Paul McCartney (106 page)

Nancy’s greatest fan among his children was his own son, James, who, since Linda’s death, had struggled with alcohol and drugs and even spent some time in rehab in Arizona, symbolically close to the place where she’d died. James’s dislike of Heather had created a rift with his father which only ended when Paul underwent the angioplasty in 2007. Now he said Nancy was like ‘a new mother… we all adore her’.

James, too, was a musician, songwriter and singer, at which trades he would have to exist in a shadow as vast as Everest. He had played on a couple of Paul’s albums and on Linda’s posthumous one, Wild Prairie, but did not start solo recording and gigging until 2009, initially under the pseudonym of Light (much as his Uncle Michael had once used that of ‘McGear’ to avoid being unfairly helped by the McCartney name, or damned by it).

His first album under his own name finally appeared in 2013, when he was 35. Simply entitled Me, it had strong echoes of Paul along with more modern influences like Nirvana and Red House Painters, and was praised by Rolling Stone for its ‘strong emotional competence’. One track, ‘Strong As You’, struck a poignant note of filial hero-worship mixed with deference: ‘Am I strong enough to see it through/ Strong as you?’ Paul bigged it up to the point of being an embarrassing dad, jumping onstage at one of James’s solo gigs, accompanied by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, affectionately pinching his boy’s cheek, then settling at the piano, taking the audience’s whole attention with him.

From time to time, someone floats the idea of putting James together with John’s younger son, Sean, and George’s son, Dhani, to form a Beatles Mk. 2 (Ringo’s two sons, Zak and Jason, being disqualified by age). But the essence of the Beatles was something their children can never know: they were hungry.

With Nancy’s wholehearted approval, Linda has been regularly commemorated, both as an animal-rights campaigner and photographer. In 2009, Paul, Mary and Stella together launched a Meat-Free Monday campaign that afterwards became a cookbook to which they contributed a foreword. Whenever Paul is questioned on the subject, he uses Linda’s old mantra: ‘Anyone who saw inside a slaughterhouse would never eat meat again.’

In 2011, father and daughters joined up again for Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs, a major retrospective compiled from some 200,000 images, exhibited at London’s Phillips de Pury gallery and collected into an opulent art book. Mary recalled how, whatever they might be doing as a family, Linda’s camera never stopped snapping. ‘It was her way of talking to you.’

The Peasmarsh estate, and Hog Hill Mill, remained the centre of Paul’s life in Britain. But after Linda’s death, he seemed to have fallen out of love with the Scottish Highland hideaway he credited with saving his sanity after the Beatles’ break-up, and of which he’d once sung ‘My desire is always to be here’.

Consequently, his interlocking farms on the Kintyre Peninsula became little more than a nature reserve which, in the harsh economic climate of 2013, his financial advisers decided was a too-expensive luxury. As part of a rationalisation plan, estate manager Bobby Cairns and the caretaker of High Park Farm, Jimmy Paterson, between them boasting 55 years of service, were fired and Paterson received three months’ notice to leave his rent-free cottage. A Daily Telegraph reporter visited the memorial garden to Linda in Campbeltown containing the statue of her cradling a lamb. He reported the spot to be in need of some care and attention.

After the divorce, Paul refrained from any public comment about Heather: they had to continue communicating in their joint custody of Beatrice–and he never made any complaint about her qualities as a mother. In 2009, Q Magazine asked point-blank if the marriage had been the worst mistake of his life. He replied that it would have to be ‘a prime contender… But I tend to look at the positive side, which is that I got a beautiful daughter out of it.’

Heather, meantime, had receded to the margins of celebrity–at least, in everyone’s eyes but her own. In 2009, she opened a vegan café named VBites in Hove, announcing it to be the first link in a worldwide chain and purchasing a vegan food company to supply it and its planned successors. The similarities with another Beatle wife-turned-ready-meals-tycoon did not escape the Daily Mail’s acerbic columnist Jan Moir. ‘One can’t help but suspect,’ wrote Moir, ‘that Heather is her own meat substitute for Linda McCartney who did all this years ago.’ Yet, despite Moir’s assertion that its chicken nuggets resembled ‘albino goose-droppings’ and its pepperoni pizza had an air of ‘trodden vegan roadkill’, the VBites company was to grow and prosper.

Heather returned to the news in a positive way in 2010 by lasting five weeks in another tough television dance competition, ITV’s Dancing on Ice, then announcing her ambition to join the British Paralympic ski team at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. By way of a warm-up, she won four gold medals at the US Adaptive Alpine Skiing National Championships in Aspen, Colorado. Then, as so many times before, negativity kicked in: during training with Paralympic hopefuls in Austria, she walked out after a row over the special left ski boot she planned to use.

Echoes of the McCartney divorce were stirred by the government inquiry into tabloid newspaper misbehaviour, specifically the illegal hacking of celebrities’ phones, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson in 2011 and 2012. Although Paul was not called to give evidence, he suspected his phone had been hacked by several papers while the divorce was in progress. ‘When I thought someone was listening, I’d say, “If you’re taking this down, get a life!”’

One strand of the Leveson Inquiry involved Piers Morgan, formerly editor of the Daily Mirror, who claimed–inaccurately–to have introduced Paul to Heather at the paper’s Pride of Britain awards in 1999. Two years later, in less benign mood, Morgan had written an article based on listening to a private voicemail Paul had left for her after an argument on which he’d sounded ‘lonely, miserable and desperate and sung “We Can Work It Out” into the answerphone’. Morgan refused to disclose who had leaked the voicemail, but hinted it had been Heather herself.

Summoned before the inquiry, she said that following their return from India in 2001–the trip on which he’d secretly bought her an engagement ring–Paul had left her 25 phone-messages, including ‘a ditty’, begging her forgiveness after a row. She denied leaking the voicemail or authorising anyone else to do so.

After Leveson, a large number of celebrities whose phones had been hacked received substantial damages, the most predatory of the tabloids, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, closed down, and the others were forced to radically clean up their act. (To give Heather her due, she had called for such measures almost a decade earlier, only to have it dismissed as ‘a rant’.)

Contentment with Nancy was not to diminish Paul’s work ethic, any more than had his heights of euphoria and depths of misery with Heather. There have been two further classical compositions: Stately Horn, written for the horn virtuoso Michael Thompson, was premiered at London’s Royal Academy of Music in 2010, and Ocean’s Kingdom, his first ballet score, by the New York City Ballet in 2011, with costumes designed by Stella. A new animated film is promised, based on his children’s book High in the Clouds.

His father’s enduring influence was marked by his 2012 album Kisses on the Bottom, a collection of jazz standards like Fats Waller’s ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ whose innocent double entendre (‘Kisses on the bottom/ I’ll be glad I got ’em’) he and John used to chortle over as teenagers. It reached number three in Britain and five in America and was streamed as a live performance on iTunes. Rolling Stone likened it to John’s 1975 Rock ‘n’ Roll album as ‘the sound of a musician joyfully tapping his roots’.

For all his taste and sophistication, he remains primarily a musician who functions best late at night and is happiest among others of his profession, though no longer a pot-smoker for fear of setting a bad example to Beatrice and his grandchildren. And beneath the melody and sentiment is the same anarchic spirit that took the Beatles closest to heavy metal with ‘Helter Skelter’. In 2013, he swapped his violin bass for a cigar-box guitar–weird great-great nephew of skiffle tea chest basses–to join the three surviving members of Nirvana in a jam called ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, which won a Grammy for best rock song the following year.

He is still avid to work with all the newest young talents, just as they are to work with him. The four-producer team for his 2014 album, New, included Mark Ronson, who’d been Amy Winehouse’s indispensable recording partner, and Paul Epworth, who produced Adele’s 21. In 2015, he recorded with Lady Gaga and shared a stage at the Grammys with Rihanna and Kanye West, the latest in a long line of outrageous rappers. As they sang Rihanna’s ‘FourFive Seconds’ with the lines ‘If I go to jail tonight/ Will you pay my bail?’, it wasn’t the outrageous rapper who’d really been there.

Afterwards, on Irish television, Heather broke a lengthy silence to accuse him of struggling to stay relevant because these days he wasn’t nearly as famous as she. ‘Most of the time I have people coming up to me in the street and going “Oh my God, you’re a ski racer” or “You help the animals.” Half of them don’t even know who he is.’

The start of everything maybe wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, but winning that prize as an 11-year-old for his essay about the 1953 Coronation. ‘All my life,’ he reflected on turning 73, ‘I’ve been trying to win a school prize or trying to do OK in an exam or trying to get a good job, something where people go “You’re good.”’

Quite an armful of school prizes: eighteen Grammys, eight BRITS, one Academy Award, honorary doctorates of music from Yale and Sussex universities, the US Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for popular song (presented at the White House by President Barack Obama during a private performance there); a Kennedy Center Award; the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ MusiCares Person of the Year; the New Musical Express award as ‘Songwriters’ Songwriter’; the French Légion d’Honneur; the Peruvian Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun; a street and a rose named after him; a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame…

In 1963, answering a questionnaire for the NME, he gave his personal ambition as ‘to have my picture in The Dandy’, the British comic book he and the other Beatles read throughout their childhood. In 2012, as a 70-year-old, he appeared in a Dandy strip, shaking hands with its most famous creation, Desperate Dan, then leading 50 of its other characters in a singalong of ‘Hey Jude’.

John evidently still looms as large as ever in his consciousness. In 2009, Neil Young performed in Hyde Park, closing his set with a version of ‘A Day in the Life’ that proved peculiarly suited to his soul-stirring backwoods wail. Paul came out to sing the ‘woke up, fell out of bed’ passage looking almost as dishevelled as Young and stayed for the rest of the song, leaping and lurching around and flailing his arms as he never had even on the drunkest teenage night in Hamburg. None of his own songs, one felt, could have generated the same emotion.

‘When John got shot,’ he told British Esquire magazine in 2015, ‘aside from the pure horror of it, the lingering thing was OK, well now John’s a martyr, a JFK… I started to get frustrated because people started to say, “He was the Beatles.” Like Yoko would appear in the press: “Paul did nothing. All he did was book the studio.” Like “Fuck you, darling. All I did was book the fucking studio?”’

Despite professing himself reconciled to the Lennon–McCartney blanket credit, he’s still galled to see it on songs John had little or no hand in writing, the more so in an electronic age when screens are sometimes too small for the text they display. His iPad once rendered it as ‘Hey Jude by John Lennon and’. But he’s made no further attempts to have it reversed.

‘If John was here, he would definitely say, “That’s OK.” Because he didn’t give a damn. But I’ve given up on it… in case it seems like I’m trying to do something to John.’

During 2014, the turmoil in Iraq and Syria and the rise of the so-called Islamic State brought the strangest and sickest proof of John’s posthumous power. As ISIS stunned even the blood-hardened twenty-first century with its medieval barbarities, it emerged that four young British converts, employed jointly as jailers and killers, had become known to their captives as ‘the Beatles’ and been given the nicknames John, Paul, George and Ringo. Even here, the traditional pecking-order was maintained. The one who achieved world notoriety for publicly beheading a series of innocent hostages, until killed by an American drone strike in 2015, was Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’.

Esquire caught up with Paul in Osaka, Japan, during another world tour, named Out There, which had already lasted almost two years and played to around two million people in the US, Poland, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador and Costa Rica. He had no plans to come off the road any time soon, he said. ‘It’s what I do. It’s my job. And it’s nothing to what the Beatles used to have to go through. Compared to that, I have it easy.’

The nightly fix of mass love was not his sole motivation, he added. ‘I kind of get to review my songs, and they go back quite a way. So if I’m singing “Eleanor Rigby”, I’m me now reviewing the work of a twentysomething and I’m going “Whoa, that’s good… wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door…”’

Since 1996, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts has become one of the world’s most celebrated fame schools, turning out graduates who have won distinction in the technical as well as creative arms of music, theatre and film, even a few who went on to work for Paul himself. He never misses a graduation ceremony if he can help it, sometimes flying thousands of miles to present the graduates with their lapel-pins and bid each one ‘Wear it with pride’.

For all the ever-multiplying multitude of popular songwriters, the ability to write an original melody remains as rare as ever, and no one since George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers has possessed it in such abundance. Indeed, Paul belongs to an ever tinier elect, like Louis Armstrong and the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa, who seem made of music more than of flesh and blood.