Paul McCartney (28 page)

Such gaucheness was completely untypical and he apologised at once. ‘Don’t worry,’ Sinatra replied. ‘I did exactly the same thing when I first met John Wayne.’

Other Beatles had been dismayed to find their parents and close relations treating them with reverence once they became household names. But when Paul came to stay, Jim treated him in the same way as always, never failing to ask if he was eating properly and his bowels were in good order, nor to suggest, with a twinkle, that his Beatle haircut must have served its purpose by now and might be changed to something a little less extreme.

Under Angie’s influence, Jim had put aside his old, double-breasted pinstripe business suits and begun to wear more stylish leisure clothes, including trousers with the ‘drainie’ style he’d so detested in the late Fifties, when Paul was besotted by them. ‘By this time, Paul and every other young bloke had taken to wearing flares,’ Ruth McCartney says. ‘So Daddy used to criticise those.’

Paul would often be accompanied by John or George, minus their respective wives, for a few days’ relaxation very much in the spirit of the old Quarrymen. George loved Jim’s cooking, especially his custard which was smooth, creamy and without any wrinkled skin on top. ‘He was always asking for the recipe,’ Angie remembers. ‘But Jim wouldn’t give it to him.’

John became a frequent house guest, developing a healthy respect for Angie when–with a touch of his Aunt Mimi–she reprimanded him for not saying ‘Please’. He particularly enjoyed spending time with Ruth, in whom he showed an absorption that his own son, Julian, sadly never received. ‘He taught me to ride a bicycle,’ Ruth remembers. ‘And he’d read to me, and make up stories about my Teddy bear.’

Once when John was visiting, he and Paul went on a shopping trip to nearby Chester by bus, disguised in old raincoats from Jim’s greenhouse, plus trilby hats and dark glasses. Their purchases had to be delivered later by truck: for John, a large crucifix, a Bible, some candlesticks and books; for Paul, a pine-framed bed that turned out to be riddled with woodworm. On top of driving, shopping, cooking and endlessly putting the kettle on, his good-natured stepmother volunteered to get it fumigated for him.

John happened to be staying when Brian Epstein phoned ‘Rembrandt’ to tell Paul that the Beatles occupied all five top places in Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. ‘They were chuffed,’ Angie recalls.

Britain in 1965 as yet had nothing like America’s burgeoning rock culture. The mark of the Beatles’ success in their homeland was their acceptance into a catch-all showbiz world which hosted annual awards at formal luncheons regulated by scarlet-clad toastmasters, whose zenith was the annual Royal Variety Show and whose innermost in-crowd met at Alma Cogan’s Sunday-night parties.

On 1 August, the band were to top the bill in a television spectacular called Blackpool Night Out, hosted by the comedians Mike and Bernie Winters. A few days beforehand, Paul telephoned his ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell, with whom he’d remained on friendly terms. Iris knew how sensitive he could be, under that angelic smile. Yet she never dreamed how her mother Vi’s half-playful jibe, ‘You’ve got no heart, Paul’, had been gnawing at him. ‘Paul told me “Watch Blackpool Night Out and tell me if I’ve still got no heart…” It was the first time he ever sang “Yesterday” on television.’

During the filming of Help!, he’d exasperated his fellow Beatles, not to mention their director, Richard Lester, by calling for a piano and continually tinkering with a little melody he said he’d dreamed one night in his unshared single bed in the attic of 57 Wimpole Street.

When he’d awoken, the melody was so complete in his head that he could play it almost instantaneously on his cabaret piano. So complete, indeed, that at first he couldn’t believe it was original, but thought he must unconsciously be plagiarising some well-known song whose title and words he’d forgotten. For weeks afterwards, he kept trying it out on other people–John, George, Ringo, George Martin, Alma Cogan, passing grips on the Help! set–but the expected cry of recognition never came. ‘It was like handing something in to the police,’ he would recall. ‘If no one claims it, I can have it.’ This was long before pop’s first great plagiarism case (against, fellow Beatle George) and few other songwriters would have been as scrupulous.

Meanwhile, he gave it only the jokey working title of ‘Scrambled Eggs’, to fit its three-note opening. ‘Scrambled eggs’, he took to singing in those endless demos, ‘Oh my baby, how I love your legs’: a very McCartney marriage of lechery with the cosiest of hot snacks.

In May, he and Jane went on holiday to Albufeira, on Portugal’s Algarve coast, staying at a holiday villa owned by Bruce Welch of the Shadows. In those days, the Algarve’s nearest international airport was at Lisbon, a five-hour drive away. In the back of their chauffeured car, while Jane slept, Paul started getting a lyric with the same scansion as ‘Scrambled Eggs’.

‘When the car arrived at my place, he jumped out and said, “Have you got a guitar?”’ Bruce Welch remembers. They spent their first evening at the nearby villa of Muriel Young, a children’s TV presenter who partnered an owl puppet named Ollie Beak. ‘Paul had finished the song on my Martin guitar in the afternoon and he played it for us after dinner,’ Welch says. ‘We were the first to hear “Yesterday”.’

By the time the Beatles met to record their Help! soundtrack album, a new anxiety was gnawing at Paul. The title ‘Yesterday’ sounded so familiar that maybe he’d unconsciously plagiarised that. But the nearest to it George Martin could call to mind was a Peggy Lee track from the 1950s called ‘Yesterdays’. Stylistically there was an echo of Ray Charles’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’, while Nat King Cole’s 1954 hit ‘Answer Me, My Love’ had a similarly remorseful mood, similar line lengths, even the couplet ‘You were mine yesterday/ I believed that love was here to stay’. Nonetheless, even the super-scrupulous Martin felt Paul was on safe ground.

How to record it was another matter. More like an Elizabethan love song than anything, it clearly wasn’t suited to Ringo’s drumming, George’s lead guitar or John’s acidic harmony, as all three readily conceded. Martin’s initial idea was to release it under Paul’s name only, but Brian Epstein wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Whatever we do,’ he said, ‘we are not splitting up the Beatles.’

To Martin, the setting Paul’s vocal cried out for was a classical string quartet. He himself initially favoured something more experimental and toyed with the idea of using the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, a pre-computer sound laboratory which created the effects for its sci-fi series Doctor Who. Strange to imagine that saddest and sweetest of elegies coming from the same dimension as a Dalek.

On 14 June 1965, four days before his twenty-third birthday, he recorded the vocal for ‘Yesterday’ at Abbey Road studios. Three days later, an all-male string quartet recorded the accompaniment to be overdubbed on the voice. As a trained classical musician, George Martin naturally did the arrangement, but so that all connection with the modern world shouldn’t be lost, Paul asked that a seventh–what jazzers call a blue note–be inserted into the score. ‘Bach would never have done that,’ Martin demurred, but to no avail.

On the Help! album, ‘Yesterday’ was listed as by Lennon–McCartney and as having been performed by the Beatles. It was not used in the film–in fact, it was virtually buried in the home market. John, George and Ringo vetoed its release as a single by Parlophone lest it should damage their credibility as a rock band. Their American label, Capitol, could not be leaned on in the same way, and on 5 October (credited solely to Paul McCartney) it reached number one in Billboard’s Hot 100, staying there for four weeks.

Among the Beatles’ British peers, it was viewed as a disastrous step out of character that no one else wanted to follow by recording a cover version. It was offered to Billy J. Kramer, from Brian’s NEMS stable, and to the R&B singer Chris Farlowe, but both turned it down as ‘too soft’. Three months elapsed before it was covered by Matt Monro, a Sinatra-style crooner (and long-time associate of George Martin), and finally entered the UK Top 10, even then getting no higher than number eight.

The classiest cover was performed on British TV by Marianne Faithfull, accompanied by Paul himself. He admired Marianne’s singing and virginal beauty but, more importantly, she was about to marry Peter Asher’s friend John Dunbar, a Cambridge fine arts student, whose child she was already carrying. Paul began the song, strumming an acoustic guitar, then Marianne took it up with an orchestra and choir, and camera angles carefully designed to hide her pregnancy.

The song became part of the Beatles’ stage act, for the short time they were still to have one. George would usually announce it, with a faintly snide parody of Britain’s most famous amateur talent show–‘And now, for Paul McCartney of Liverpool… opportunity knocks’–and John would hand him a floral bouquet afterwards. When he performed it on America’s Ed Sullivan Show, the audience was estimated at 73 million; as many as had watched the Beatles’ legendary debut on the Sullivan Show in February 1964.

A Novello Award as ‘the best song of 1965’ was just the beginning of the superlatives destined to be heaped on ‘Yesterday’ tomorrow and tomorrow. By the end of the twentieth century, it would be calculated to have been played seven million times and to have inspired more than 2000 cover versions, challenging the record held for decades by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’. A poll of BBC radio listeners in 1999 would vote it ‘the best song of the century’, and Rolling Stone magazine and the MTV channel later jointly named it ‘number one pop song of all time’.

Not bad for a 22-year-old remembering a dream.

‘This is what a Beatle does in the evenings’

By 1965, the Beatles had transformed pop music–its sound, its look, its social status, its economics and its practices. The effect wasn’t to make them less insecure, however, but vastly more so.

Formations of young men with guitars, bases and drums had come to dominate the British record charts, every one with Beatle fringes, skimpy Beatle suits and Cuban-heeled Beatle boots, playing with Beatle-esque energy and humour and singing in Lennon and McCartneyesque tough/tender harmony. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but in this case it also created dozens of lookalike rivals whose chart-placings John and Paul were always comparing anxiously with their own.

When the Beatles started out, their Liverpool origins had been like a shaming caste-mark. Now, in the once snobbish, superior south, a Liverpudlian group was the very last word in chic. They had also opened the door to combos from other northern cities like Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield–then points even further afield like Scotland, Northern Ireland, the West Country and East Anglia–whose birthplaces likewise no longer needed to be shamefacedly hidden, but could be positively flaunted.

The greatest barrier the Beatles had breached, greater even than Britain’s class system or North–South Divide, had been the Atlantic ocean. In the wake of their monster American success came the so-called ‘British invasion’ of other UK bands–the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Animals, the Searchers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers. America in effect declared a Year Zero for its pop music, rejecting almost all home-grown performers who’d been famous pre-1964; wanting only Beatle fringes, high-buttoning corduroy and British regional accents so thick that on TV they were often provided with subtitles.

A new kind of American pop group had emerged, looking like Beatles with their fringes, buttons and boots, using Beatle harmonies and instrumentation, often singing in faux-British or even faux-Liverpudlian accents, but drawing on the national heritage of blues, country and folk from which the invaders had borrowed. Back across the Atlantic, surreally, came hits by American musicians imitating British ones imitating American ones.

The Beatle-ishly named, and misspelt, Byrds created harmonies in a higher, sweeter register even than Paul’s and a jangling guitar that knocked spots off George’s in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The Lovin’ Spoonful had a Lennon–McCartneyesque humour and lyricism and, in John Sebastian, a vocalist sharing some of Lennon’s wolfish charm as well as his given name. The Beach Boys, previously known for their rather witless ‘surfing’ sound, suddenly revealed their leader, Brian Wilson, to be a T-shirted mini-Mozart. Bob Dylan, previously known as a folk singer in the Woody Guthrie mould, decided to ‘go electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, thereby alienating the entire American Civil Rights movement, and proceeded to come out with one electrifying rock single after another. All of this wasn’t just a tribute to the Beatles; it was a shaggy Hydra-headed challenge to keep going one better.

Even the offstage camaraderie that generally existed among bands had largely been dictated by their Liverpudlian mateyness and John and Paul’s generosity in handing out their songs for cover versions (just in case they might one day have to subsist as songwriters only). The Rolling Stones were portrayed in the media as the Beatles’ daggers-drawn rivals, Montagues to their Capulets, Sharks to their Jets; in reality, the two bands were good friends who participated anonymously in each other’s recording sessions, timed their releases so as not to block each other’s climb up the charts, at one point even considered merging their management operations.

The Beatles were just as friendly towards their American mirror-images, freely admitting that many possessed levels of musical expertise far beyond theirs. Even at their unparalleled level of stardom, they remained passionate music fans, always ready to talk up singers or bands they thought had potential, even if it might mean yet more competition for them.

None was keener than Paul, both to acknowledge and encourage new-rising talent. At various times during 1965, perhaps the greatest-ever year for pure joyous pop, he could be heard on radio unselfishly plugging the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’, the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, the Beach Boys’ ‘Help Me Rhonda’ and the Byrds’ cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’–while stressing that Dylan’s own version, on Bringing It All Back Home, was even better.