it very much alive, in a crate so large that he had to lash it to the taxi roof.
On the return journey to Kintyre, he ran into high winds and lashing rain such as only the Scottish Highlands can produce. Fearing that the goose mightn’t survive the journey–and so rob Paul and Linda of the experience of butchering their own Christmas dinner–he made frequent stops amid the tempest to check it was still alive. Furious hisses and wing-beatings confirmed this to be so.
However, its destiny was not to be carved by Paul at the head of a table decorated with crackers and tinsel. When McManus called at High Park some weeks later, Linda took him into the backyard, and there was his former outside passenger waddling around at the head of a flock of goslings. They hadn’t had the heart to kill it, Linda said. ‘It was now part of the family, raising its own family.’
Vegetarianism did not have much of a following in Britain at this time. Most people regarded it as a rather pitiable eccentricity practised by joyless characters who wore sandals and made their own clothes, and summed up in the drab phrase ‘nut cutlet’. Most vegetarian restaurants were gloomy places still redolent of the hippy era. The name of London’s most successful one, Cranks, wryly acknowledged the overwhelming public view of its clientele.
Paul had grown up an enthusiastic carnivore whose favourite meal, before he discovered more sophisticated fare, was lamb chop and chips (though at 20 Forthlin Road, his father’s catering sometimes included ‘pea sandwiches’). Though he’d tried vegetarianism with Jane Asher, he’d rather back-slid with Linda, whose earliest taste of fame had been with a meat loaf recipe (‘take three pounds of mixed veal, beef or pork…’) in the Arizona Daily Star. ‘When they came to my house, Linda would go into the kitchen and make BLTs,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘And I can hear her now asking me. “Do you fancy a burger?”’
Neither had ever felt anything contradictory in loving the lambs that were born by the hundred at High Park early each spring, giving the cutest ones names, letting the children bottle-feed the weaklings and then, a few weeks later, seeing them herded into trucks to be taken to Campbeltown livestock market. But one sunny Sunday noontime, realisation suddenly dawned.
‘We were having lunch and looking out the window at all these little lambs jumping around, full of life,’ Paul would remember. ‘Then we realised we were eating leg of lamb. We looked at each other and had the same thought: “Maybe we should find a way of not doing this.”’
For Wings’ fourth album–their first after leaving the Apple label–Paul continued his policy of recording in hopefully inspirational foreign places and took them to New Orleans. Despite the magnetic pull of the city’s jazz and blues heritage, he’d been there only once before, as a Beatle. All he remembered from that hermetically-sealed visit was the heat, the vibrator bed in the motel, and meeting Fats Domino.
The Wings troupe arrived on 5 January 1975, unaware that the city’s Mardi Gras festival was in full swing. Venturing out to explore, they found themselves engulfed by fancy dress parades and marching Dixieland bands. Always glad of a chance to dress up, Paul and Linda joined the festivities disguised as circus clowns. But the chalk-white face and red nose fooled no one. ‘Hi, Paul,’ one after another fellow reveller greeted him.
Sea-Saint Studios, where the band were booked to record, also had an inspirational purpose. The studios’ co-owner, songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint, was one of the most influential figures in New Orleans R&B, the composer of seminal early-Sixties hits like Ernie K-Doe’s ‘Mother-in-Law’ and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Working in the Coal Mine’. Toussaint himself was to play backup piano for Paul in support of Linda’s keyboards.
There was no current rumour of a Beatles reunion but the ravenous media had recently missed the strongest prospect yet. At their meeting in LA the previous summer, Paul had invited John to New Orleans to play on Wings’ album and John had said he’d think about it. Later, according to his then companion, May Pang, he’d talked seriously about writing with Paul again and, at Pang’s urging, decided to accept the New Orleans invitation. But the very week he was due to go, Yoko finally agreed to a reconciliation: he cancelled his flight and settled down with her in the Dakota Building to have a child and, in Yoko’s poignant words, ‘grow old together’.
It had been over a year since the release of Band on the Run and expectations for Wing’s follow-up were almost as great as for the successor to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul had planned a formula similar to his 1973 smash–and his 1967 one–with songs linked together and reprised to create a seemingly coherent narrative. Holidaying in Jamaica prior to the trip, he’d set out all the tracks on a paper scroll ‘almost as long as the room’, continually changing their running-order to get the right balance of light and shade. The only other time he’d done that was with his medley at the end of Abbey Road.
Sea-Saint Studios and the New Orleans vibe did not disappoint. Allen Toussaint was a courtly host and a consummate professional who submerged his own highly individual piano style to do whatever Paul wanted. A succession of local legends dropped by to meet the McCartneys and jam, including the two great pedagogues of Southern blues, Professor Longhair and Dr John, and Sea-Saint’s famous house band, the Meters. At a press reception aboard a Mississippi riverboat, Paul was evasive about the album’s name, but Linda let it out: ‘Venus and Mars.’
In contrast with this positive creative atmosphere, there was still unrest in Wings’ ranks. After six months, drummer Geoff Britton remained at loggerheads with lead guitar Jimmy McCulloch and noticeably isolated from the others. His problem was the same as Pete Best’s long ago in the baby Beatles: neither his playing nor his face seemed to fit. And a fortnight into the Venus and Mars sessions, Paul fired him, making him the third Wingsman to fall to earth in less than two years.
Luckily, this was a part of the world where high-grade musicians grew as plentifully as watermelons. As a temporary stand-in, Paul hired 26-year-old Joe English, a migrant from Syracuse, New York, who’d been playing with a band called the Tall Dogs Orchestra in Macon, Georgia. Besides being an excellent drummer, he had a good singing voice and an easy-going manner, and was soon offered a permanent place in the line-up–by his own account, ‘the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me since my first Communion’.
In March, Paul and Linda returned to LA to finish off the album at the Wally Heider Studios and attend the Grammys for a double triumph. With sales now at five million, Band on the Run received the award for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group. It was also named Best-Produced Non-Classical Album, finally recompensing its engineer, Geoff Emerick, for his ordeals with Nigeria’s insect life.
The evening also brought the kind of embarrassing moment usually associated with the Oscars. To present the award for Record of the Year, host Andy Williams introduced ‘two of the most prolific talents of this or any other musical generation… They have both recently parted from respective partners of whom you may have heard. Now they’re alone and adrift in the sea of rocky royalties.’ It was John and Paul, though in this case the latter’s surname was Simon.
The new, domesticated John was a strange-looking figure with shoulder-length hair, a black beret and an orchid corsage, all vaguely reminiscent of his Aunt Mimi back home in Britain. In a front seat sat Yoko, on guard against any further signals that he might get back to writing with Paul.
The co-presenters recited a slightly bitchy script that cannot but have soured Band on the Run’s achievement a little: ‘Hello. I’m John and I used to play with my partner, Paul.’… ‘Hello, I’m Paul and I used to play with my partner, Art [Garfunkel].’ The award went to ‘I Honestly Love You’ by Olivia Newton-John, but was collected for her by Garfunkel, to Simon’s obvious discomfiture.
‘Are you guys getting back together?’ Simon took the opportunity to ask John on behalf of the assembled industry bigwigs.
‘Are you guys getting back together?’ John quipped–then, in a mischievous aside to Garfunkel: ‘Where’s Linda?’
The answer was: taking the heat for Paul as usual. Late one night, they were driving along Santa Monica Boulevard with the three children asleep in the back when he accidentally ran a red light and was pulled over by the police. Smelling a telltale fragrance, the officers searched their car, to find 17 grammes of marijuana in Linda’s bag and a still-smouldering joint under a passenger seat.
To protect Paul’s visa, and thinking the cops might go easier on an American citizen, Linda claimed sole responsibility for the stash. She was taken in and booked for possession, with a further charge of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ because Heather, Mary and Stella had been in the car at the time.
Paul drove the girls back to their hotel, then hurried to the police station to find Linda’s bail had been set at $500. Though he’d long since given up his royal/Beatle habit of carrying no money, there was still only $200 in his wallet. Luckily, his old Apple factotum, Peter Brown, was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and rushed over to make good the deficit. The LAPD proving more tolerant than Campbeltown Constabulary, both charges against Linda were later dropped.
The album wrapped with a party aboard the great Cunard liner Queen Mary, now retired from transatlantic service and moored at Long Beach as a tourist attraction and hotel. Three hundred and fifty guests, including Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Cher, watched performances by Paul’s new New Orleans friends, Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Professor Longhair and the Meters.
John and Yoko had returned to New York by then, but George turned up with his new partner, Olivia Arias. It was his first public appearance with Paul for almost four years, and in no time another Beatles reunion rumour went flashing around the world.
Venus and Mars was released in May, with a cover on which a red and a gold orb hung in an indigo void like a couple of soft-boiled billiard balls. An accompanying TV ad showed the band skylarking around a billiard table, watched by Linda in a curly blonde wig. When the ball she potted failed to reach its pocket, Paul inflated his cheeks and blew it in for her.
The music press was generally underwhelmed, none more so than Rolling Stone which, 18 months earlier, had hailed Band on the Run as his solo breakthrough and Linda’s musical emancipation. Reviewer Paul Nelson drew the kind of disparaging parallels with John and Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band that Paul hoped to have left far behind. ‘The ghost of [John’s] sincerity not only haunts but accentuates the cool calculation of the McCartney project,’ Nelson wrote, ‘and a jarring primal scream or two might make me feel less enraged by Paul and Linda’s chic, unconvincing and blatant bid to be enshrined as pop music’s Romeo and Juliet.’
The punters did not agree: Venus and Mars reached number one in Britain and America, was quickly certified gold and would go on to sell ten million. Just as Band on the Run had shown no trace of Nigeria, so Venus and Mars showed none of New Orleans, Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, shrimp gumbo or Tennessee Williams. Allen Toussaint’s contribution was all but buried. From the bravura opening title track and its segue into ‘Rockshow’, everything was customised for the Glam Rock stage. The printed lyrics contained a lapse from Paul’s usual punctiliousness; Venus and Mars were said to be ‘alright tonight’. The Liverpool Institute schoolboy of yore, with his dad’s dictionary behind him, would never have been guilty of such a slip.
The album’s runaway hit single was ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, a buoyant love song with an almost gospel tinge (i.e. ‘the Man Upstairs’) that went to number one in America but only six in ungodly Britain. Rock authors Roy Carr and Tony Tyler later cited it as an example of how ‘artful and sensitive production [could] elevate what had originally been a piece of inconsequential whimsy into what can only be called High Pop’.
In Britain, the main target of critical ire was a track where Paul’s desire to be young and Glam-Rocky seemed to go out of the window. As the finale to side two, Wings played the theme music to Crossroads, the famously cheap but hugely popular early-evening soap broadcast four times a week by Associated Television. The fact that ATV had made off with the copyrights to all his Beatles songs made this identification with cardboard sets, wooden acting and wonky screen-graphics all the more mystifying. It seemed yet another symptom of the craving for universal acceptance that pushed Wings into areas like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and their recent commercial for Mother’s Pride sliced bread, for which he’d written a special 60-second song.
Paul responded that it was simply a joke, although one not without relevance since the preceding track, ‘Treat Her Gently’, about lonely old people, must apply to a large section of Crossroads’ 15 million audience. Joke or not, it played over the soap’s closing credits, heightening one ludicrous cliffhanger over another, until the show was taken off the air in the mid-1980s.
Actually, Crossroads wasn’t such a bad metaphor for Paul and Wings in the summer of 1975. ‘We’d come from very small beginnings, after the hugeness of the Beatles,’ he would later reflect. ‘We’d wanted to start something up, just to continue playing music. Then we’d wanted it to be something cool that was us, that allowed us to be free and experiment. Then we’d wanted to practise and get a really good group. So we’d finally done all those things. Now, here we were poised to take it out and show off a bit.’
So, after Wings Over Kintyre, Wings Over Universities, Wings Over Britain and Wings Over Europe, there was to be Wings Over the World, a year-long tour beginning in September with the UK and Australia, continuing through 1976 with Europe, North America, then Europe again, a total of 66 shows winding up at London’s Empire Pool arena in October. The guitarist Jerry Reed, whom Paul had got to know in Nashville, expressed astonishment that he still felt a need to go on the road: ‘Man, if I was Paul McCartney, I’d buy the road.’
The itinerary was also to have included Japan. But early in November, as Paul was starting its Australian leg in Melbourne, the Japanese government refused him entry because of his Scottish drug conviction three years earlier. Though he’d already received a visa from the Japanese Consulate in London, it had been rescinded on direct instructions from the country’s Minister of Justice.
Paul protested that neither Australia nor America had sought to exclude him on those grounds, but the Minister remained immovable. Instead, his Japanese fans had to make do with a TV documentary of Wings’ Melbourne show and a filmed greeting from him, Linda and the band, squashed together matily on a couch, performing a snatch of ‘Bluebird’.
‘We’ll see you next time,’ he promised–rashly, it would prove. ‘Sayonara.’