On 4 December 1965, the Beatles appeared at Newcastle-on-Tyne’s City Hall during what would be their last-ever British tour. I was a 22-year-old reporter in the Newcastle office of the Northern Echo, a daily paper circulating throughout the north-east. Orders from my newsdesk were ‘Go along and try to get a word with them.’
I set out on the assignment with zero hope. The Beatles had already been the biggest story in pop music–and, increasingly, beyond it–for more than two years. From my lowly, limited vantage-point, what new insight could I hope to add? As for getting ‘a word’ with them, this tour came in the wake of their Rubber Soul album, their second smash-hit film Help!, their historic performance to 55,000 people at New York’s Shea Stadium and their investiture as MBEs by the Queen. I’d be competing not only with Tyneside’s own heavyweight media but also the national newspapers and broadcasters who had offices there. Even if I did manage to get close to them, why would they waste a second on some nobody from the Northern Echo?
Like almost every young male in the Western Hemisphere, my daily fantasy was to swap lives with a Beatle. And there was no question as to which one. Paul, a year my senior, was the most obviously good-looking; John for all his magnetism could never be called that while George had good bone-structure but unsightly teeth and Ringo was… Ringo. If the adolescent female frenzies that engulfed them had any rational focus, it was the left-handed bass guitarist whose delicate face and doe-like eyes were saved from girliness by the five o’clock shadow dusting his jawline.
Paul wore his Beatle gear with greatest elegance: the high polo necks and long-collared, button-down shirts, the corduroy once confined to farm labourers, the black leather jackets still uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers, the elastic-sided boots last seen on Edwardian men-about-town. He also seemed the one most enjoying the band’s (presumably) mounting riches; I remember with what inexpressible envy I read this gossip snippet in the New Musical Express: ‘On order for Beatle Paul McCartney–Aston Martin DB5.’
He’d become known as their PR man, before we quite understood what PR men were, with his charm, good humour, impeccable manners and air of what could only be called refinement. There was always something aspirational about him, as in his dating of a classy young actress, Jane Asher; at the same time, none of the others seemed happier amid the mindless, balcony-buckling, seat-wetting mayhem of their live shows. A friend who saw them at Portsmouth Guildhall told me how, in the crazed opening moments, someone threw a teddy bear onto the stage. Paul picked it up, sat it on the neck of his bass guitar and kept it there throughout their performance.
So now here I was on a slushy December night in Newcastle, waiting outside the City Hall’s rear entrance with a knot of reporters including my friend David Watts from the Northern Echo’s evening stablemate, the Northern Despatch. Forty-five minutes before showtime, a black Austin Princess limousine, which had driven from Glasgow through heavy snow, drew up and from it emerged the four most famous haircuts on earth. The only one to acknowledge us was John, who shouted a sarcastic greeting. Despite the cold, he wore no topcoat, only jeans and a white T-shirt, the first I ever saw with something printed across the front. I couldn’t make out what it said, but I got the impression that was sarcastic also.
In those innocent days, the only security was a single elderly stage-door keeper. Dave and I between us easily talked our way past him and a few minutes later found ourselves in the corridor outside the Beatles’–totally unguarded–dressing-room. Some other media people had also got this far, but no one dared knock on the closed door, let alone barge in. As we loitered there indecisively, a rising crescendo of shrieks and stamping feet from the adjacent concert hall warned that potential interview time was running out.
Then suddenly Paul came along the passage wearing a black polo neck, just like on the With the Beatles album cover, and unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. As he opened the door, Dave said ‘I know that face’ and, as he paused with a grin, I managed to ask, ‘Can we come in and talk to you?’
‘Sure,’ he replied in the Liverpudlian voice that was so conspicuously higher and softer than the others. So, scarcely believing our luck, we followed him.
It wasn’t a dressing-room, in fact, but a spacious lounge with green leather sofas and armchairs and a wall of French windows looking on to nothing. The Beatles had just finished a meal of steak and chips and trifle and the plates were being cleared by a squad of brisk Geordie waitresses in black dresses and white aprons. There were no other females present, nor any visible trace of alcohol or drugs. The only entertainment provided was a TV set showing an episode of The Avengers, its only audience George’s pale, unsmiling face.
I started talking to Ringo, who was sitting in one of the green leather chairs, then John perched on an arm and joined in. Both now also wore their stage uniform of black polo necks and were astonishingly friendly and easy: I felt I had every bit as much right to be there as the Melody Maker big shot who’d come up specially from London. (John’s patience seems especially remarkable now that I know what pressures he was under at the time.) George never looked up from The Avengers and Paul moved around restlessly, chewing Juicy Fruit and looking for one of the Moody Blues who were also appearing that night. ‘Anyone seen the Moodies?’ he kept asking. I recall staring at his jeans and wondering if they were the everyday kind they seemed, or custom-made with specially reinforced seams and rivets to prevent them being torn to shreds by frantic hands.
On a nearby sofa lay the Hofner ‘violin’ bass whose long-necked Stradivarius silhouette had become his particular trademark. I’d once played guitar myself, in a no-hope band on the Isle of Wight, and to show my kinship with the Beatles I asked him if the bass was heavy to wear onstage. ‘No, it’s light,’ he said. ‘Here… try it.’ With that, he picked it up and tossed it over to me. I’m a hopeless catcher, but I somehow managed to grab its fretboard and shoulder-strap together. For a few moments I found myself fingering the same frets Paul McCartney did, and thumbing the same steel-wound strings. I asked whether violin-shaped basses were more expensive than regular ones. ‘Only 52 guineas [£54.60],’ he said. ‘I’m a skinflint, you see.’
The three were just as nice when I found a blank page in my notebook and requested an autograph for my young sister. ‘You’re her favourite,’ I blurted, as Paul added his surprisingly grown-up signature. ‘I’ll be all right then, won’t I,’ he murmured, ‘if I’m her favourite.’ It was the gentlest possible put-down.
Like all their interviewers, I felt I got on better with them than anyone ever had before. ‘Is it OK if I stick around for a bit?’ I asked Paul, then looked at John. ‘Sure,’ they both nodded. Just then, a hollow-cheeked man in a yellow shirt with leg o’ mutton sleeves entered the room and noticed me. This was their roadie, Neil Aspinall, one of whose main functions on the road was saying to journalists what the lovely, cuddly Fab Four couldn’t possibly say themselves. More than likely he’d received one of their secret signals that a visitor was becoming tiresome.
‘You,’ he said with a jerk of his thumb. ‘Out!’
‘But… they just told me I could stay,’ I protested.
‘Well, I’m telling you you’ve got to go,’ he snapped, then glanced down at a newspaper, forgetting my existence.
As I made my ignominious exit, I consoled myself that at least I had a Beatles angle none of my rivals did: how Paul McCartney threw me his violin bass and told me he was a skinflint.
For the rest of the Sixties, and the century, our paths were never to cross again. At the London Sunday Times, where I went on to work, all Beatles coverage was jealously guarded by older colleagues. So I wrote not a line about the flowering of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting after they stopped touring in 1966, which brought their album masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and superlative ‘Paul’ songs like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘She’s Leaving Home’. It was for others–so many others–to chronicle the two eventful years after Brian Epstein’s death, with Paul seemingly running the band, that saw their journey to a Himalayan ashram, their Yellow Submarine cartoon film, their White Album, their Magical Mystery Tour and their launch of a business called Apple, which had nothing whatever to do with computers.
All that time, I remained just another of the countless young males for whom Paul McCartney’s life seemed like paradise, and whose girlfriends mortifyingly melted at any sight of him (especially the ‘Fool on the Hill’ film sequence with those melting brown eyes in extreme close-up). There were already fears that the Beatles mightn’t last for ever; an awareness that their life together maybe hadn’t brought the supreme happiness we all presumed and that strange discontents and doubts were starting to gnaw at them. But one, at least, seemed to stand for continuity. George might have found Indian religion and lost his sense of humour; John might have dumped his pleasant wife for a Japanese performance artist and be off with her on all kinds of weird tangents. But Paul stuck with lovely Jane Asher, still maintained a flawless Beatle cut, wore the latest Carnaby suits, attended West End first nights, signed autographs and kept smiling.
Then, as the Sixties ran out, even his sense of public duty seemed to weaken. He parted from Asher, who had seemed so perfect for him in every way, and took up with an unknown American photographer named Linda Eastman. On their sudden wedding day in 1969, millions of heartbroken young women weren’t the only ones to feel let down. Dry-eyed young men like me, who’d lived his life vicariously since 1963, also wondered what on earth he could be thinking of.
That same year, I was finally commissioned to write a Beatles story in a national publication, though not yet a British one. America’s Show magazine asked me to investigate their Apple organisation, the fortunes it was devouring and the resultant blizzard of rumour about their imminent break-up. I approached their press officer, Derek Taylor, expecting the fact I’d published nothing about them, save long ago in the Northern Echo, to count against me. However, Taylor liked some Sunday Times pieces I’d written on other subjects, notably the strong man Charles Atlas, and agreed to give me accreditation. For several weeks that summer, I was allowed to hang around Apple’s London headquarters, 3 Savile Row, the Georgian townhouse which seemed the ultimate expression of Paul’s good taste.
By that point, his taste was all that remained of him there. John and Yoko were in almost every day, running their peace campaign from the front ground-floor office; George and Ringo both dropped by frequently. But there was no sign of Paul. Disgusted by John’s appointment of Allen Klein as the Beatles’ manager, he’d left London with Linda, to go to ground on his Scottish farm and record his first solo album. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I had a ringside seat at the Beatles’ break-up.
A few months into the bleak, hung-over morning-after we were learning to call ‘the Seventies’, I received a phone call from Tony Brainsby, a freelance publicist known for his bumptiousness and shock of bright red hair. Brainsby now represented the solo Paul McCartney who was putting together a new band, to be named Wings, and asked if I would care to interview him about it for the Sunday Times? I answered no without a qualm. Then, and for years to come, the Beatles were considered immeasurably greater than any individual member. The only story of interest was when they’d get back together.
For the Sunday Times Magazine I went on to interview many major names in rock, country and blues–Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Beach Boys, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Elton John, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart, B.B. King, the Everly Brothers, Diana Ross, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, Bill Haley–but was never offered another talk with Paul, and never sought one. I shared the media’s feeling of offence that he should have started another band–adding insult to injury by putting Linda in it in place of John–and resolution to give it no encouragement. As the (daily) Times’s first-ever rock critic, I had ample opportunities to talk to him at press launches for the early Wings albums, yet somehow never did. In 1973, I had to concede his triumph with Band on the Run, even if some of the rhymes (‘And the county judge/ held a grudge…’) seemed a comedown for the creator of ‘Penny Lane’.
Otherwise I echoed the view that Paul McCartney had turned into a self-satisfied lightweight and mourned the loss of his Beatle magic, and his increasing attacks of sentimentality and whimsy. Soon after the release of ‘Mull of Kintyre’, I wrote a satirical poem about him in the Sunday Times Magazine whose last verse now looks horrifically tasteless:
Oh, deified scouse with unmusical spouse
For the cliches and cloy you unload
To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon
In the middlemost midst of the road.
Has anyone ever more thoroughly burned his bridges?
In 1979, an industrial dispute closed down the Sunday Times for a year, which I decided to spend writing a biography of the Beatles. Colleagues and friends urged me not to waste my time; by then, the words written and spoken about them must have run into the billions; everything there was to know must already be known.
I approached the ex-Beatles for interviews, but got the same response from all four via their respective PRs: they were more interested in their solo careers than raking up the past. In fact–as we hadn’t yet learned to say–they were still in denial of what had happened to them in the Sixties, an experience finally monstrous more than miraculous. The turn-down from Paul via Tony Brainsby may also have been influenced by that recent verse in the Sunday Times. My conversations with Brainsby grew increasingly tense until one day he shouted ‘Philip… fuck off!’ and banged down the phone.
I delivered my book, Shout!, to the publishers in late November 1980, just two weeks before John was murdered in New York. After five years out of the music business, he’d just released a new album, Double Fantasy, and was doing extensive promotional interviews. I’d kept Shout! open-ended in case he’d agree to talk to me for a postscript.
I did get inside his apartment at the Dakota Building–but not in the way I’d hoped. When the book came out in America the following spring, I went to New York to appear on the Good Morning America television show. During the interview, I said that in my view John hadn’t been one quarter but three-quarters of the Beatles. Yoko saw the broadcast and phoned me at the ABC studio to tell me that what I’d said was ‘very nice’. ‘Maybe you’d like to come over and see where we were living,’ she added.
That afternoon, I found myself at the Dakota, being shown round the huge white seventh-floor apartment where John had raised their son, Sean, while Yoko tended to their finances. Later in her ground-floor office, seated in a chair modelled on an Egyptian pharaoh’s throne, she talked at length about his phobias and insecurities and the bitterness he’d felt towards his old bandmates, especially his other half in pop’s greatest songwriting partnership. As often happens with the recently bereaved, some of the partner she’d lost seemed to have gone into her; listening to Yoko, I often felt I was hearing John. And any mention of Paul brought a wintry bleakness to her face. ‘John always used to say,’ she told me at one point, ‘that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him.’
The words suggested a far deeper emotional attachment between the two than the world had ever suspected–they were like those of a spurned lover–and I naturally included them in my account of my visit for the Sunday Times. After it appeared, I returned to my London flat one evening to be told by my then girlfriend, ‘Paul phoned you.’ She said he wanted to know what Yoko had meant and that he’d seemed upset rather than angry. As with John, I was being offered access much too late and in a way I’d never imagined. However, at that time I fondly believed I’d written my last word on the Beatles and their era. So I didn’t attempt to get his formal response to Yoko’s quote, and afterwards heard no more about it.
The main criticisms of Shout!, by the lyricist Sir Tim Rice among others, were its over-glorification of Lennon and bias against McCartney. I replied that I wasn’t ‘anti-Paul’, but had merely tried to show the real human being behind the charming, smiley façade. Actually, if I’m honest, all those years I’d spent wishing to be him had left me feeling in some obscure way that I needed to get my own back. The pronouncement that John had represented three-quarters of the Beatles, for instance, was (as Tim Rice pointed out) ‘mad’. Paul himself hated the book, so I heard, and always referred to it as Shite.
And in the end–to quote his sum-up on the Abbey Road album–all his critics were confounded. Wings became a chart success and live concert attraction as big as the Beatles had ever been. Shrewd self-management and investment in other musical catalogues (while anomalously not owning copyright in his own best-known songs) earned him a fortune vastly bigger than any of his fellow Beatles, or anyone else in the business, an estimated £1 billion. Ancient rumours of his tight-fistedness (hadn’t he told me ‘I’m a skinflint’ in 1965?) were put to rest by his frequent involvement in charity concerts and, most spectacularly, his creation of a performing arts academy, to bring on young singers, musicians and songwriters, on the site of his old school in Liverpool.
His marriage to Linda, viewed as such a disastrous misstep at the time, became by far the happiest and most durable in pop. Despite the immensity of his fame and wealth, the couple managed to lead a relatively normal domestic life and prevent their children from becoming the usual pampered, neglected, screwed-up rockbiz brats. If the public never quite warmed to Linda, thanks mainly to her militant vegetarianism and animal-rights activism, she was acknowledged to have been the right one for him, just as Yoko had been for John.
He seemed to have achieved everything possible, not only in pop music but in the wider creative world: his classical oratorio performed in Liverpool Cathedral and accepted into the repertoire of symphonies all over the world; his painting exhibited at the Royal Academy; his collected poems published in hardback, prompting suggestions that he’d be an overwhelmingly popular choice as Poet Laureate. In 1997, his lengthy record of drug-busts (including a nine-day prison term in Japan) was brushed aside to allow him to receive a knighthood for services to music. He had indeed, as Rolling Stone magazine said, ‘done less to fuck up his good luck than any other rock star who ever existed’.
Then, in his late fifties, his life suddenly veered off its perfectly-polished rails. In 1998, Linda died after a long struggle against breast cancer. Four years later, he married the charity campaigner and former model Heather Mills, to the evident consternation of his children; six years after that, the couple divorced amid a tabloid tumult uglier than even the pop world had seen before. For the first time ever, it felt good not to be Paul McCartney.
Since Yoko had invited me to the Dakota Building in the aftermath of John’s death, she’d given me several further exclusive interviews. In 2003, we met in Paris and she agreed to co-operate with me in what would be the first large-scale, serious Lennon biography. Even without my troubled history with McCartney, I assumed there’d have been no hope of any input from him. Despite their public displays of solidarity, his relations with Yoko stayed deep in the Ice Age over issues like the order of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting credit and John’s share of royalties from Paul’s ‘Yesterday’. If she was with me, that surely must mean he’d be agin me.
Nonetheless, I thought it only courteous to send him a message via his then PR, Geoff Baker, saying I was doing a biography of John and that it would not be in any way ‘anti-McCartney’. Two weeks later, my office phone rang and a familiar Scouse-Lite voice said ‘’Ullo… it’s Paul here.’ Would that I’d had the balls to answer ‘Paul who?’
My astonished silence elicited a faint chuckle. ‘Yeah… I bet you never thought you’d hear from me, did you?’
He was phoning out of curiosity, he told me, ‘to see what this fellow who seems to hate me so much is like’. We ended up talking for about 15 minutes. But it wasn’t the conversation of a writer and the world’s biggest pop star. I had no hope that he’d help me with the Lennon biography, so employed none of the guile with which journalists try to extract quotes from celebrities. I talked to him bloke-to-bloke, without deference but with growing respect. Rock megastars never have to do anything unpleasant or uncomfortable for themselves if they don’t want to, yet, despite all the aides at his disposal, he’d bothered to pick up the phone.
When I told him I wasn’t expecting him to give me an interview for the Lennon book, he did not demur: ‘Otherwise it’d look as if I was rewarding you for writing bad stuff about me.’ But, I said, there were certain specific factual questions that only he could answer: would he at least do that by e-mail?
‘Okay,’ he said.
As I’d learned in 1965, backstage at Newcastle City Hall, a Beatle’s ‘yes’ didn’t always mean yes. But in this case it did. I would e-mail my questions to his PA, Holly Dearden, and dictated replies would immediately come back, varying from half a dozen words to a couple of hundred.
Some resolved crucial issues about the Beatles’ early history. In their Hamburg days, for example, he was said to have been the only witness when a drunken, pill-crazed John allegedly kicked their then bass-player Stu Sutcliffe in the head, maybe triggering Sutcliffe’s later fatal brain haemorrhage. No, he could not recollect any such incident. Other less sensational points were no less revealing. Was it true, I asked, that when they started writing songs together, left-handed Paul could play John’s right-handed guitar and vice versa? If so, it was a perfect metaphor for the creative symbiosis between two otherwise totally different characters that enabled one to finish a song the other had started.
Yes, he replied, it was true.
In June 2012, I watched the now 70-year-old Sir Paul headline over pop music’s other knights, Sir Elton John, Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Tom Jones, in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace; wearing a dark blue military tunic like a sobered-up Sergeant Pepper and still playing his ‘skinflint’s’ Hofner violin bass. John’s ‘Imagine’ might be the world’s favourite secular hymn but his ‘Hey Jude’ was by now an alternative national anthem. Two months later, again in the Queen’s presence, he and ‘Hey Jude’ provided the finale of the London Olympics’ £27 million opening ceremony. Apart from the sparkly little woman in the Royal box, there was no national treasure Britain was keener to show off to the world.
Yet being honoured and loved on this scale brings with it what one might call the Curse of Yesterday. The Beatles broke up longer ago than John Lennon’s whole lifetime, their career representing barely a fifth of McCartney’s total one. All his solo success since then has not changed a general view that his talent peaked in his early twenties, with John looking over his shoulder; that there can never again be a Paul McCartney song to match ‘Yesterday’, ‘Penny Lane’ or even ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
Lesser figures from the do-it-yourself songwriting boom Lennon and McCartney instigated are happy to bask in the glow of their old hits, but not McCartney. Although his back catalogue is pop music’s equivalent of the works of Shakespeare, he still feels as great a need to prove himself as the rawest beginner. In common with so many of rock’s enduring monoliths–Mick Jagger, Elton John–adulation seems to go through him like Chinese food, leaving him always ravenous for more. That day he telephoned me, he mentioned he was currently ‘back at Abbey Road, making records’. As I write, in late 2015, the world tour on which he has been more or less continuously for the past 15 years still shows no sign of coming to an end.
The dozens of books that have been written about him almost all focus on his role in the Beatles’ story–what their publicist, Derek Taylor, rightly called ‘the 20th century’s greatest romance’–and treat the four decades which followed as merely an afterthought. His own official biography, Many Years from Now, written by Barry Miles, followed the same pattern, devoting only some 20 pages out of more than 600 to his post-Beatle years and ending in 1997, the year before Linda’s death.
So there has been no comprehensive quality biography of pop music’s greatest living emblem as well as greatest nonconformist. And for all the millions of words written about him, in and out of the Beatles, the page remains strangely blank. This seemingly most open and approachable of all mega-celebrities is actually one of the most elusive. From his apparent ‘normality’ and ‘ordinariness’ he has constructed ramparts of privacy rivalled only by Bob Dylan. Now and again, behind the eternal Mr Nice Guy, we glimpse someone who, for all his blessings and honours, can still feel frustration, even insecurity, and who on the inside niggles and festers just like the rest of us. But for the most part, that smile and cheery thumbs-up have camouflaged everything.
At the end of 2012, I e-mailed McCartney, care of his publicist, Stuart Bell, saying I’d like to write his biography as a companion volume to John Lennon: The Life. If he didn’t want to talk to me directly–and it was hardly likely he could face ploughing through the whole Beatles story yet again–then perhaps he’d give me tacit approval, so I could interview people close to him who’d never be accessible otherwise. I admitted I might be his very last choice as a biographer, but said I hoped the Lennon book had made some amends for my less than fair treatment of him in Shout! Bell agreed to pass on my request, warning that a response might take some time as McCartney was on tour in America. Oh, yes, I thought… the old runaround…
A couple of weeks later, a response came back, e-mailed by a PA at his dictation:
Dear Philip
Thanks for your note. I’m happy to give tacit approval and maybe Stuart Bell will be able to help.
All the best
Paul
It was the biggest surprise of my career.