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A few weeks after the release of Abbey Road, the Apple press office began to receive calls from around the world wanting to know if Paul was dead. This type of rumour was by no means a rarity – as early as 1961, a reader of Mersey Beat had written in to ask whether one of the Beatles had just died in a car crash – but this one took on a life of its own, each denial acting as further confirmation of a cover-up.

The rumour of Paul’s death appears to have started on 12 October 1969, when Russ Gibb, a disc jockey on the Detroit station WLNR-FM, took a call from a listener who said that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident. Tom drew Gibb’s attention to the voice on ‘Revolution 9’ that repeated ‘number nine, number nine’ over and over again. The listener claimed that if you played the message backwards it said: ‘Turn me on, dead man.’

Gibb broadcast it backwards. It sounded more like ‘tunmyondenmum’, but for anyone predisposed to believe, it offered proof galore. And so the rumour mushroomed, with everyone joining the scramble for fresh proof that Paul was indeed dead. According to one listener, at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ John confesses, ‘I buried Paul.’ Another listened hard to the mumbles between the tracks ‘I’m So Tired’ and ‘Blackbird’ on The White Album and heard ‘Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him.’ And so on.

On 14 October a student newspaper called the Michigan Daily produced a satirical spoof of these crazy rumours, illustrated with a photo of Paul’s head separated from his body. Under the headline ‘McCartney is Dead: New Evidence Brought to Light’, the report concentrated on the cover of Abbey Road. The four Beatles were clearly in funeral procession, argued the author Fred LaBour. But spoofs are often mistaken for the truth – in fact, that is partly their purpose. Sure enough, the parody served only to reinforce the rumour it had set out to debunk.

Before long it seemed that virtually everything in the universe was pointing to the fact that Paul had died:

  1. Paul – or rather, the man impersonating Paul – is the only Beatle to be walking barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road. His eyes appear to be closed, and he is out of step with the others.
  2. The white VW Beetle parked on the left has the licence number LMW 28IF. LMW stands for ‘Linda McCartney Weeps’, and 28IF signifies that Paul would have been twenty-eight if he had not died. Strictly speaking, this is not so (he would have been twenty-seven) but – let’s not forget! – Indian mystics date a person’s real age from their conception.
  3. John, dressed in white, is the preacher. Ringo, in black, is the pallbearer. George, in denim, is the gravedigger. ‘Paul’ is pictured with a cigarette in his left hand, but the real Paul was right-handed.
  4. To the left of the road stand three men dressed in white. A single person, dressed in dark clothes, stands alone on the other side.
  5. If you trace a line from the bottom of the VW Beetle through the three cars behind it, the line goes through Paul’s head. Paul died of a head injury.
  6. On the Australian cover there is a red stain on the road just behind Ringo and John, indicating a traffic accident.
  7. On the back cover, eight dots on the wall to the left of the words ‘THE BEATLES’ can be joined together to form a 3 – the number of Beatles remaining after Paul’s death.
  8. If you turn the back cover 45 degrees anticlockwise, the shadow on the wall creates the clear image of a skull with a black gown.
  9. On the night of the fatal crash, Paul gave a lift to a fan. The woman in blue on the back cover is that same fan, either fleeing the scene or running for help.
  10. The signs saying ‘BEATLES’ and ‘ABBEY ROAD’ on the back cover appear to be divided into BE AT LES ABBEY RO AD. ‘R’ and ‘O’ are the eighteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet. Added together they make 33, which is the numerical equivalent of ‘CC’. Paul is therefore buried at St Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight. Thirty-three multiplied by two, which is the number of letters, is sixty-six. Paul died in 1966.
  11. On ‘Come Together’ John sings ‘One and one and one is three’. This indicates that only three Beatles remain.
  12. Sgt. Pepper holds almost as many clues. On the front cover, the man immediately behind ‘Paul’ – the music-hall comedian Issy Bonn – is holding his right hand over Paul’s head. This is a symbol of death, as is the black musical instrument held by Paul. The entire cover is a depiction of Paul’s funeral, with the Beatles standing around a freshly dug grave.
  13. On the inside of the gatefold, ‘Paul’ is wearing a black armband with the letters ‘OPD’. This is the Canadian acronym for Officially Pronounced Dead.
  14. On the back cover, Paul is the only Beatle whose back is turned to the camera.
  15. ‘A Day in the Life’ contains the line ‘He blew his mind out in a car.’
  16. At the end of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, George wails ‘Paul, Paul.’
  17. The poster included with The White Album also contains a number of opaque references to Paul’s death. The photograph of Paul in the bath – eyes closed, head floating as though separate from his body – shows what he would have looked like after the fatal crash. To the bottom right of the poster there is a small photo of Paul in white trousers, clapping and dancing. Behind him there is something blurry and unexplained. Is it the hands of a skeleton reaching out for him?
  18. On ‘Glass Onion’ John sings: ‘And here’s another clue for you all – the Walrus was Paul.’ In many cultures a walrus symbolises death – even if no one is quite sure exactly which cultures these are.
  19. ‘I am the Walrus’ is John’s coded account of the fatal accident, which took place after Paul left the Abbey Road studio in a temper on a ‘stupid bloody Tuesday’. John sings ‘I’m crying’ over and over again. It’s an expression of grief.
  20. At the beginning of the same song, two notes are repeated, making a sound similar to an ambulance siren. The ‘pretty little policemen waiting for the van to come’ are the police who arrived at the site of the accident. They were paid to keep quiet. ‘Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye’ is a description of Paul’s horrific facial injuries. ‘I am he as you are he and we are all together’ is an admission that the other three Beatles were involved in a conspiracy of silence. On page 557 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the words ‘googoo goosth’ are in the same sentence as ‘them four hoarsemen on their apolkaloops’.
  21. The fake Paul grew a moustache to cover up the scars of the plastic surgery he had undergone. Once the scars had healed, the powers that be let him remove it.
  22. The fake Paul protested that what John was really saying at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is not ‘I buried Paul,’ but ‘Cranberry sauce.’ This is part of the cover-up.
  23. On the cover of Magical Mystery Tour, the title is written in stars. If you turn the cover upside down, the stars form a phone number. If you call this number, you will be told the details of Paul’s death.
  24. In the lavish ‘Your Mother Would Know’ sequence of the Magical Mystery Tour film, ‘Paul’ is wearing a black carnation. The others wear white carnations.

All these signs pointed to just one conclusion: three years earlier, on 6 November 1966, Paul had died in a car crash. From then on his place had been taken by a lookalike. After all, there was no photograph of Paul for eighteen days from 6 November, and then he had been pictured with new facial hair – clearly there to cover up the scars from the plastic surgery on his lookalike. And who was the lookalike? An actor called William Shears Campbell, otherwise known as ‘Billy Shears’, who had won a Paul McCartney lookalike competition and had never been seen again. Until now.

Heartbroken fans jammed the Apple switchboard. Derek Taylor contacted Paul in Scotland, and asked what he wanted to do about it. ‘Nothing,’ replied Paul. ‘Just let it go.’

Unable to field the real Paul, Taylor’s sidekick Tony Bramwell came up with a fiendish plan to scotch the rumours. Putting his own Liverpudlian accent to good use, he phoned the DJ Richie York on CING-FM in Burlington, Ontario. ‘This is Paul McCartney,’ he said. ‘As you can hear, I’m alive and kicking.’

This aroused suspicions in two other radio stations. They immediately submitted the tape to two experts in voice recognition. Having compared Bramwell’s voice with a recording of the known voice of Paul McCartney, Professor Oscar Tossey1 of Michigan State University and Dr Henry M. Truby of Miami University both testified to the fact that they were not the same. This was further proof of a cover-up: Paul McCartney was, indeed, dead.

Paul was obliged to issue a written statement through the Apple press office: ‘I am alive and well and concerned about the rumours of my death, but if I were dead, I would be the last to know.’ This half-hearted message served only to fuel the fire. Now Derek Taylor was driven to issue a press release: ‘Paul refuses to say anything more than that. Even if he appeared in public, it wouldn’t do any good. If people want to believe he’s dead, then they’ll believe it. The truth is not at all persuasive.’ Once again, the denial was taken as proof positive of a cover-up.

Two of the other Beatles stated that Paul was not dead. ‘It’s the most stupid rumour I’ve ever heard,’ John said on WLNR. ‘Sure, you can play anything backwards and you’re going to get different connotations, ’cause it’s backwards.’ Ringo also pitched in, though only to explain why he wasn’t pitching in. ‘I’m not going to say anything,’ he said, ‘because nobody believes me when I do.’

At this stage, even some of Paul’s friends began to entertain suspicions. One day Peter Blake, the designer of the Sgt. Pepper cover, bumped into the real, living Paul McCartney. ‘He said to me, “Yes, it’s true. I’m not actually Paul McCartney. You know Paul McCartney, he didn’t have a scar on his mouth. I’m very like him, but I’m actually not him.” I looked, and indeed there was a scar, but Paul didn’t have a scar. What had happened was that he had fallen off his bike and had got a scar since I last saw him. Of course, it was Paul, and he did kid me for two minutes. And for three minutes I did believe him.’

Meanwhile the celebrated defence attorney F. Lee Bailey2 had been hired by RKO to conduct a mock trial for a television special in which he cross-questioned ‘expert witnesses’, including Allen Klein and Peter Asher. Those defending the allegations included Fred LaBour, whose joky piece in the Michigan Daily had set the ball rolling. Before he took the stand, LaBour confessed to Bailey that he had perpetrated the hoax. ‘Well,’ replied Bailey, ‘we have an hour of television to do, so you’re going to have to go along with this.’

By now, four different singles on the Paul is Dead theme had been released: ‘Brother Paul’ by Billy Shears and the All-Americans, ‘We’re All Paul Bearers’ by Zacherias and the Tree People, ‘Saint Paul’ by Terry Knight, and ‘So Long Paul’ by Werbley Finster,3 which contained the somewhat pedestrian chorus:

So long Paul, we hate to see you go,

So long Paul, after making all that dough.

Later the same month, Life magazine sent a team of photographers and reporters to Scotland to track Paul down. Having walked four miles over marshy land to his farmhouse, they were confronted by Martha, Paul’s Old English sheepdog. Alerted by Martha’s barking, an irate Paul emerged from his house and told them to get off his land, before throwing a bucket of water over them, an act caught by one of the photographers. As they left, Paul, ever conscious of his public image, and feeling he had gone too far, chased after them, offering an interview and photos in return for the offending photo.

Under the heading ‘THE CASE OF THE MISSING BEATLE: Paul is Still With Us’, the photograph on the cover of the November 1969 issue of Life showed the McCartney family – Paul, Linda, Heather and baby Mary – in rural bliss. In the accompanying interview Paul said, ‘It is all bloody stupid. I picked up that OPD badge in Canada. It was a police badge. Perhaps it means Ontario Police Department or something. I was wearing a black flower because they ran out of red ones. It is John, not me, dressed in black on the cover and inside of Magical Mystery Tour. On Abbey Road we were wearing our ordinary clothes. I was walking barefoot because it was a hot day. The Volkswagen just happened to be parked there … The people who are making up these rumors should look to themselves a little more. There is not enough time in life. They should worry about themselves instead of worrying whether I am dead or not.’

To coincide with the interview, Apple released a triumphant and characteristically long-winded press release.

Paul McCartney is alive. He says so. His wife says so, his children show he is. The recent photos confirm it, the new songs make it concrete, and the very fact that he is alive should be enough. If in doubt, read Life magazine. If still in doubt, there is nothing we can do. The Paul McCartney who wrote ‘And I Love Her’ still loves you, and is still alive, and has a lot to write. There are a thousand songs unwritten and much to do. Have faith and believe. He is alive and well and hopes to remain so as long as possible. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll start our own rumour that the public is dead from the neck up and they’ve been using a stand-in facsimile of a brain for the past three and a half years and then sit back and see who denies it.

Fifty years on, there are still those who believe that Paul died in 1966, and that his part is being played by a gifted impostor. In 2009 the Italian edition of Wired magazine published a nine-page article in which a forensic pathologist called Gabriella Carlesi and a computer scientist called Francesco Gavazenni went to great lengths to test before and after photographs of Paul, measuring differences in his teeth, lips, jaws and ears. They concluded that they were not of the same man.

A book by Tina Foster called Plastic Macca: The Secret Death and Replacement of Beatle Paul McCartney (2019) presents yet more evidence, including the revelation that ‘the remaining Beatles and their business representatives made a pact with Paul’s relatives, for a large sum of money, to keep Paul’s death a secret, and hired a replacement to protect the group’s image, career, popularity, and finances’.

Foster suggests that one of the initial motives for the fraud was the fear that fans would be so distraught over Paul’s death that they would be driven to suicide. ‘There is a precedent for this theory,’ she writes. ‘Shortly before Christmas 1962, a puppy named “Petra” appeared on the children’s TV show, Blue Peter. Sadly, the dog died of distemper two days later. Rather than traumatise millions of children by revealing the puppy’s tragic fate, the show’s bosses found a lookalike black and brown puppy to replace the original Petra. Not a single viewer noticed.’

The book’s blurb states that ‘Attorney and author Tina Foster has devoted years of her life to unearthing what happened to James Paul McCartney … Recognised as an authority on the subject, Tina has been invited to speak on radio shows in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia.’

Oddly enough, Foster never explains why the remaining Beatles and their co-conspirators were so keen to give away their own secret by offering quite so many tell-tale clues to its unlocking.

1 His real name.

2 Legal representative of celebrity defendants including Albert DeSalvo (‘The Boston Strangler’) and, later, Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson.

3 Later revealed as a pseudonym of José Feliciano, the blind Puerto Rican singer still probably best known for his 1968 rendition of ‘Light My Fire’.