Paul McCartney (66 page)

Surrounded by protective armies of trees, it was almost as remote and secluded as High Park Farm. Yet London was only an hour away by road and Lydd Airport, with its access to Paris and the Continent, just 25 minutes. But for now, Waterfall Cottage would be used only for spur-of-the-moment weekend breaks. Paul’s main home and first love continued to be Kintyre, as he showed by repeatedly purchasing large tracts of it.

This expansion stemmed from his discovery that High Park was not as impregnably private as it had seemed. The first fan to run him to earth there was a young Mormon woman from Utah who’d already been tenaciously doorstepping him in London for about three years. In 1971, she was found to be camped with a female friend in a small wood on the slope above the farm, both of them spying on it through binoculars. Paul drove up to confront them in person and, recognising his long-time persecutor from Cavendish, made little of his usual effort to be nice. The Mormon later went to Campbeltown police claiming that he’d struck her across the face, but he denied it and no formal charge was ever brought.

To stop others camping in the wood, he purchased it outright and from then on began systematically acquiring other properties and land around High Park to create one vast, continuous McCartney exclusion-zone. Low Ranachan Farm, bought on the retirement of his neighbour Archie Revie, added a further 304 acres to his domain, as well as the barn where Wings rehearsed Band on the Run and the cottage where Jo Jo Laine went into labour. The addition of Low Park Farm, also known as Skeroblinraid, with its similar acreage, completed the circle; now one could not even see High Park without trespassing on Paul’s land.

His ownership had an immediate beneficial effect on the environment, something for which conventional farmers in those days cared little. At Linda’s prompting, most of the walls and fences which had formerly divided the properties were removed, effectively creating a nature reserve where fauna and flora flourished as never before. The Highland red deer which had largely deserted the area–fearful of stalkers of their own–returned in abundance.

All the satellite farmhouses and cottages were in a poor state of repair when Paul acquired them, and needed extensive modernisation which he oversaw with his usual practical flair and restrained good taste. Yet, strangely, no such effort and expense went into the heart of his empire. He seemed to prefer High Park looking half-finished, with stacks of timber and corrugated iron lying around everywhere but never used. His daughter, Mary, would recall playing with her sisters in what seemed like ‘one big lumber-yard’.

Linda in Scotland was unrecognisable as the reluctantly glammed-up figure who accompanied Paul in Wings, still attracting almost universal hostility and ridicule. ‘Mother and wife is it for me,’ she admitted in a complete U-turn from the feminism she’d once pioneered. ‘And riding my horse and animals is it for me.’

One of the locals who got to know her best was Campbeltown taxi-driver Reggie McManus, who regularly drove the family to and from the airport and ferried Linda and the children down to Cheshire to visit Paul’s father. McManus remembers a woman utterly devoid of the airs and graces one would expect from a rock megastar’s wife. ‘Both she and Paul always called me “Mr McManus”, which I used to appreciate,’ he recalls. ‘Paul was very likeable, but I think he was always holding back a little bit. With Linda, well, she wore her heart on her sleeve.’

After all the stories of Beatle millions he’d read, the McCartneys’ simple lifestyle came as a revelation. ‘Every so often, I would go to Glasgow to pick up a parcel of clothes Linda had ordered, mostly for the children. There was never any of this designer stuff–just the kind of wee dresses you could get in Woolworths back in those days. Simple kids’ stuff.’

Linda’s great pride, McManus recalls, was her vegetable-patch. ‘One day when I was there with my wife, she asked if we’d like some vegetables to take home. The next thing, she was down on her hands and knees pulling up carrots, then she asked if we’d like some potatoes and before you could stop her she had both hands deep in the soil. I said, “Stop, use a fork,” but she was having none of it and as she clawed at the soil she said, “This is the best way, Mr McManus.” Her hands were filthy but she didn’t care.’

Here, too, she had time for photography, her first love and undisputed talent, finding subjects very different from the rock stars and backstage courtiers who used to be her main material.

At Low Ranachan Cottage, Paul set up the first real studio she’d ever had. But she preferred to wander the streets of Campbeltown snapping local characters like the colloquy of elderly men in flat caps, known locally as ‘the Mill Dam Midges’, who always gathered on the same street-corner, putting the world to rights. Her other favourite subjects were small children in prams or strollers. Years later, leafing through her various books of photographs, adult Campbeltonians would come upon their infant faces juxtaposed with Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger.

Her adoration of animals became a local legend. When one of Martha’s mongrel puppies was kicked by a horse and suffered a broken leg, it was taken by taxi for treatment at Glasgow Veterinary Hospital, a round-trip of 280 miles. By the time the pup was returned to High Park, Paul and Linda had departed for London, so it was then flown down to join them. On an even more famous occasion, the Campbeltown vet found himself called to High Park Farm to treat a duck with a broken leg.

Despite Linda’s pride in her home-grown veg, the cuisine at High Park still remained largely meat-based. But there were already signs of wavering. One Christmas time, she asked Reggie McManus to go to Glasgow and collect a goose she’d ordered as a change from turkey for the festive meal. McManus expected the bird to be already plucked and dressed but found it very much alive, in a crate so large that he had to lash it to the taxi roof.

On the return journey to Kintyre, he ran into high winds and lashing rain such as only the Scottish Highlands can produce. Fearing that the goose mightn’t survive the journey–and so rob Paul and Linda of the experience of butchering their own Christmas dinner–he made frequent stops amid the tempest to check it was still alive. Furious hisses and wing-beatings confirmed this to be so.

However, its destiny was not to be carved by Paul at the head of a table decorated with crackers and tinsel. When McManus called at High Park some weeks later, Linda took him into the backyard, and there was his former outside passenger waddling around at the head of a flock of goslings. They hadn’t had the heart to kill it, Linda said. ‘It was now part of the family, raising its own family.’

Vegetarianism did not have much of a following in Britain at this time. Most people regarded it as a rather pitiable eccentricity practised by joyless characters who wore sandals and made their own clothes, and summed up in the drab phrase ‘nut cutlet’. Most vegetarian restaurants were gloomy places still redolent of the hippy era. The name of London’s most successful one, Cranks, wryly acknowledged the overwhelming public view of its clientele.

Paul had grown up an enthusiastic carnivore whose favourite meal, before he discovered more sophisticated fare, was lamb chop and chips (though at 20 Forthlin Road, his father’s catering sometimes included ‘pea sandwiches’). Though he’d tried vegetarianism with Jane Asher, he’d rather back-slid with Linda, whose earliest taste of fame had been with a meat loaf recipe (‘take three pounds of mixed veal, beef or pork…’) in the Arizona Daily Star. ‘When they came to my house, Linda would go into the kitchen and make BLTs,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘And I can hear her now asking me. “Do you fancy a burger?”’

Neither had ever felt anything contradictory in loving the lambs that were born by the hundred at High Park early each spring, giving the cutest ones names, letting the children bottle-feed the weaklings and then, a few weeks later, seeing them herded into trucks to be taken to Campbeltown livestock market. But one sunny Sunday noontime, realisation suddenly dawned.

‘We were having lunch and looking out the window at all these little lambs jumping around, full of life,’ Paul would remember. ‘Then we realised we were eating leg of lamb. We looked at each other and had the same thought: “Maybe we should find a way of not doing this.”’

For Wings’ fourth album–their first after leaving the Apple label–Paul continued his policy of recording in hopefully inspirational foreign places and took them to New Orleans. Despite the magnetic pull of the city’s jazz and blues heritage, he’d been there only once before, as a Beatle. All he remembered from that hermetically-sealed visit was the heat, the vibrator bed in the motel, and meeting Fats Domino.

The Wings troupe arrived on 5 January 1975, unaware that the city’s Mardi Gras festival was in full swing. Venturing out to explore, they found themselves engulfed by fancy dress parades and marching Dixieland bands. Always glad of a chance to dress up, Paul and Linda joined the festivities disguised as circus clowns. But the chalk-white face and red nose fooled no one. ‘Hi, Paul,’ one after another fellow reveller greeted him.

Sea-Saint Studios, where the band were booked to record, also had an inspirational purpose. The studios’ co-owner, songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint, was one of the most influential figures in New Orleans R&B, the composer of seminal early-Sixties hits like Ernie K-Doe’s ‘Motherin-Law’ and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Working in the Coal Mine’. Toussaint himself was to play backup piano for Paul in support of Linda’s keyboards.

There was no current rumour of a Beatles reunion but the ravenous media had recently missed the strongest prospect yet. At their meeting in LA the previous summer, Paul had invited John to New Orleans to play on Wings’ album and John had said he’d think about it. Later, according to his then companion, May Pang, he’d talked seriously about writing with Paul again and, at Pang’s urging, decided to accept the New Orleans invitation. But the very week he was due to go, Yoko finally agreed to a reconciliation: he cancelled his flight and settled down with her in the Dakota Building to have a child and, in Yoko’s poignant words, ‘grow old together’.

It had been over a year since the release of Band on the Run and expectations for Wing’s follow-up were almost as great as for the successor to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul had planned a formula similar to his 1973 smash–and his 1967 one–with songs linked together and reprised to create a seemingly coherent narrative. Holidaying in Jamaica prior to the trip, he’d set out all the tracks on a paper scroll ‘almost as long as the room’, continually changing their running-order to get the right balance of light and shade. The only other time he’d done that was with his medley at the end of Abbey Road.

Sea-Saint Studios and the New Orleans vibe did not disappoint. Allen Toussaint was a courtly host and a consummate professional who submerged his own highly individual piano style to do whatever Paul wanted. A succession of local legends dropped by to meet the McCartneys and jam, including the two great pedagogues of Southern blues, Professor Longhair and Dr John, and Sea-Saint’s famous house band, the Meters. At a press reception aboard a Mississippi riverboat, Paul was evasive about the album’s name, but Linda let it out: ‘Venus and Mars.’

In contrast with this positive creative atmosphere, there was still unrest in Wings’ ranks. After six months, drummer Geoff Britton remained at loggerheads with lead guitar Jimmy McCulloch and noticeably isolated from the others. His problem was the same as Pete Best’s long ago in the baby Beatles: neither his playing nor his face seemed to fit. And a fortnight into the Venus and Mars sessions, Paul fired him, making him the third Wingsman to fall to earth in less than two years.

Luckily, this was a part of the world where high-grade musicians grew as plentifully as watermelons. As a temporary standin, Paul hired 26-year-old Joe English, a migrant from Syracuse, New York, who’d been playing with a band called the Tall Dogs Orchestra in Macon, Georgia. Besides being an excellent drummer, he had a good singing voice and an easy-going manner, and was soon offered a permanent place in the line-up–by his own account, ‘the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me since my first Communion’.

In March, Paul and Linda returned to LA to finish off the album at the Wally Heider Studios and attend the Grammys for a double triumph. With sales now at five million, Band on the Run received the award for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group. It was also named Best-Produced Non-Classical Album, finally recompensing its engineer, Geoff Emerick, for his ordeals with Nigeria’s insect life.

The evening also brought the kind of embarrassing moment usually associated with the Oscars. To present the award for Record of the Year, host Andy Williams introduced ‘two of the most prolific talents of this or any other musical generation… They have both recently parted from respective partners of whom you may have heard. Now they’re alone and adrift in the sea of rocky royalties.’ It was John and Paul, though in this case the latter’s surname was Simon.

The new, domesticated John was a strange-looking figure with shoulder-length hair, a black beret and an orchid corsage, all vaguely reminiscent of his Aunt Mimi back home in Britain. In a front seat sat Yoko, on guard against any further signals that he might get back to writing with Paul.

The co-presenters recited a slightly bitchy script that cannot but have soured Band on the Run’s achievement a little: ‘Hello. I’m John and I used to play with my partner, Paul.’… ‘Hello, I’m Paul and I used to play with my partner, Art [Garfunkel].’ The award went to ‘I Honestly Love You’ by Olivia Newton-John, but was collected for her by Garfunkel, to Simon’s obvious discomfiture.

‘Are you guys getting back together?’ Simon took the opportunity to ask John on behalf of the assembled industry bigwigs.

‘Are you guys getting back together?’ John quipped–then, in a mischievous aside to Garfunkel: ‘Where’s Linda?’

The answer was: taking the heat for Paul as usual. Late one night, they were driving along Santa Monica Boulevard with the three children asleep in the back when he accidentally ran a red light and was pulled over by the police. Smelling a telltale fragrance, the officers searched their car, to find 17 grammes of marijuana in Linda’s bag and a still-smouldering joint under a passenger seat.