Paul McCartney (30 page)

Away from Abbey Road studios, he and John had always used reel-to-reel tape recorders, both to develop their songs and unwind by acting out comic plays and poems with Goon Show-inspired sound effects. After the arrival of pocket-size cassette recorders in 1964, playing around with sound became a great deal easier. One day, while giving Barry Miles a ride in his Aston Martin DB 5, Paul flipped a switch on the dash and Miles heard what appeared to be an American radio station with frantic jingles, idents and commercial breaks, so unlike the stuffy BBC. In fact, it was a tape made by Paul, using some of the freebie records that were showered on him every week. The authentic-sounding deejay patter also featured impersonations of Al Jolson, Little Richard and a wickedly accurate one of the Beatles’ good friend Mick Jagger.

Miles thereafter introduced him to experimental music, whose cutting edge was not Anglo-American but European and whose leading figures made his and John’s audio adventures at Abbey Road seem tame indeed: the German Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Edgard Varèse, and the Italians Ferruccio Busoni and Luciano Berio. He learned how, following on from IBM’s model 740 computer, machines were turning into performers and magnetic tape into orchestras, cut up and re-ordered or played backwards or endlessly repeated on multilayered ‘loops’.

Miles could also brief him on the growing number of American bands with no interest in becoming Beatle-clones, still less having hits or making money, who were pushing the boundaries of pop into art, beat poetry and radical politics. Many were eccentrics whom even Liverpool couldn’t have conceived : from Frank Zappa, a chin-bearded devotee of Stravinsky who named his rock sidemen the Mothers of Invention, to the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and their band the Fugs (named after what was then the only printable rendition of ‘fuck’).

Whenever Paul saw John, he’d be full of news from this esoteric new world: how the tape-loop maestro Luciano Berio was coming to Britain to teach a course at Dartington Hall; how Paul had written a fan letter to Stockhausen–quite a turnaround for a Beatle–and received a personal reply. ‘God, man, I’m so jealous,’ John would respond gloomily, but always left it at that.

Conversely, the most unlikely figures from the avant-garde now became bit-players in the Beatles story. Another friend Miles had made through Better Books was William S. Burroughs, the doyen of American beat writers (and a famously unrepenting heroin-user) whose third novel, Naked Lunch, had been taken to court under America’s anti-sodomy laws. Burroughs would often hang out with Miles and John Dunbar at a flat in Montagu Square which actually belonged to Ringo but which Paul had commandeered to set up an experimental recording studio, using Burroughs’s boyfriend, Ian Sommerville, as an occasional engineer.

‘We were there one night, smoking pot and making free-form music–otherwise known as banging pots and pans–when Paul came by with an acetate of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album,’ Miles recalls. ‘Bill Burroughs was one of the first people he played it to.’ Clearly awed by the great man, he said it had ‘14 flaws’ that he’d been unable to rectify, though its billions of listeners since would be hard put to name even one.

Rubber Soul saw the further development of identifiable ‘John’ or ‘Paul’ songs, despite their continuing joint byline. From John came ‘Girl’, ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, thinly-disguised self-portraits full of the restlessness and self-dislike first hinted at on ‘Help!’ Paul’s most notable track, by contrast, seemed almost a brag about his sophisticated metropolitan life and smart new friends.

In fact, it owed much to a very old friend, Ivan Vaughan, who’d attended Liverpool Institute with Paul and introduced him to John at the Woolton parish church fete. ‘Ivy’ had gone on to read classics at University College, London, where he met his wife, Jan, a languages student. The couple now lived in Islington and often hung out with Paul and Jane, as they did with ‘the nowhere man’ down in Weybridge.

Jan Vaughan was a fluent French speaker and one day while she and Ivy were at Jane’s house, Paul asked for her help on a song he was writing. ‘He wanted a French girl’s name and something that rhymed with it. I suggested “Michelle” and “ma belle”. Then he wanted the French for “these are words that go together well”, so I gave him “sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble”.’

The previous September, Miles and John Dunbar had opened London’s first bookshop cum art gallery dedicated to the visual and verbal avant-garde. When Marianne Faithfull declined to invest any of her pop earnings in her husband’s project, Peter Asher provided the capital, lending Dunbar and Miles £600 each and putting in £600 himself, the three partners’ surnames thereby giving birth to a company called MAD.

Premises were found in Mason’s Yard, St James’s, a tiny no-thoroughfare which happened already to be the location of the super-trendy Scotch of St James club. The ground-floor bookshop and basement gallery together were named Indica after one of the three types of marijuana plant.

Peter Asher’s broad-minded family were as encouraging and supportive as always. For the Indica bookshop, his sister Jane contributed an old-fashioned money-drawer she’d played with as a child. As they’d already done for Paul, the Ashers introduced the MAD company to their own–and the Queen’s–bankers, Coutts, where one’s chequebook was brought on a silver tray by a uniformed footman.

No one worked so hard or so selflessly in converting and redecorating the Indica building as Paul. Drawing on DIY skills even his closest London friends had never suspected, he spent hours hammering, sawing, drilling and slapping on the ‘green gunk’ primer for the art gallery’s de rigueur all-over white. He also made his pristine Aston Martin available for rough jobs like transporting the wood for the bookshop’s shelves.

To the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, he’d previously seemed the ultimate Swinging Sixties dandy ‘who always knew how the crease at the back of his trousers was falling and how his jacket was hanging at the waist’. Taylor wasn’t the only one to marvel at the ever-willing and cheerful navvy he became in the cause of helping out Jane’s brother. One day, a female Japanese journalist arrived to interview Peter Asher, whose pop career with Peter and Gordon was still flourishing, helped by further songs from Paul under the Lennon–McCartney banner (and one under the pseudonym Bernard Webb). As the journalist sat with Peter in the unfinished gallery, she was amazed to see Paul in the distance, up a ladder, cigarette in mouth, knocking in a nail.

Other friends and acquaintances of Miles’s and Dunbar’s were also mobilised to help, among them an impecunious poet named Pete Brown, later to be the lyricist for supergroup Cream, and a Welshman known only as Taffy who claimed to be a bank-robbers’ getaway driver. Taffy was given free use of the McCartney Aston Martin and would have run up a fortune in speeding fines had the police not waived prosecution on discovering who the car’s owner was. Paul later learned that on a trip to collect Marianne Faithfull from Heathrow airport, it had been clocked at 128mph on the outward journey and 135mph on the return.

Early-arriving stock for the bookshop was stored in the Ashers’ Wimpole Street basement, that space which had previously witnessed so many Margaret Asher recorder-lessons and Lennon–McCartney songwriting sessions. For Paul, this was like a private library: late at night, he’d come down from his attic bedsitting room and browse through the mint-fresh volumes, always scrupulously leaving a note of what he’d taken to be charged to his account.

A typical selection included Peace Eye Poems by Ed Sanders of the Fugs, Robert S. De Ropp’s Drugs and the Mind and a biography of Alfred Jarry, the nineteenth-century French dramatist who wrote the first-ever surreal play, Ubu Roi, and conceived a philosophy ‘beyond metaphysics’ that he named pataphysics. Paul grasped Jarry’s philosophy no better than anyone else (pataphysics having more than 100 different definitions, all equally long-winded and nebulous) but the adjective ‘pataphysical’ went into his mental word-bank, to turn up in a song-lyric, in a wildly different context, almost three years later.

Nor was his work for Indica solely manual; it also deployed the graphic flair that had no outlet when John was around. He helped put together the fliers that were circulated before the grand opening, and single-handedly designed the wrapping-paper for the bookshop. ‘He worked on that for about two days, locked away in his room at Wimpole Street,’ Miles remembers. ‘We thought he must have a groupie in there.’

On the night of the opening, he roared up in his Aston with 2000 sheets of superfine paper he’d had made up in his design, showing Indica’s name, address and telephone number in crosswise strips like one of the newly-modish Union flags. ‘The care and thought he’d put in were amazing,’ Miles says. ‘He could easily just have given a rough design to a printer and had it typeset.’

The British press soon picked up on these un-Beatle-like new interests, giving him a foretaste of the incomprehension and mockery John was to attract for similar reasons much, much later. When Luciano Berio, the maestro of tape-manipulation, gave a rare performance in London, Paul turned up eagerly at the Italian Institute to see him. But the recital was ruined by press photographers with no interest whatsoever in the performer. This insult to Berio angered Paul in a way that little of his popstar life ever could. ‘All you do is destroy things,’ he shouted at the jostling lenses. ‘Why don’t you create something?’ The Daily Mail’s sarcastic headline next morning was ‘THIS IS WHAT A BEATLE DOES IN THE EVENINGS’.

Not every outing with his avant-garde friends was quite so highbrow. One night, while sitting around with Miles and Dunbar, he read that Cliff Richard was currently appearing at the Talk of the Town, a garish new cabaret venue on the site of the old Hippodrome theatre in Charing Cross Road. Cliff had been Britain’s nearest answer to Elvis back when the Quarrymen were still skiffling, but had since gone middle of the road as well as making a very public conversion to Christianity. ‘Paul decided we had to go and see Cliff’s show,’ Miles recalls, ‘so the three of us piled into his Aston and roared up to the West End. He just left the car outside the theatre, which he always seemed able to do anywhere without getting a ticket.

‘As soon as the management saw who it was, we were ushered straight backstage to see Cliff. Outside his dressing-room, Paul was taking the piss out of the star that had been put on the door, like “Wow, look at that, lads! That’s what it’s really all about!” Cliff isn’t a fool and knew we were only there as a piss-take, but he went along with it, and he and Paul got on very well. They ended up having a discussion about property.’

‘It’s a big one, ’cos I like big houses’

Just then, property was a subject much on Paul’s mind. After almost three years as the Asher family’s attic boarder, he’d finally decided to buy a home of his own, but the process was proving lengthy and troublesome.

This was because, at the outset, all he knew for certain was the kind he didn’t want. He didn’t want a modern bungalow with a psychedelic paint-job like George’s, or a mock-Beverly Hills estate with a naff name (‘Sunny Heights’) like Ringo’s, and especially not a faux Tudor mansion like the one where John lived, with wife Cynthia and three-year-old son Julian, in a growing fester of frustration and restlessness. In short, he didn’t want anything picked out by Brian Epstein in Surrey’s Stockbroker Belt, as the others’ had been, with some quasi-paternal idea of keeping Brian’s precious ‘boys’ all in one place and under his protective eye. What Paul had in mind was something altogether more complicated: peaceful and private yet still on the doorstep of Swinging London so he could keep what he called his ‘antenna’ constantly tuned to new developments in art and culture. And, most importantly, something not in any way identifiable with a nouveau riche pop star.

Since even this most particular, practical Beatle couldn’t be expected to house-hunt for himself, Brian’s personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, took on the job of poring over estate agents’ catalogues and checking out promising entries. Taylor came up with a series of seemingly ideal properties, only to have them all rejected for what Paul considered their showiness or vulgarity. ‘He’d say, “This is the sort of place where Gerry Marsden [of Gerry and the Pacemakers] would live.”’

The first to meet all his exacting criteria was in Chester Terrace, the longest of the John Nash facades bordering Regent’s Park, whose illustrious tenants had ranged from H.G. Wells to Harold Pinter. However, the residents’ association, led by theatrical impresario Jack Hylton, blackballed him on the grounds that screaming fans would create too much disturbance. (That Hylton had himself once been a popular dance-band leader, with his own clamorous fans, was conveniently forgotten.)

An ideal candidate then materialised in St John’s Wood, a little to the north: the still verdant district where Victorian grandees used to hide away their mistresses. Number 7 Cavendish Avenue was on a quiet thoroughfare tucked away beside Lord’s, the country’s most prestigious and exclusive cricket ground. A substantial family home with a neoclassical portico, it stood back from the road, screened by a stout brick wall, and had a long rear garden ending in a grove of trees. Not only were the West End’s theatres, galleries and clubs in easy reach but Abbey Road studios were just around the corner.

Paul bought the house, for £40,000, in April 1965 but, as it needed major refurbishment, didn’t move in until March 1966. To compensate the Ashers for the wear and tear on 57 Wimpole Street by his fans, he had the exterior completely redecorated.

Other Beatle domiciles had received top-to-bottom makeovers by fashionable interior decorators, with little or no consultation of their owners. But for 7 Cavendish Avenue–henceforward known by him simply as ‘Cavendish’, just as 20 Forthlin Road was ‘Forthlin’–Paul hired the relatively unknown husband-and-wife architectural team of John and Marina Adams. Marina was John Dunbar’s older sister, and John Adams had designed Peter Asher’s wood-panelled bedroom-cum-studio at Wimpole Street.