Paul McCartney (107 page)

He continues to teach a songwriting class at LIPA, fulfilling what was once thought his true vocation. There’s little conventional teaching involved, as he’s never taken for granted a process one of his few peers, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, says can be ‘as natural as swallowing a glass of milk’. ‘I always tell my students, “Look, I don’t really know how to write a song. There’s no set way. What I do know is how to work on and finish a song.” All I can say is “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”’

He admits still getting a thrill from hearing milkmen whistle his songs. Once, he swears, he even heard a bird chirp a bit of ‘From Me to You’.

‘Songwriting is still something I deeply love to do, but at the beginning, there’s always that moment of “Can I do it?” To start with, there’s nothing–just me at the piano or with a guitar and then, if you’re lucky, this amazing feeling of “Hey, I’ve written a song!” The feeling when you do that… there’s nothing like it.’

Fifty years have passed since the scene at Newcastle-on-Tyne City Hall with which this book opened. On 28 May 2015, an evening almost as chilly as that of 4 December 1965, I’m waiting outside Liverpool’s Echo Arena, for my second face-to-face encounter with Paul McCartney.

Back then, he was 23, the Beatles were still a touring band and Britain had barely begun to swing. Now, three weeks before his seventy-third birthday, he’s near the end of his Out There tour, a journey lasting two years on which he will have given 91 shows across four continents with an estimated total gross of $225 million. But the basic elements are the same: a concert-venue in the north of England and a capacity crowd with the added fervour of being his hometown one.

I’ve spent the past two and a half years as his biographer with his ‘tacit approval’, not authorised but not discouraged either. The job has involved no conversations nor any direct contact with its subject. At his time of life, it was hardly to be expected he’d be willing to sit down and plough through the Beatles’ history in detail yet again. But that tacit approval has been a unique concession, opening the door to family members and close friends who otherwise would never dream of speaking on the record. Anyone contacting his office to check me out has been told ‘It’s up to you but it’s OK with Paul.’

As a result, I’ve been able to uncover a Paul McCartney very different from the one the world thinks it knows; a workaholic and perfectionist who, despite his vast fame, has been underestimated by history and who, despite his undoubted genius, is in his own way as insecure and vulnerable as was his seeming total opposite, John Lennon. While recognising his foibles, I’ve come to respect–frequently admire–the man for whom I was once seen as cherishing such animosity.

However, his touring schedule has delayed this meeting until I’ve all but completed my manuscript. And it’s come about that I have something to impart to him which strangely reprises our only other meeting, half a century ago.

When I got into the Beatles’ Newcastle dressing-room as a 22-year-old Northern Echo reporter, he gave me an exclusive by throwing me his Hofner violin bass to try out. No other rock star has ever remained so faithful to a single instrument. He still starts every show on the violin bass, then tosses it in that same casual way to his PA, John Hammel, who’s never yet missed the nerve-racking catch of an instrument as valuable as a Stradivarius. On flights the bass always has a seat to itself and Hammel sleeps with it in his hotel room–not the kind of overnight company usually associated with being on the road.

Actually, there were two violin basses. The first Paul bought in Hamburg in 1962 and played throughout the Cavern Club era; then in 1963, the Hofner company gave him an improved model as thanks for making their brand internationally famous. In 1969, when the Beatles started the Get Back album, he took both instruments to the sessions, hoping it might assist the hoped-for rediscovery of their roots. And the older of the two, known to Beatles historians as ‘the Cavern bass’, was stolen and never recovered.

One of the many new sources for my biography has been a Liverpool taxi-driver named Peter Hodgson, whose father and uncle were contemporaries of Paul’s, lived round the corner from him in Allerton and would sometimes lend the Quarrymen their Grundig tape recorder. A massive McCartney fan, Hodgson has been trying to track down the Cavern bass for years, even starting a special Facebook page to appeal for information about it.

Recently, he’s emailed me that he may have located it in Ottawa, Canada, in the possession of someone who was not the thief. This personage, with a Tolkien-esque flourish, calls himself The Keeper, suggesting the guardian of some sacred relic, rather than a possessor of stolen goods who expects someday to return it to its rightful owner.

Paul has always paid big money for mementoes of his early career–which often belonged to him in the first place–and for one as iconic as this, the sum involved would clearly be astronomical (the newer bass is insured for more than £2 million). Hodgson seeks no monetary gain for himself, just the joy of seeing the Cavern bass in action again, but is concerned that if and when its hand-back takes place, his years of detective work might get overlooked. So, rather than contact some faceless MPL person, he’s asked me to tell Paul about it at our fortuitously-timed meet-and-greet.

Outside the Echo Arena, two broad queues stretch across the bleak concrete plaza of what used to be King’s Dock. Near a ticket-window, there’s a sudden flurry of excitement and a brief illusion that the star himself has emerged to check how business is doing. But it’s just a Paul lookalike, one of several with roughly similar eyes and pixie features who derive a steady income from posing for photographs with pilgrims outside his childhood home.

My companion is Peter Trollope, formerly crime correspondent with the Liverpool Echo, the evening paper for which this ultramodern, eco-friendly structure is implausibly named. Among the crowd, he spots two one-time big names from the city’s gang-ridden southern quarter and another still very much active.

After several fraught mobile phone exchanges, I manage to rendezvous with Stuart Bell, the boyishly youthful (but impressively long-serving) McCartney publicist. ‘I’ve just seen Paul standing on his head,’ Bell tells me as we head to the stage-door. It takes a moment to realise this must refer to pre-performance yoga.

I follow him past two security checks–only two–and through a warren of corridors blocked by giant equipment-containers and thronging with young men and women in black. On the floor, strips of pink tape point the way to ‘Band Room’ and the special accommodation set aside, as always, for ‘PM Family’.

Those whom Paul is to meet and greet assemble in a small side room containing a refrigerator full of soft drinks and a couple of rather shabby sofas on which no one feels sufficiently relaxed to sit. Two of its walls are covered in tacked-up Oriental-looking fabric, the third consists only of a plain black cloth, beyond which the 15,000-seat arena can be heard filling up with an oblivious, steady roar.

All our group has some connection or other with music. Here’s Tom Meighan, the lead singer with Kasabian, a band who are all unabashed McCartney-worshippers, often seen attending him at Q magazine awards ceremonies. Yonder is Ben Hayes, a mixing maestro like Paul’s sometime collaborator, ‘Youth’, whose creations include fusing ‘Helter-Skelter’ together with Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Belying this electronic audacity, he’s a stolid, rosy-cheeked boy in a tweed sports jacket who still lives at home and has brought his mum up from North Wales with him.

The tension is lightened by two of Paul’s stage band, keyboard-player Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens and bassist Brian Ray. After all the chopping and changing with Wings in the 1970s, he’s kept the same line-up of Wickens, Ray, lead guitarist Rusty Anderson and drummer Abe Laboriel, Jr for 12 years without a sign of discontent on either side. ‘They’re such a pleasure to play with,’ he recently told Billboard magazine. ‘We all enjoy each other’s company and the musicianship.’

Wickens, the band’s only British member, is amazed by his leader’s stamina, undiminished at almost 73. ‘He doesn’t eat anything before a show, then he does three hours, 38 songs, and I’ve hardly ever seen him take a sip of water onstage. Though he does like his Margarita afterwards.’

Out in the corridor a female assistant, aptly named Michele, is briefing three more meet-and-greetees, a man and two women, on the protocol of the ceremony. Smartphones, set for selfies, already glow in their hands. ‘You can’t take any pictures of your own,’ Michele says. ‘Our photographer will take your picture with Paul and if he approves it, a copy will be sent to you.’

‘I am a professional photographer,’ one of the women protests.

‘Sorry, but that’s Paul’s rule.’

Half a century ago at Newcastle City Hall he came along a backstage corridor towards me, and so he does again tonight. Knowing all that I do about him without knowing him, it’s a surreal moment, like seeing the hero of some epic novel, David Copperfield or Tristram Shandy, suddenly step out of its pages. The reality of him in the flesh prompts a sudden awful thought: what if nothing I’ve written in the biography–none of those exhaustively worked-over 270,000 words–got it right in any way at all?

He’s wearing a grey tweed suit with a Nehru collar, a distant descendant of Beatle stage-wear, with a creamy open-necked shirt and Beatley black suede boots. He uses coffee-coloured stage make-up, but otherwise gives off no whiff of septuagenarianism from the side-swept, faintly auburn hair to the match-thin limbs, smooth, unspotted hands and jivey walk. Full-face, he still looks much as he always did. But in profile his once retroussé nose has grown beakier, his eye deep-set and downturned, his cheek furrowed; he’s become his dad.

He starts along the receiving-line in traditional royal film premiere style, a handshake and a little light banter at each stop. Some of it concerns his suit, for he turns back one coat-lapel in obvious satisfaction; the first words I catch from him are ‘Charcoal grey’.

‘Hello, Philippe,’ he greets me. ‘We’ve spoken on the phone.’ He means his call to me out of the blue in 2004 when, despite my reputation as ‘anti-Paul’, he magnanimously agreed to help me with my biography of John. Amazing that he remembers.

‘I’ve been living your life for the past two and a half years,’ I say.

‘How’s it going?’

‘I’ve been astounded by the work ethic.’

He grimaces and recoils slightly; meet-and-greet exchanges clearly aren’t meant to be so nitty-gritty. Tom from Kasabian, who joins us at that moment, demonstrates the proper tone: ‘Hey, is everything cool, Paul my man?’ That he already said it a few minutes ago makes it no less apropos.

Even so, I outline my tale of the Cavern violin bass; how, 46 years after its theft from the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, it has apparently turned up in Ottawa in the possession of someone who wasn’t the thief and on whom it bestows an almost mystical aura. Inured though he is to hardcore Beatlemaniac weirdness, he seems amused by that concept of ‘The Keeper’.

‘Well,’ I continue, ‘he’s got it and…’

Another wrong note: my words are echoed with a derisive laugh. ‘He’s got it!’

‘… and he seems to want to return it.’

I’m left wondering whether my great reveal has made any impression at all. But as he moves on, his security director sidles up with a mobile phone to take further details.

When the now met and greeted line up for their pictures with him, taken by his official photographer–and, subject to his approval, sent on later–I realise I’m expected to join them. As the photographer bobs down before us and a film camera comes in from the side, he slips his arm round me. Automatic as the gesture is, it somehow conveys that all has been forgiven.

‘I don’t usually smile,’ I say. ‘But that time, I was.’

‘Yeah,’ he replies, astonishingly. ‘I never know what to do in photographs.’

As he leaves to go onstage, there’s a moment of pure McCartney; whether natural or calculated hardly matters. I call ‘Goodbye’, thinking myself inaudible in the general chorus–but he turns with a wave and says, ‘See ya, Phil.’

I’ve been to many rock concerts, but never one quite like this. When he walks on, all 15,000 people in the Echo Stadium rise to their feet with a roar and stay standing for the next three hours.

However, this is Liverpool, where even patron saints are never allowed to get above themselves. The arena-floor has two Mississippi-like aisles, both of which throng with traffic through every song as people exit and return with giant plastic beakers of beer or soft drinks and tubs of popcorn or nachos.

For the past couple of years, it’s been widely reported that his voice has gone and his non-stop performances are now just mass yearning for yesterday. But the voice is here in full with hardly a blemish, so familiar that one no longer notices its peculiar quality, its lightness yet robustness, its feminine powers of empathy and compassion mixed with never-for-a-second-to-be-doubted masculinity. And Wix Wickens wasn’t exaggerating; in the whole 38-song, non-intermission show, he doesn’t take so much as a sip of water.

The costly stage set he’s recently taken through Europe, Asia, North, South and Central America seems almost irrelevant. Likewise the excellent band, other than in its power to create perfect facsimiles of recorded classics. This evening, he’s just plain Paul, singing for the ’Pool. After his third song, ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, the perfect charcoal grey jacket is discarded, the wondrously creamy blouse turns into workaday shirtsleeves; he could almost be back at the Cavern, kicking off one of its famous all-nighters.

‘Everywhere I go around the world, I say, “Tonight, we’re going to have a party,”’ he tells his permanent standing ovation. ‘But tonight, we are going to have a party.’

Twenty-three of the songs are Beatles ones, digging still deeper into the Lennon–McCartney vaults with ‘Another Girl’, ‘All Together Now’, ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, from Sgt. Pepper, whose words John copied straight off a Victorian theatre-bill. In front of me are four hefty young men in head-to-toe Gap, clearly mates of long standing, who might be thought more at home cheering on the city’s sacred football team at its Anfield pitch. While fiercely hetero, they’re physically demonstrative as Scouse lads of the Beatles’ generation could never be, clinging together and singing the words from the stage directly to each other. Not ‘LIV-ER-POOL!’ but ‘blackbird singing in the dead of night…’