The 1980s had not been kind to Liverpool. Incessant strikes had crippled its surviving industry, raising unemployment to twice the national rate, and race riots culminating in orgies of arson and looting had brought police baton-charges and CS gas to its streets. A far left-dominated city council waged guerrilla war on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government while essential services teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and 15 per cent of the once-proud Victorian metropolis lay derelict. There were thousands of decent, hard-working Liverpudlians who were horrified by the state of things, but the Thatcher propaganda machine portrayed them all as gobby layabouts content to sponge off the benefits system while their habitat disintegrated around them.
That stereotype was enshrined in Bread, Carla Lane’s TV comedy series whose Dingle-dwelling Boswell family possessed all the Scouser’s supposed fecklessness and bombast in excelsis. Yet out of the show came an event which can be said to have started Liverpool on the road back to self-respect.
After Paul and Linda’s cameo appearance, they had become friendly with Jean Boht, who played the Boswells’ matriarch. And it happened that ‘Ma Boswell’s’ real-life husband was the American composer and conductor Carl Davis, famous in Britain for scoring prestigious television series like Thames TV’s The World at War and silent movie classics like Abel Gance’s Napoléon.
Soon after the McCartneys’ appearance in Bread, Davis found himself conducting the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the city’s last uneroded bastions of excellence. The gig resulted in an invitation to compose and conduct something to mark the orchestra’s 150th anniversary in 1991. Remembering his wife’s recent pleasant working experience with the world’s greatest living Liverpudlian, he suggested he should write that something in collaboration with Paul.
Classical music had run through Paul’s work ever since the string quartet on ‘Yesterday’ and the piccolo trumpet on ‘Penny Lane’; he’d marshalled whole symphony orchestras for both Beatles and Wings tracks, and lost count of the number of his songs which had been scored for strings and woodwind. George Martin had always believed him capable of creating some large-scale classical work and repeatedly urged him to try. But he’d always hesitated, feeling himself disqualified by being unable to read or write music and put off by the ‘posh’ aura of the conductors and virtuosi with whom he’d have to work.
Carl Davis was not in the least posh with his television and movie themes and cheery boast that ‘if it moves, I’ll score it’. Before meeting him through his wife, Jean, Paul had seen him on a talk show and remarked to Linda, ‘One of these days, I might get in touch with that guy.’
An invitation with Jean to Peasmarsh offered Davis an opportunity to pitch the Liverpool Philharmonic idea. Unfortunately, a crowd of Paul’s Liverpool relatives also happened to be there, making it difficult to get him on his own. There was an awkward moment, too, when he asked Davis to name his favourite Beatles song and Davis could think only of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, written by John.
At first, the chance to co-compose a choral work for the Liverpool Phil’s 150th anniversary did not seem to excite him. But later, around the tea-table with his relations, he started reminiscing about his days at Liverpool Institute High School; how on hot summer days he would ‘sag off’ class and sneak into the nearby cathedral graveyard to sunbathe on the tombstones. This triggered the idea of a musical autobiography on a scale far beyond ‘Penny Lane’.
Davis expected merely to be Paul’s amanuensis, translating raw ideas into musical grammar as George Martin had always done. To begin with, he adopted a somewhat pedagogic air, explaining technical terms such as ‘rondo’, sometimes pausing to say ‘Let me give you a lesson…’ ‘He tried to sit me down one day with Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,’ Paul would remember, ‘[but] I said, “No, Carl, it’s too late for that, love.”’
He’d also presumed they would be working separately and he’d take the musical lead, pastiching Paul’s style in the same way he’d matched 1920s-ish music to Hollywood silent movies. For the first movement, ‘War’, set in the year of Paul’s birth, 1942, he composed what he thought were sweet, tuneful McCartneyesque cadences, only to have them rejected out of hand. What Paul wanted to evoke was the Nazi bombing of Liverpool as shown on grainy old black and white cinema newsreels, ‘with planes coming over and dropping their bombs and the fire brigade rushing around and bells ringing’. ‘My God, you’re turning me on,’ Davis said, beginning to scribble new notes. After that, the two worked together almost as closely and interactively as Paul once had with John.
Some time passed before Paul knew exactly what it was they were composing. ‘I’d say to Carl, “Is this a symphony?” He’d say, “No, that’s slightly different.” “Is it a concerto then?” He’d say, “No, it’s not.” “Is it a suite?” “Oh, no, God, no.”’ Then by chance he read an inflight magazine article which mentioned the oratorio form, a narrative work on a religious theme, like Handel’s Messiah or Verdi’s Requiem. After checking with Davis that that indeed was what they were about, he titled it the Liverpool Oratorio–the first use of the city’s name for artistic purposes since ‘the Liverpool Sound’.
Close collaborators that they had become, Davis was expecting a Lennon–McCartney-style 50–50 credit. But Paul made it clear that he wanted the billing to be ‘Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio’. As he later explained: ‘I was getting paranoid that Carl would be up on the podium like Stravinsky on heat and I’d be coming over as the scruff from Speke who couldn’t read music.’ Speke was the blue-collar suburb where he’d lived as a small boy before his mother’s job as a midwife allowed them to move to a better area; how revealing that 40 years on, for all the immensity of his fame, he should still have felt its caste-mark.
He worked on the oratorio for two and a half years, longer by far than he’d ever devoted to a single project, somehow finding time for sessions with Carl Davis between making the Flowers in the Dirt album, setting up two further ones and going on that ten-month, 100,000-mile world tour.
It told the story of his early life but not any part of his musical career, which he’d ruled out as ‘too boring’. Its hero therefore had a fictitious name, Shanty, a dual reference to Liverpool seafarers’ songs and the humblest type of dwelling, more so even than a Speke council house with an outside toilet.
The core of the piece was Shanty’s education at Liverpool Institute, which mirrored Paul’s own; its leitmotif was the Inny’s Latin motto, ‘Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Nati’–‘not for ourselves alone but for the whole world were we born’–an apt prophecy for two pupils (George as well) destined to be Beatles. There was also a recreation of the Spanish teacher, Miss Inkley, whom Paul’s class believed to have been a wartime secret agent, and her little song about three bunny rabbits in a tree, ‘Tres conejos en un árbol’.
Other autobiographical touches were more oblique. In boyhood, Shanty did not lose his mother as Paul had but his father, commemorated in what could have been an epitaph for ‘Gentleman Jim’ McCartney: ‘Your spirit will keep us moving in the right direction’. Later, the adult Shanty received a vision of his mother in a graveyard which morphed into his future wife, both of them named after Paul’s maternal patron saint, Mary.
And despite the moratorium on Beatle history, there was no preventing John from sneaking into the libretto. Shanty’s declaration that ‘the most important thing I’ve done was sagging off’ meant more than just cutting class to sunbathe on gravestones; it meant forging the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership in the tiny front room at 20 Forthlin Road.
At the end, Shanty’s pregnant wife Mary suffered an accident and was taken to hospital where a kindly nurse (Paul’s other patron saint) asked her, ‘Do you know who you are?’ It is the emergency services’ first means of assessing trauma in an accident victim. After John’s shooting by Mark David Chapman, he’d been asked the same question in the back of a New York police car as it rushed him, unavailingly, to Roosevelt Hospital.
While Liverpool Institute was being thus celebrated in words and music, it presented one of the saddest symbols of the city’s decline.
The Inny had closed in 1985 after 140 years. Officially, the reason was declining pupil numbers caused by an oversupply of modern schools round about. In reality, the feeling of privilege it gave its pupils was anathema to Liverpool’s hard left city council (none more so than the Trotskyist deputy leader Derek Hatton, who’d once been among them). Nor did the Inny’s demise put an end to this official malevolence: for six years, its neoclassical building in Mount Street had simply been left to rot.
When Paul first embarked on the oratorio, he’d paid a return visit to his alma mater to refresh his memory for the music, and had been shocked by the desolation he found. In fact, the Inny had contributed little to his musical development beyond putting him on the other side of a wall from John in the adjacent art college. Still, he recognised the superlative education in English and languages that he’d jettisoned to go with the Beatles to Hamburg.
At this point, it must be said, he was not exactly famous as a public benefactor, least of all in his home city. During the late Seventies, when the school launched a redevelopment appeal, his old English teacher, Alan ‘Dusty’ Durband, had asked him to contribute and been disappointed to receive a cheque for just £1000.
His reputation as a tightwad hardly bore scrutiny; as a co-founder of the Beatles’ Apple organisation, he had given away more money than any pop star before or since. But overt acts of philanthropy like, for instance, Elton John’s had never seemed his thing. ‘I know any number of people and organisations he’s helped,’ says his old Liverpool friend, Joe Flannery. ‘But never a word about it has got out. I sometimes said to him, “Paul, why don’t you tell some of these people who think you’re tight with your money?” He always said, “It’s not the point.”’
Lately, that had begun to change. In 1990, when Rye’s small hospital was threatened with closure, he and Linda joined in local efforts to save it, including a protest march in company with Spike Milligan. He subsequently donated £1 million to build a new 19-bed care centre, to which Linda sent flowers every day.
So now he felt it was up to him to do something about his old school, little dreaming how much it would end up costing him. His first idea was merely to replace the Inny’s roof which had been stripped of its lead even more thoroughly than Apple’s old headquarters in London, allowing rain to compound the ruin below. But to safeguard the building in the long term, some new use for it would have to be found.
Historically the only way for pop artistes to learn their craft–as the Beatles learned theirs–had been by trial and error in front of live audiences. But in America during the 1980s, the idea took root that pop vocalising, songwriting and instrumentation could be taught in the same way as English or algebra. This notion of stardom as being open to everyone inspired Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame, about hyper-competitive students at the New York School of Performing Arts. Irene Cara’s title song had since become an anthem for millions of young people to whom fame had never before seemed an option: ‘I’m gonna live for ever… I’m gonna light up the sky.’
Yet British versions of that ‘Fame academy’ had been slow to take root. The first, prophetically enough, was at Liverpool University which opened its Institute of Popular Music in 1988 with Paul’s brother, Mike, on its steering committee. The idea then spread to secondary education, notably with the BRIT School–named after the UK’s annual pop awards–in Croydon, south of London, which offered performing arts courses, sponsored by the record industry, alongside conventional subjects.
The BRIT School was the brainchild of a former teacher and publisher with the very un-rock ‘n’ roll name of Mark Featherstone-Witty. Inspired by Parker’s film, Featherstone-Witty had set up the Performing Arts Trust, a body dedicated to bringing it to life in the UK, whose supporters included Parker himself, Richard Branson, Joan Armatrading and George Martin.
Martin had received the most rigorous classical music education at London’s Guildhall School. But he’d never forgotten the torrent of raw talent that had come out of Liverpool in the Sixties in the Beatles, Cilla Black, Gerry Marsden and dozens more. Hearing of the Inny’s predicament from Paul, he suggested it would be a perfect site for a fame school like the one Mark Featherstone-Witty was putting together in Croydon.
By then, Featherstone-Witty had bowed out of the BRIT School, which had made use of his ideas but then failed to appoint him principal. At a loss professionally, and in ‘a deep depression’, he was contacted by Richard Ogden, and invited to a meeting with Paul. Thus from the mildewed classrooms and sodden textbooks of Liverpool Institute High School for Boys was born the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, or LIPA. As its ‘lead patron’, Paul pledged £1 million of start-up money in staged payments; Featherstone-Witty was to be its founding principal and head its fund-raising campaign.
The moment could not have been more opportune. By 1991 the city council had recovered from its long amnesia about the Beatles and realised the potential of their name to attract tourism and generate business. LIPA therefore received enthusiastic support from City Hall, if no concrete promise of funding. The city’s evening paper, the Echo, also took up the cause, conducting a readers poll which showed overwhelming enthusiasm for the project. In a letter to the Echo, Paul stressed that the new school would be for Merseyside’s young talent above all. ‘I got a great start in life at the Institute, and would love to see other local people do the same.’
Confirmation of the Inny’s rescue came in the run-up to the Liverpool Oratorio’s premiere in June 1991. Paul had further announced that when LIPA was established, he himself would teach classes there. No one imagined such a thing could really happen, but it swelled the already huge media interest in his classical debut. For the first time in many years, the name ‘Liverpool’ in a story signified something other than strikes, motormouth politicos and benefits cheats.
The oratorio was not to be performed at the Philharmonic Hall, its orchestra’s usual home, but in the Anglican cathedral whose stark sandstone bulk towers over the heights of Georgian Liverpool. Paul had been rejected by its choir at the age of 11, instead joining the rather less exalted one at St Barnabas’ Church near Penny Lane.
To sing the four solo parts, his simple instruction to Carl Davis was ‘Get the best in the world’. Grand opera had boomed in popularity since Luciano Pavarotti’s heart-stopping performance of Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ during the 1990 World Cup; however, Pavarotti and the other tenors of the so-called ‘Football Three’, Placido Domingo and José Carreras, all had Latin accents too strong for the work’s Scouse idiom.
Paul got his wish nevertheless; the line-up was headed by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the world’s best as well as best-loved soprano, in the role of Shanty’s wife, Mary, supported by the American tenor Jerry Hadley as Shanty, the great West Indian bass-baritone Willard White and the South African mezzo-soprano Sally Burgess.
In March, Davis began rehearsing the finished 90-minute piece with its 90 musicians and 150-strong choir, augmented by the cathedral’s own 40 choristers (one of whom was actually named Shanty). Paul was there throughout with Linda; rather than commute to and from Sussex by private jet, they used the house on the Cheshire Wirral that Paul had originally bought for his father, then turned over to his brother, Michael.
He himself very nearly joined the four international opera stars who were to sing the sort-of story of his early life. Dame Kiri was all for it, suggesting he took the role of the Institute headmaster. He tried a few bars, but decided the competition would be too great.
Although Davis was the one on a podium with a baton, Paul effectively ran the rehearsals. He was concerned that the orchestra shouldn’t think themselves on a soft wicket, having overheard Davis tell leader violinist Malcolm Stewart, ‘Don’t worry… It’s not concerto-level.’ The fourth movement, ‘Father’, particularly exercised him as it featured trumpets, his dad’s old instrument. If anyone forgot a note, he instantly supplied it in a perfect falsetto. Linda sat to one side, singing along word-perfectly.
And of course the resources at hand far exceeded any normal choir-practice. When Kiri Te Kanawa sportingly volunteered to sing ‘I’m going to have a baby’ in a Liverpudlian accent, Ma Boswell from Bread, aka Mrs Carl Davis, was brought in to coach her.
The premiere was to be filmed and also recorded for release as an album. The extra generators that were needed almost drowned out the music, so a sound-engineer suggested muffling them with bales of hay. ‘Paul snapped his fingers and said “Get hay”,’ Davis recalls. ‘In an hour or so, a lorry load arrived.’
At the outset, Paul’s biggest worry had been hearing his words sung by ‘fruity’ voices, the kind he’d always poked fun at (never more zestfully than in John’s company). But as the days passed, he discovered how that fruitiness could move him in ways the most poignant pop track he’d written never had. For instance, in the chorale where Shanty, Mary and their child looked ahead to the future, the Fifties and Sixties, he admitted, ‘I had to bite my lip a bit. I didn’t want to start crying there in the middle of everyone.’
In fact, none of the words came near ‘Penny Lane’ level. But world-class operatic voices and the cathedral’s magnificent acoustics lifted the tritest of them to a higher dimension–like tenor Jerry Hadley’s spine-tinglingly sweet and poignant delivery of ‘I can say that looking back the most important thing I’ve done was sagging off.’
One of the journalists allowed to observe the rehearsals was Russell Miller of the Sunday Times Magazine. At first, Miller hardly recognised Paul, seated alone in the top tier of the choir stalls:
To judge by his appearance he could belong to Liverpool’s legion of unemployed, could have crept in off the street to warm up for a bit. He wears a brown tweed overcoat that has definitely seen better days… His hair is long and greying and he carries his possessions in a cheap green nylon rucksack.
To Miller he came across as his usual unpretentious, light-hearted self, mocking his own presumptuousness in a Scouse voice more lumpen than any of the Boswells’: ‘Oratorio! Orright Paul wazza noratorio when it’s at home? Wasn’t he the bloke who shot Moby Dick?’ Yet his anxiety was palpable: Miller noticed how he kept shifting in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, running his hands through his hair, picking at his fingers and chewing his nails.
His involvement in the Rye hospital campaign had been big enough news to be still worth asking about. ‘It’s not a worry for me, I could build my own bloody hospital if I wanted, but it’s for the people who really need that hospital… because I’m one of them really. I don’t see any reason to become middle class or upper class because I’ve got some money. People say to me, “You’re not really working class any more.” I say, “I bloody am, you know. I work my arse off, I do. I work my bloody arse off.”’
He took the opportunity once again to correct the ‘huge misconception’ about his character in relation to John’s: the cute, middle-of-the-road Beatle versus the avant-garde artist and iconoclast. While he’d been co-founding the Indica gallery and funding the International Times, he said, in an untypical outburst, ‘John was living on a golf course in bloody Weybridge… I suppose [the mistake] is to do with the way I am, the way I was brought up, sort of jolly.… I’m a great believer in time. There’s a lot to be found out about who did what, but I think it will come out in time.’
Linda was there as always to defend him. ‘A lot of the artistic and creative things that John got the credit for were done by Paul, but you can’t prove that… I keep saying it doesn’t matter what people think, he knows who he is and what he’s done. But he still resents it.’
The final run-through was watched by all four McCartney children, 21-year-old Mary in her new capacity as her mother’s assistant at MPL. ‘They just seemed a very ordinary family, if you forgot they’d just flown in by private jet,’ Russell Miller remembers. ‘The boy, James, had a basketball with him and kept looking around the cathedral as if assessing its potential for a game.’
A block of VIP seats had been set aside for Paul’s Liverpool relations. His favourite aunt, Gin, had died in 1987, so the clan matriarch was now Auntie Joan, wife of his dad’s whispering brother Joe, who’d helped care for him and Michael in the first shock of their mother’s death when it seemed doubtful that Gentleman Jim could ever recover.
Paul’s real affection for these elderly and frail survivors was what most impressed Miller. ‘They may not look much, there are no stunners among them,’ Paul said, ‘but by God they’ve got something–common sense in the truest sense of the word. I’ve met lots of people, I’ve met Harold Wilson and Maggie Thatcher and most of the mayors in America, but I’ve never met anyone as fascinating, as interesting or as wise as my Liverpool family.’
The premiere of the Liverpool Oratorio on 28 June was also an opportunity to publicise the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Margaret Thatcher had resigned as prime minister in 1990 and under her less bellicose, more culturally-aware successor, John Major, there were prospects of government funding for LIPA.
Before the recital, Paul gave Major’s Inner Cities Minister Michael Portillo a guided tour of the Inny building to show what huge renovation it needed. In one of the derelict classrooms, he mentioned the Spanish song ‘Tres conejos en un árbol’ which he’d learned there as a small boy and now put into the oratorio. (Portillo, whose father was born near Madrid, came back in disconcertingly fluent Spanish.) As a further gift to the media, he said he himself might take a LIPA course ‘and finally get some letters after my name’.
The audience of 2500 in the cathedral that evening was believed to be the largest congregation in its history. As Carl Davis lifted his baton, the massed television lamps and recording equipment caused a power overload and every light in the place went out. But after a few moments, as if through divine intervention, perhaps by an angel named Mary, they came on again.
At the end, there was a ten-minute standing ovation. Paul joined Davis on the podium and they hoisted each other’s arms aloft like boxing champs. The biggest challenge in his solo career had brought its most successful collaboration. He’d even ceded a share of the glory: the posters outside read ‘Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio by Paul McCartney and Carl Davis’.
The classical music critics who provided the bulk of the reviews were almost as sniffy about Davis’s background in populist TV and film as about Paul’s in pop. The Guardian called their work ‘lacklustre and embarrassing’; The Times said the oratorio had some ‘sweet tunes, but the churchy choral passages and laboured orchestral interludes made Brahms’s Requiem sound like a hotbed of syncopation’.
Five months later, it received its American premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall–where the Beatles had famously appeared in 1964–with Barbara Bonney taking Kiri Te Kanawa’s role and the Liverpool Cathedral choristers replaced by the Boys Choir of Harlem. The New York Times’s reviewer Edward Rothstein was little more impressed than his British colleagues, calling it ‘a primitive assemblage of material gussied up through some clever scoring’, and noting how ‘the kind of musical and emotional simplicity that make a pop hit can sound barren in the concert hall’. Complimenting and admonishing Paul in the same breath, Rothstein quoted the reply of the great classical composer Arnold Schoenberg during the 1930s when he was asked for composition lessons by George Gershwin. ‘But why do you want to be an Arnold Schoenberg? You’re such a good Gershwin already.’
As so often with Paul’s pop releases, bad reviews had no effect: the two-disc live recording made all 25 of America’s most important classical music charts and even appeared in some pop ones. Professional and amateur orchestras around the world instantly put their own versions into rehearsal, creating EMI’s first surge in sheet music sales since the early Sixties.
He may have failed to become an Arnold Schoenberg and had to settle for being a modern Gershwin–but he had given his birthplace something precious beyond price. It was there in the oratorio’s second movement like an audible turning of the tide, when the cathedral choristers sang the Inny’s Latin motto, ‘Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Nati’, then its English translation with six extra words.
‘Not for ourselves alone but for the whole world were we born,’ chorused the boyish trebles with–yes–pride. ‘And we were born in Liverpool.’