Just after the Beatles’ break-up, Neil Aspinall, their former roadie, now Apple’s managing director, had begun compiling a definitive film record of their career. The resultant 90-minute cinema documentary, entitled The Long and Winding Road, could have been released in the mid-Seventies but, thanks to the conflicting demands of its stars–Magical Mystery Tour syndrome reborn!–it had sat on the shelf as numerous unofficial film biographies came and went.
By the time of John’s death, Aspinall’s plan had changed to a television documentary which, even John seemed to accept, must reunite the four of them in some way. Although that idea had perished on 8 December 1980, there clearly was still vast commercial potential in bringing the three survivors back together on-screen. The problem was the bitterness George still felt towards Paul.
George’s solo performing career might have tailed off, but he’d seemingly found ample fulfilment elsewhere. HandMade Films, the company he’d started with his manager, Denis O’Brien, produced some of the most successful British movies of the 1980s, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Time Bandits to Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday and A Private Function.
His second marriage, to Olivia Arias, had proved happy and calming, and given him a son, Dhani. He remained a stalwart of the Transcendental Meditation movement (which latterly had claimed to give converts the power of flight). With his friends Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty he’d formed a spare-time supergroup called the Traveling Wilburys, playing a gentle brand of country-rock which the music press dubbed ‘skiffle for the Eighties’. Yet all these years on, he still seethed about the way he’d been treated in the Beatles; how his songs had always been pushed to the margins by the Lennon–McCartney juggernaut and, most of all, how Paul used to boss him about in the recording studio.
The documentary idea resurfaced in the late Eighties, then immediately sank again when Paul got his extra one per cent on Beatles back royalties from EMI and George, Ringo and Yoko joined forces to sue him, George most determinedly of all. EMI settled the dispute simply by giving the litigants their own extra one per cent each. Yet the old grudge continued to smoulder. ‘Paul McCartney ruined me as a guitarist,’ he told an interviewer on BBC radio–though it evidently hadn’t stopped him playing. He seldom missed an opportunity to take a poke at Paul, whether for suggesting (around the time of Flowers in the Dirt) that the two of them might write together or for doing so much Beatles material onstage: ‘He’s decided he’s the Beatles. I’m not interested. It’s in the past… There won’t be any reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.’
But by 1990, when Aspinall raised the documentary idea yet again, things were rather different. HandMade Films had suffered a run of costly flops, like Shanghai Surprise starring Madonna, and, having underwritten the company personally, George faced possible bankruptcy. A surge in Beatles interest, and Beatles income, thus was manna from Heaven, albeit with Macca attached. His one proviso was that the project’s McCartney-saturated title The Long and Winding Road should be changed, which it was, to the neutral The Beatles Anthology.
Still, when the Anthology was publicly announced–by Paul–in May 1991, George denied that it signified a reunion, in terms suggesting he hadn’t softened all that much: ‘No, it can’t be possible because the Beatles don’t exist. It just comes every time Paul wants some publicity.’
The multipart documentary combined the film footage Neil Aspinall had collected–much of it never aired before–and ‘talking-head’ interviews with Paul, George and Ringo and TV and audio clips of John. There would be testimony from a few close associates like Aspinall himself, George Martin and their former press officer, Derek Taylor (who had come out of retirement to handle the project’s publicity), but no wives, present or past.
There was a conscious effort to avoid the nostalgia of unofficial Beatle film-histories and make it all feel crisp and contemporary. The director, Geoff Wonfor, had previously worked on Channel 4’s outré pop show, The Tube, where he’d come to Paul’s notice after doing an item on one of Linda’s photographic exhibitions that particularly pleased her. The interviews were to be conducted by Jools Holland, the famously irreverent musician and former Tube presenter who’d first found fame in the New Wave band Squeeze.
Alongside the documentary, three double CDs were to chronicle the Beatles’ career on record, with out-takes and alternate versions of songs etched on the memory of millions, mixed with snatches from old radio and TV shows and studio chatter. The first, covering the years 1958–64, included their first professionally recorded tracks: Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and Paul’s surprisingly mature country song ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. There were also items from the audition tape that got them turned down by Decca in 1962 for eccentric choices, usually traceable back to Jim McCartney, like ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Besame Mucho’.
Here and there, history was somewhat rewritten. The CD’s collage-style cover–created by their old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann–had an image of the band in their black leather days, but with the head of their then drummer, Pete Best, obliterated and Ringo’s superimposed.
In 1962, when the Beatles were on the brink of fame, Best had been brutally sacked in favour of Ringo, without any compensation then or ever afterwards. The rumour at the time had been that he was too good-looking for his bandmates’ peace of mind and that Paul in particular had chafed at the adoring screams of ‘Pete!’ wherever they appeared. After fronting his own band for a while, he’d drifted out of music and spent 20 years as a local government official with the most tragic eyes in Liverpool.
However, when the Beatles made the Decca tape, Best had still been with them, so was due a share of royalties from ten tracks used on the Anthology. The first he knew about it was a phone call from the one who’d been so keen to get rid of him–the first time they’d spoken since it happened.
‘Some wrongs need to be righted,’ Paul told him. ‘There’s some money here that’s owing to you and you can take it or leave it.’ Best took it.
As Paul was beginning a double journey through his past with interviews for The Beatles Anthology and his own authorised biography, he received some news which gave it special poignancy. Ivan Vaughan, the boyhood friend whose birth-date he shared, had died from pneumonia.
‘Ivy’ had been Paul’s classmate at Liverpool Institute and lived over the garden wall from John. It was he who brought those two very different friends of his together at Woolton church fete, with such momentous consequences for music and popular culture.
Studious Ivy, in fact, had followed the career path which once beckoned to Paul, reading classics at London University, then becoming a teacher. From time to time, he would find himself pulled into his old school friend’s rarified world, as when his wife, Jan, provided the French words for ‘Michelle’. Later, he’d been one of Paul’s only two travelling companions to LA for the first, top-secret tryst with Linda. And when Apple Corps’ first idealistic prospectus included a school, to be run on hippy lines utterly unlike the Inny, he was the obvious choice as its head.
After the axing of the Apple school project, he and Jan had moved to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer at Homerton College. Then, in his late thirties, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His courage and fortitude were shown in a 1984 television documentary, Ivan: Living With Parkinson’s Disease, narrated by Jonathan Miller and subsequently turned into a much-admired book.
Paul had always kept in touch with him, just as John had from New York; indeed, there were moments when concern for Ivy seemed about all they had left in common. ‘Ivan still talked to both of them in a kind of weird private language they’d used when they were kids,’ Jan Vaughan remembers. ‘It was more like a code, because no one else could understand a word of it.’
He and Paul last met at the Liverpool Oratorio’s London premiere, a glitzy gala occasion at the Royal Festival Hall. ‘By that time, Ivan found going anywhere very difficult. But he was determined not to miss Paul’s classical music debut.’
He died in August 1993, while Paul was in the midst of the New World Tour. Though not a surprise, the news was devastating for one whom that shared birth-date made practically a blood brother. Yet it also stirred fond memories of skiffle-playing days a million miles from high-tech stadium rock; of tinny acoustic guitars, checked shirts, church halls and a tea chest bass whose player disguised his lack of musicality with the proud inscription ‘JIVE WITH IVE THE ACE ON THE BASS’.
Paul had already been spurred by Spike Milligan to try his hand at poetry; now the passing of his friend made him do so again, this time showing more emotion than he ever had in words before. The blank verse ode he sent to Jan Vaughan was entitled simply ‘Ivan’:
Two doors open
On the eighteenth of June
Two babies born
On the same day
In Liverpool
One was Ivan
The other–me.
We met in adolescence
They dared us do
Jive with Ive
The ace on the bass.
He introduced to me
At Woolton fete
A pal or two
And so we did
A classic scholar he
A rocking roller me
As firm as friends could be.
Cranlock Naval
Cranlock pie
A tear is rolling
Down my eye.
On the sixteenth of August
Nineteen ninety-three
One door closes.
Bye-bye Ivy.
When the verse appeared in print some years later, ‘Cranlock Naval/Cranlock pie’ would be puzzled over as much as any Beatles lyric of yore. ‘I recognised it immediately as part of the private language Ivan and Paul used to speak to each other,’ Jan Vaughan remembers. ‘But I never had any idea what it meant.’
The Beatles Anthology was to absorb almost all Paul’s attention during 1994 and spell the end of the post-Wings band that had worked so well since 1989. ‘He told us he had to go away and be a Beatle again for a year,’ lead guitarist Hamish Stuart recalls. But in case it appeared that he’d totally succumbed to nostalgia, he left behind some music showing himself still very much in the present.
By the early 1990s, ubiquitous hip-hop and ‘dance’ music–as if no one had ever danced to music before–was changing the record producer’s role, for so long defined by figures like George Martin. Producers of the modern school were sonic scavengers who no longer devised original vocal and instrumental configurations, but remixed existing tracks and sampled–i.e. filched–scraps of old pop classics displaying the old-school producer’s art as ironic punctuation to a tuneless machine-made beat.
No one stood for the traditional studio system, and melody, as strongly as Paul but, as always, he was determined to stay current. After the New World Tour, he had approached one of Britain’s foremost young performer-producers, Martin Glover, who played bass with the band Killing Joke but remoulded sound for the dance music crowd under the pseudonym Youth.
Paul’s initial idea was merely for parts of Off the Ground and Wings’ farewell album, Back to the Egg, to be remixed for the huge venues where dance music was played. Instead, he ended up collaborating with Youth on a whole album of ‘sound-collages’, reviving the love of experimental music which John Cage and Luciano Berio had implanted in him during the Sixties.
There was a strong mystical strain in Youth and he was surprised to find one in Paul also. Their recording sessions were always timed to coincide with pagan festivals like the Summer Solstice or the Equinox. ‘I thought of him as a Master Bard–but at the same time, I got a strong Catholic feeling from him, too. I remember him telling me once how much he disliked the Tarot.
‘One day he had to go off somewhere with Linda, so he left me alone working at the Mill. When their helicopter came back, it was very late, they’d had a few glasses of champagne and their kids were with them. Paul said to me, “Do you mind if we stick around and watch?” as if it wasn’t his studio I was using. They all stayed, dancing around to the music until the sun came up.’
The finished album was titled Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest. As Paul had undertaken not to release anything under his own name during The Beatles Anthology, it was credited to The Fireman–descendant of the one in ‘Penny Lane’ with the hourglass and ‘in his pocket… a portrait of the Queen’.
A crucial element in the Anthology was the good relationship he now seemed to have with Yoko Ono after years of mutual coldness and mistrust.
Their rapprochement had begun in 1988 when the American author Albert Goldman published an unauthorised biography entitled The Lives of John Lennon. In 800 vitriolic but ill-informed pages, John was portrayed as a schizophrenic, epileptic, autistic, hyper-neurotic, bisexual thug whose several crimes of maniacal violence included an unprovoked attack on his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, adduced to be the direct cause of Sutcliffe’s death from a brain haemorrhage in 1962. Musically, he did not come out well either; according to Goldman, his songs mostly employed the structure of the same nursery rhyme, ‘Three Blind Mice’.
The biography was simultaneously an attack on Yoko so savage that she considered suicide (though, strangely, not legal action). Paul rallied to her support, dismissing Goldman’s more ludicrous claims and urging Beatles fans to boycott the book. Largely because of that, she had consented to the Anthology and allowed it to go forward without trying to influence its format or even seeking to take part. By late 1993, Paul, George and Ringo had agreed to record some new music to go with the out-takes and rarities on its CD series. But, clearly, such an exercise would be pointless unless it included John. Yoko’s goodwill would thus have to be tested even further.
In his five years of so-called retirement from music between 1975 and 1980, John had continued writing songs on the treadmill of competition with Paul that nothing could ever halt. At the Dakota Building, his widow was sitting on a cache of his home-demos, some known to hardcore fans via bootlegs but all justifiably described as ‘unknown’ Lennon tracks. On New Year’s Day 1994, Paul phoned Yoko to say that he, George and Ringo were thinking of doing ‘a little instrumental’ for the Anthology but getting ‘cold feet at the thought of a three-quarters Beatles reunion’. Would she consider handing over something by John for them to work with? Neil Aspinall–of whom she thought highly–had already made the same request.
As she told me at the time, her first thought was how fiercely John had dismissed any idea of a Beatles comeback performance when the world was clamouring for one. ‘He used to say they’d just be four rusty old men. But I decided it would be wrong to stand in its way. The Beatles were John’s group. He was the band leader and the one who coined [their] name.’ The sheer irony of the situation also helped sway her. ‘I had the reputation of having broken the Beatles up. Now I was in a position where I could bring them back together… it was kind of a situation given to me by Fate.’
On 19 January, he and Paul found themselves together in a room for the first time in many years. John was to be posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–a first for an individual member of a band which had already received that honour–and Paul was to give the induction address.
This took the form of an open letter to his old soul-mate and arch-competitor, recalling their first meeting at Woolton fete thanks to Ivy Vaughan; John onstage, making up lyrics to the Del-Vikings’ ‘Come Go With Me’; his beautiful mother Julia with her red hair and captivating prowess on the ukulele; songwriting sessions at 20 Forthlin Road, fuelled by Typhoo tea-leaves smoked in Jim McCartney’s pipe; journeys to early gigs in freezing vans when the only way to keep warm was to lie on top of each other in a ‘Beatle sandwich’; the ‘little look’ they’d exchanged before singing ‘I’d love to turn you on’ in ‘A Day in the Life’, knowing the consequences but not caring.
The woman who’d come between them received only the briefest, most tactful mention. One day in the Sixties, ‘a girl named Yoko Ono’ had appeared, soliciting a Lennon and McCartney manuscript. ‘I told her to go and see John,’ Paul said, adding with masterly understatement: ‘And she did.’
At the end, he spoke directly to John about their reconciliation, as it proved just in the nick of time. ‘And the joy for me, after all the business shit we’d gone through, was that we were actively getting back together and communicating again. And the joy as you told me how you were baking bread now. And how you were playing with your little baby, Sean. That was great for me, because it gave me something to hold on to. And now years on here we are assembled to thank you for everything you mean to us all. This letter comes with love from your friend Paul.’
Afterwards, he and Yoko embraced a little gingerly, but there was no doubting how moved she had been. Later that night, she gave him tapes of four songs by John and her blessing for the surviving Beatles to overdub vocals and a backing.
So the reunion that millions had awaited for almost a quarter of a century was finally to happen, albeit only on record and with what the British press termed ‘the Threetles’. After the news came a flurry of speculation that they mightn’t stop there. One report claimed that they’d been offered £20 million each for a single live show with Julian Lennon replacing his father; others, that they were being courted by reincarnations of both the Woodstock and Isle of Wight pop festivals.
The best song on the tapes was judged to be ‘Free as a Bird’, a pensive ballad which John had recorded with just his own piano accompaniment sometime in 1977. Augmented by Paul, George and Ringo, it would be the pièce de résistance of the first Anthology CD as well as coming out as a single. Although George Martin was compiling the archive music, he felt unable to produce this late addition to an oeuvre he had done so much to foster. Martin was now 68 and four decades of fastidious listening had taken their toll: his hearing was beginning to fail.
Instead, the job went to Jeff Lynne, George’s companion in the Traveling Wilburys (whose former band, the Electric Light Orchestra, had been called ‘the Beatles of the Seventies’). The sound on John’s archaic cassette was of such poor quality that Lynne first had to take it to his studio in Hollywood to be cleaned up and digitised. The song being too short as it stood, Paul and George between them supplied a middle eight, for each would sing in turn. So, despite George’s earlier snarkiness, they did end up writing together.
The overdubbing took place in February at Hog Hill Studio. It was the first time the two of them and Ringo had played together since George’s ‘I Me Mine’ in January 1970.
Still the soul of tact, Paul had done his best to forestall any last-minute interference by Yoko. ‘I said, “Don’t impose too many conditions on us,”’ he would recall. ‘“It’s really difficult to do this spiritually. We don’t know, we might hate each other after two hours.”’ But she imposed no conditions and didn’t even attend the session. Different days indeed from when she’d whispered in John’s ear through the White Album and he’d had a bed rigged up for her on the studio floor during Abbey Road.
Playing and singing along with John’s voice was an eerie experience for all of them. ‘I invented a little scenario,’ Paul was to remember. ‘He’d gone away on holiday and he’d rung us [and said], “Just finish this track for me, will you?” It was very nice and it was very irreverent towards John… not too “Aah, the fallen hero.”… John would have been the first to debunk that. “A fucking hero? A fallen hero? Fuck off, we’re making a record.”’
Some of the Let It Be tension resurfaced nonetheless. Paul had initially thought ‘Free as a Bird’ should be a big orchestral number, but George wanted to give it a yearning steel guitar riff like his famous one on ‘My Sweet Lord’ (belying his supposed ‘ruination’ as a guitarist). Paul gave way after hearing the riff and, with impressive self-restraint, offered no suggestions as to how it might be improved.
Three months later, the same team reassembled at Hog Hill to overdub a second John home-demo, ‘Here and There’, for the second Anthology CD. The session was abandoned after one afternoon because of the song’s weakness, although it gave Paul a chance to sing along with John in the headphones, feeling ‘as if he was in the next room’.
In the end, it wasn’t until February 1995 that they came back to work on ‘Real Love’, which John had taped in 1979 in six different voice-and-piano versions, some under the alternate title ‘Real Life’. Paul played the stand-up bass used by Bill Black on Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that Linda had bought him in Nashville.
Relations with Yoko continued to be excellent, so much so that at the time of the ‘Real Love’ sessions she paid a visit to Peasmarsh with her son Sean, now aged 19. She and Paul even recorded a track together at Hog Hill Mill, something that neither of them could ever have imagined.
That August, it would be 50 years since the dropping of the atom bomb on Yoko’s homeland. ‘Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue’ somewhat recalled that emblematic John-and-Yoko anthem ‘Give Peace a Chance’, with Sean, Linda and the McCartney children joining in; there was also a touch of the seance in Yoko’s introductory words, ‘John, we’re here now, together. Bless you, peace on earth and Strawberry Fields Forever.’
She took the lead vocal–simply a repetition of the title segueing into her characteristic sound effects–with Paul on string bass, audibly respectful. The piece would be broadcast by Japanese public radio on the anniversary of Hiroshima’s incineration.
Sean Lennon had grown up feeling that the father he’d lost at the age of five belonged more to the world than to him, and that his only private time with John came through playing the piano. Among Hog Hill Mill’s collection of historic musical instruments was the Baldwin spinet John had used on the Abbey Road track ‘Because’. When Paul invited Sean to play it, he didn’t stop for hours.
The Dakota Building was not alone in yielding up lost recordings for The Beatles Anthology. As a teenager Paul had occasionally been able to borrow one of those so desirable Grundig tape recorders, belonging to two brothers, Reginald and Charles Hodgson, who lived around the corner from him in Allerton. That August of 1995, the brothers were clearing out their mother’s attic after her death and came upon the Grundig and an ancient spool tape. On it were the nameless band that had helped to bridge the gap between the Quarrymen and the Beatles: John, Paul, George and Stuart Sutcliffe.
The Hodgsons contacted Paul’s old friend Joe Flannery and arrangements were made for the tape to be brought to Peasmarsh by Reg Hodgson’s son, Peter. Sure enough, it contained a whole recital, apparently in the front room at 20 Forthlin Road, by the drummerless quartet who vainly used to assure local dance promoters that ‘the rhythm’s in the guitars’. Paul’s contributions included Eddie Cochran’s ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’ and Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’, a memory of his and John’s brief career as The Nerk Twins. To add a bit of percussion, his brother Mike could be heard bashing on anything to hand.
Paul was intensely moved by what he heard and asked to buy the tape (subsequently paying the Hodgson family a reported £260,000). To show his gratitude, he gave Peter Hodgson a guided tour of Hog Hill Mill, pointing out the Bill Black double bass, the ‘Because’ spinet and the Mellotron he’d played on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. To Hodgson, the room above the studio seemed ‘like a museum’, for Paul’s old school desk was also there (scratched with the initials ‘AA’, for Arthur Askey); the walls displayed what were evidently genuine Picassos and against one wall stood a chair which, he learned, had once belonged to Vincent Van Gogh.
As a special concession, the famous Hofner violin bass was taken from its secret underfloor compartment for the visitor to hold. Taped to its back there was still a piece of Senior Service cigarette-packet with Paul’s scribbled setlist for the Beatles’ last-ever live concert, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in 1966. ‘Don’t drop that,’ he warned. ‘It’s insured for two million.’
He also revealed himself as a Beatle memorabilia-collector to beat the most obsessive. The cover of their 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, had shown four cheery, innocent lads leaning out over a metal rail at EMI’s London headquarters in Manchester Square. Six years later, while making the abortive Get Back album, they had a cover prepared of their no longer innocent or cheery selves similarly leaning out over the same rail.
When the EMI building was demolished, Paul had bought the rail. He kept it at Hog Hill with a blow-up photograph of John, George, Ringo and himself, positioned to look as if they were leaning over it.
‘Free as a Bird’ was premiered by BBC Radio 1 on 21 November 1995. There probably has never been a record that more people wanted to love. And the general disappointment was palpable. All Jeff Lynne’s technical expertise had been unable to integrate Paul’s and George’s overdubbed voices with John’s; faint and uncharacteristically diffident, it seemed to come from a separate studio beyond the grave. The extra McCartney/Harrison words had a pang of real sadness: ‘Whatever happened to/ the love that we once knew/ Can we really live without each other?’ Trouble was, everyone knew they didn’t mean it.
The song was lead track on the first Anthology CD, then, after a brief interval, released as a single to catch the Christmas market. It sold 120,000 in its first week, reaching number two in the UK–denied the top spot by Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’–and number six on the Billboard chart. All well and good if one forgot the era when Beatles singles routinely sold a million before release.
On 19 November, the first Anthology documentary was aired by ITV in Britain and ABC in America. The Beatles always used to possess perfect timing, but now it had deserted them. The next evening, on BBC1’s Panorama programme, Diana, Princess of Wales gave a sensational interview admitting that her supposed ‘fairytale’ marriage to Britain’s future king had been a sham and that Prince Charles had been carrying on with his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, throughout it.
From then on, the only story for the world’s media was beautiful, brave, batty Princess Di taking on the House of Windsor and showing every sign of triumphing. Different days again, when the Fab Four could be kicked off the front pages by royalty.
The documentary’s talking-head interviews left no doubt which Threetle had worn best. Recovering alcoholic Ringo now sported a cropped head and a beard which gave him a weird resemblance to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Extensive dental work had left George with a rather camp, cosy smile that went with his homespun coloured woollens–though not the gall that leaked into his reminiscences. Thirty years on, he revealed how insulted he’d been by the Beatles’ MBE awards (an unprecedented honour at the time). ‘For all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, and they just gave us a bloody old leather medal with a wooden string through it.’
Paul, however, seemed unchanged, particularly since all traces of grey had vanished from his hair. While the others looked like retirees, he came across as still busy and engaged with life, sitting in his recording studio, surrounded by guitars, or piloting his converted fishing trawler Barnaby Rudge around Rye harbour.
As an interviewee he gave the same good value as always. But juxtaposed with archive footage of the London Palladium or The Ed Sullivan Show or Shea Stadium, his articulacy, candour and humour were the more striking. It seemed hardly possible for someone to have gone through all that, and infinitely more, yet ended up so very normal.
At the close of the final documentary, each of the three summed up what the Beatles meant to him. Ringo, surprisingly, showed the most emotion. ‘It was magical,’ he said, choking back tears. ‘There were some really loving, caring moments between four people… a hotel-room here and there… a really amazing closeness… four guys who really loved each other…’
‘[The fans] gave us their money and their screams,’ said George, ‘but the Beatles gave their nervous systems.’
The final–and, perhaps, best–judgement came from the one whose nervous system was apparently still fine.
‘To me,’ said Paul, ‘the Beatles were always a great little band. Nothing more, nothing less, for all our success. When we sat down to play, we played good.’