Paul McCartney (7 page)

Puttin’ On the Style

Rock ‘n’ roll did many things for British boys when it burst on the unsuspecting 1950s. For Paul, it turned a shell into a suit of shiny armour.

Jim McCartney’s collapse was short-lived. After Mary’s funeral–the Catholic one she’d requested on her deathbed–Jim dried his eyes and buckled down to his new responsibilities. Since their mother’s death, Paul and Michael had been staying with their Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry in Huyton. When they returned to Forthlin Road, their dad seemed back to his old disciplined, understated self.

On his small salary, there was no question of employing a housekeeper. So, at the age of 55, he had to teach himself to cook and do all the other household jobs that men of his generation, especially in the north of England, regarded as ‘women’s work’. His sons pitched in to help like the Boy Scouts they were, Paul now the proud holder of a ‘bivouac badge’ for building a fire and cooking over it. Their plentiful uncles and aunts rallied round with frequent morale-boosting visits and invitations to meals, Every Tuesday, Gin and Millie would clean the house from top to bottom and have a hot dinner waiting when Paul and Mike came in from school.

The home Jim created was rough and ready, but never gloomy. ‘The house was full of laughter,’ Mike McCartney says. ‘There was always music playing–Dad with his records or on the piano, or the relatives around for a sing-song. Dad could have his moments [of grieving for Mary] but Auntie Gin would be there, or someone else, and it’d soon be all right again.’

In the otherwise male atmosphere, Jim perpetuated Mary’s many hospital-inspired rules for hygiene and health–for example, only white tablecloths and towels because coloured ones got dirty without showing it. He also carried on her concern over her sons’ diet, urging them to eat healthily, with plenty of roughage, and inquiring every day whether their bowels were working satisfactorily. Unlike most bachelor establishments, too, the house always smelt of lavender, which Jim grew in the back garden, then rubbed between his fingers to unlock its scent.

Bereaved families often find a pet dog helps to ease the pain, but Paul and Mike had no need of that: the sound of barking from the nearby police training school went on almost around the clock. The wide grassy tract behind their house provided a constant spectacle of dogs being trained or stately police horses at exercise. There were regular public displays of horse-riding and obedience-trials, always culminating with the routine the boys had seen on their first morning–the pistol-firing fugitive pursued by an Alsatian, grabbed by his outsize glove and sent sprawling onto the grass. Paul and Mike would put chairs on the flat roof of their concrete garden shed and see the whole show for nothing. Paul particularly loved the vast chestnut police horses whose duties, in those riot-free days in Liverpool, were purely ceremonial. Watching them go through their dignified paces, he little dreamed of the thoroughbreds he himself would one day own and ride.

Jim McCartney might be a humble cotton salesman who’d left school aged 14, but he had a capacious mind and memory and a thirst for knowledge he’d always striven to pass on to his sons. He prided himself on his vocabulary and religiously filled in the crossword puzzles in his morning Daily Express and evening Liverpool Echo. When an unfamiliar word cropped up, he’d send the boys to check its spelling in the multivolume Newnes Family Encyclopaedia, which for him represented the fount of all knowledge. Paul, as a result, was the one in his class at the Inny who knew how to spell ‘phlegm’. His cousin, Bert Danher, caught the crossword bug from Jim sufficiently to become a puzzle-compiler in later life.

Jim was a treasury of proverbs and sayings, which in Liverpool can verge on the surreal: ‘There’s no hair on a seagull’s chest…’; ‘It’s imposausigable…’; ‘Put it there if it weighs a ton’ (shake hands); ‘You’re about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest’. If ever Paul or Mike wanted to postpone a boring task, their father’s response was always ‘D.I.N.’, for ‘Do it now’; if they were quarrelling, he’d tell them to ‘let it be’, or forget it. Another oft-repeated maxim summed up Jim’s whole civilised approach to life: ‘The two most important “-ations” in life are “toler-” and “moder-”.’

‘Dad was always encouraging us to make something of ourselves,’ Mike McCartney says. ‘That was his mantra–giving us the confidence to go out there and be something in that big old world.’

But even for a singular boy like Paul, the world of his boyhood seemed to hold little promise or excitement. Mid-Fifties Britain may have had a stability later generations would envy, but its downside was stifling dullness and predictability. The British had had quite enough excitement with the Second World War, and now wished only for everlasting peace to enjoy all the commodities that had lately come off the ration, like eggs, butter and sugar.

Youth had none of the power it would later enjoy–in fact, was barely recognised at all. Around the age of 16, boys turned into men and girls into women, dressing and talking like their parents, adopting the same values, seeking the same amusements, soon marrying and ‘settling down’ in their turn. Only university and college students, a tiny minority, were permitted any drawn-out transition from adolescence to maturity, albeit still in the same tweed jackets and frumpy frocks as their elders.

The war had made popular music a vital part of everyday life, but as yet it had no specific appeal to the young. The BBC’s Light Programme gave employment to dozens of dance orchestras and bands, all of whom performed live on-air, in programmes still with a wartime flavour: Calling All Forces, Workers’ Playtime, Music While You Work. Record-sales were already big business: the New Musical Express had started a ‘Top 12’ chart in 1952 and extended it to a Top 20 in 1954. Every new song was also issued as sheet music so that it could be reproduced, Victorian-style, on parlour pianos at home.

The biggest hits were by American artistes like Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine and Doris Day, though Sinatra-esque British crooners like Dennis Lotis and Dickie Valentine inspired large female followings. The songs–written by those mysterious ‘professionals’ for whom Jim McCartney had such respect–tended to be faux-Italian or -Irish ballads, themes from the newest Disney film or novelty numbers like ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’

A few successful vocalists came from Liverpool, notably Frankie Vaughan, Michael Holliday and Lita Roza. But, like the comedians for which the city was more famous–Robb Wilton, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey–they were advised to lose their Scouse accents and never mention their birthplace in their acts. Showbusiness superstition held that anything glamorous or desirable had to come, or seem to come, from London. The last place it could conceivably come from was a sooty seaport on a muddy river, far away in the north-west.

Paul’s thirteenth birthday present from his father was a trumpet. The instrument with which Jim led his little dance band before the war still had greatest prestige on the bandstand, thanks to America’s Harry James and Britain’s Eddie Calvert, aka ‘the Man with the Golden Trumpet’. Calvert’s instrumental version of ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, from the film Underwater, had been number one in Britain’s new Top 20 for four weeks in 1955.

However, Jim had no idea of launching Paul on a musical career, even one as modest as his own had been. Rather, the trumpet would be a social asset in a city where much of the best entertainment took place in private homes. ‘If you can play something, son,’ he advised, ‘you’ll always get invited to parties.’

Rock ‘n’ roll first crept up on Britain in the dark. During mid-1955, showings of an American film called Blackboard Jungle caused disturbances among young members of its audience that left a trail of wrecked cinemas across the country. This reaction was not to the film, which concerned delinquent high school students in New York, but to a song played over the opening credits, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets.

In hindsight, the record seems innocent enough, a conventional, intelligible tenor voice simply chanting the hours in the day when one can rock–i.e. dance. To adult British ears at the time, its slap-bass beat and braying saxophone were a din almost as destructively hideous as the recent war’s bombs. Indeed its consequences were to be almost as traumatic, and much longer lasting.

The war had not made Britain any less rigidly class-bound, and rock ‘n’ roll music initially affected only the working class. Its first enthusiasts, the instigators of those cinema riots, were Teddy boys: young men who defied the drab national dress code by sporting Edwardian-style velvet-collared jackets and narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers, with accessories often including switchblade knives, razors, brass knuckles and bicycle chains. ‘Teds’ responding to rock ‘n’ roll awoke fears of a juvenile delinquency problem on the same scale as America’s, not to mention an older, darker fear of proletarian uprising.

But, as was soon apparent, the musical malignancy had spread much wider. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ went to number one in the new Top 20, and was followed by a string of further Bill Haley hits, all using ‘rock’ in the title and all unleashing further mayhem. When Haley visited Britain in 1956, arriving by ocean liner, he was greeted by crowds that even the young Queen would hardly attract. That was his big mistake. In total contrast with his music, he proved to be a chubby, benign-looking man with a kiss-curl plastered on his forehead and not the faintest whiff of danger or subversion. When, soon afterwards, his record-sales went into decline, Britain’s parents breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the crisis had passed.

But by now America had a new rock ‘n’ roller of a very different stamp. Like Bill Haley, the bizarrely-named Elvis Presley wore a guitar but, unlike any vocalist–that is, any white vocalist–he used his body, especially his hips and buckling knees, to underline the amorous fervour of what he sang. He was, in other words, raw sex on crêpe soles. While Haley’s deleterious effect had largely been on males, Presley’s was overwhelmingly on females, rousing previously decorous, tight-corseted Fifties young womanhood to hysterical screams, reciprocal bodily writhings and an apparent common compulsion to tear the singer’s clothes from his back.

Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, recorded in January 1956, was the first rock ‘n’ roll song truly reflecting the adolescent psyche in all its self-dramatisation and self-pity. Presley did not (and never would) follow Bill Haley’s example of meeting his British public, but film footage showed him to be the ultimate Teddy boy, with black backswept hair, brooding eyes, a top lip permanently curled as if in disdain for the entire adult world that hated, feared, mocked and execrated him. Over the next two years, he would enjoy a run of UK hits no other act would match until the following decade.

Paul was an instant convert to Elvis, hereafter known by Christian name alone. ‘I first saw his picture in a magazine–I think it was an ad for “Heartbreak Hotel” and I thought, “Wow! He’s so good looking… he’s perfect. The Messiah has arrived.”’ When thoughts of his mother began gnawing at him, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Teddy Bear’, or especially ‘All Shook Up’ (with its glorious–and prophetic–mumble of ‘Mm-hm-hm hm yay-yay-yeah’) were infallible balm.

He also loved Little Richard, the first black rock ‘n’ roller, who combined a demented shriek with outrageous camp that went completely over most British heads. Though Paul’s voice was the lightest alto, he found he could do spot-on imitations of both the Presley mumble and the Richard scream. The crowd now gathered round him in the Inny playground not to hear a radio but a rock show.

Today, pop music is an unavoidable element of daily life, playing on perpetual loops in shops, offices, bars, restaurants and public spaces, buzzing in the earpieces of bus-and train-travellers, thumping out of cars, ringing around construction sites, whispering inside lifts and tinkling down telephone lines. But in rock ‘n’ roll’s early days in Britain, it received public airing only in the disreputable haunts of Teddy boys–espresso bars, bikers’ cafes, pinball arcades and fairgrounds.

In America, it had received instant circulation via the country’s hundreds of commercial radio stations. But British radio was the monopoly of the traditionally stuffy, puritanical BBC which–with all those conventional bands and orchestras to protect–excluded it completely. Its sole mouthpiece was Radio Luxembourg, beamed from far away in mainland Europe, which operated a nightly English language service playing all the new American releases, somewhat blurred by intrusive French or Belgian voices and static.

Like most families in that pre-transistor era, the McCartneys had only one radio, a bulky, valve-operated apparatus housed in a wooden cabinet and known as a ‘wireless’. Unfortunately, this was sited immovably in the sitting-room, where Jim McCartney liked to play his kind of music on the gramophone during Luxembourg’s evening transmission hours. An inveterate handyman, Jim kept a drawer full of electronic oddments he thought ‘might come in useful someday’. One evening, he came up to Paul’s and Mike’s rooms–they’d stopped sharing by then–and presented each of them with a set of black Bakelite headphones.

‘There were wires disappearing through the floorboards to the radio below, so that we’d be able to listen to Radio Luxembourg in our bedrooms,’ Mike McCartney remembers. ‘So Dad would have his Mantovani downstairs while upstairs we’d have Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry… and our kid [Paul] would be singing along or trying to write down the lyrics. I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for those Bakelite headphones, there wouldn’t have been any Beatles.’

Though the music no longer destroyed cinemas, the press kept up an unremitting tirade against it, supported by opportunistic politicians, teachers, clergy and ‘real’ musicians of Jim’s generation. Its lyrics, mostly nonsensical enough to have been written by Lewis Carroll, were condemned as ‘obscene’ and its rhythm as ‘jungle-like’–a racist allusion to its origins in black rhythm and blues. Rock ‘n’ roll singers were ridiculed as inarticulate morons, controlled by unscrupulous managers (all too true in most cases), whose fraudulence was summed up by their inability to play the guitars they flourished and spun about them. Every commentator agreed: it couldn’t be long before young people saw through the con-trick that was being perpetrated on them and the whole noisy nuisance blew over.