Paul McCartney (76 page)

Far from disbanding Wings after the Japan debacle, as expected, he maintained the illusion they were still a going concern for the rest of 1980. In the autumn, they returned to the studio apparently to start a new album and were filmed by BBC1’s Nationwide programme rehearsing in a rented barn in the village of Tenterton, near Peasmarsh. But drummer Steve Holley felt he was just going through the motions: ‘I could see the band unravelling in front of my eyes.’

John’s murder at the hands of a seemingly devoted fan had terrified all other major rock stars and made them vastly increase their personal security, especially at live shows. On the Rolling Stones’ 1981–82 American tour, a veritable army of yellow T-shirted thugs guarded the stage while the band themselves were watched over by a seven-foot-high giant and an entire martial arts academy.

It was no time to be taking young children on the road but, in truth, the McCartneys and Linda had already decided to scale down that side of Wings. ‘Touring wasn’t gelling with where they were in their lives,’ recalls Laurence Juber. ‘Linda had four children who needed to be at school; she had no more energy for travelling round the world and Paul didn’t want to do it without her.’

Juber had already been hived off from Wings to accompany the couple to France and join them on Ringo’s new album, Stop and Smell the Roses. This last-ever potential Beatles reunion once again saw three ex-members rallying round the abandoned ‘child’ of their divorce to try to keep his career alive. As well as singing backup vocals with Linda, Paul wrote and produced two tracks and George wrote and produced another. The summer before his death, John too had promised to take part and given Ringo a song that might be used, poignantly entitled ‘Life Begins at 40’.

Paul had seemingly found a successor to Denny Laine: another noted vocalist and songwriter–and additionally someone almost as angelic-looking as himself–who was willing to be his sideman. Fellow northerner Eric Stewart had been in Wayne Fontana’s backing group, the Mindbenders, then gone on to 10cc, one of the most original British bands of the Seventies, co-writing and performing their massively successful single ‘I’m Not in Love’.

Following the Apple model, 10cc had started a fruit-themed independent studio, Strawberry, in Stockport, Lancashire, later opening a southern branch in Dorking, Surrey, only a few miles from Peasmarsh, which was what brought Stewart into Paul’s orbit. He was in fact hospitalised after a serious car crash when Paul telephoned and suggested they work together.

In February 1981, a fully-recovered Stewart joined the personnel on what would be Paul’s fourth solo album, Tug of War, recorded at George Martin’s newly-opened AIR studios on the West Indies island of Montserrat, with Martin back in the producer’s chair, as politely authoritative as ever. Although Wings were theoretically still in existence, only Linda and Denny Laine took part. The rest were VIP session musicians like Eric Stewart and American drummer Steve Gadd, plus two guest artistes whom Paul held in sufficient reverence to share lead vocals with them.

The first was Carl Perkins, the Fifties rockabilly legend who’d written and first recorded ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and whose equally infectious ‘Matchbox’ and ‘Honey Don’t’ used to be staples of the Beatles’ stage act. A gentle, unassuming man who’d never grown that rich from his songbook, Perkins arrived on Montserrat without an entourage, in fact all alone. Strangely, Paul chose to waste him on an underpowered oddment called ‘Get It’ which, judging by his strained laughter at the end, Perkins didn’t.

The album’s other spectacular guest turn was Stevie Wonder, with whom Paul had only ever worked in the shambolic LA studio-session with John that became A Toot and a Snore in ’74. Now there was no ‘tooting’ and certainly no snoring as they duetted ‘Ebony and Ivory’, Paul’s plea for interracial harmony like the black and white keys on a piano. Stevie was his match in ruthless perfectionism, at one point pulling him up for handclaps that weren’t quite in beat.

Three months on from John’s death, he seemed fully recovered–but actually so many self-defence mechanisms had been in play that the enormity of it was only now sinking in. One day in the studio with Eric Stewart, he suddenly stopped work, overwhelmed by the realisation that the hilarious, irascible, cruel, kindly, haunted boy for whom he played ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ at St Peter’s church fete was no longer in the world.

He had released no kind of ‘tribute’ song to John–further evidence to many of coldness or indifference. Now on Tug of War there would be ‘Here Today’, a direct address to an unnamed John, reflecting on the vast differences between them and the essential bond that had lasted almost to the end: ‘Didn’t understand a thing/ But we could always sing’. ‘Here Today’ wasn’t released as a single or drawn attention to on the album, so most of the media never noticed it.

The doom of Wings was finally sealed by Denny Laine, who had survived all the band’s personnel-changes and internal politics through the Seventies, but now wanted out if there was to be no more touring. Paul announced the break-up in April 1981, without forewarning drummer Steve Holley. ‘The first I knew about it was a story in the Evening Standard,’ Holley recalls. ‘So I rang Paul and he said, “Oh, yeah… I meant to tell you.”’

Despite Laine’s finger-pointing Japanese Tears album, there seemed to have been no personal rancour in his departure. A month later, he joined Paul and Linda in overdubbing vocals for ‘All Those Years Ago’, a tribute to John by George which grabbed all the attention that should have gone to ‘Here Today’. It was a three-quarter-Beatles reunion, the first time the survivors had recorded together since ‘I Me Mine’ in 1970. Mainly for that reason–the song itself being a feeble effort, previously offered to Ringo with different words–‘All Those Years Ago’ spent three weeks at number two on the Billboard chart.

After that, Laine ‘just kind of drifted away’ from Paul. ‘The next time I saw him was on the video for “Ebony and Ivory”.’

Five pistol-shots outside the Dakota Building had shattered the decade-long hope that someday the Beatles might come back again. The result was a new wave of Beatlemania, far surpassing the 1963 version and this time destined never to subside.

Inevitably, the main focus was John. His last album, Double Fantasy, which had sold only moderately on its release in November 1980, became a posthumous global hit, as did ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ and the other singles taken from it. Three months after his death, he had sold two million records in the US alone. Even that was dwarfed by demand for the Beatles’ 11 landmark albums, the compilations issued since their break-up and the new ones now being rushed into production. Everything they had ever recorded became of priceless value, back to the old jazz chestnuts they’d played as Tony Sheridan’s backing band on the Polydor label and the amateur tapings of them drunk onstage at the Hamburg Star-Club.

Apart from the record companies, the main beneficiary of this international listening frenzy was Northern Songs, the publishing company created for Lennon and McCartney’s output, which they’d lost to Lew Grade’s ATV organisation in 1969. All Paul’s success with Wings hadn’t erased the nagging sense of injustice that he didn’t own his Beatles songs. And now, with those songs at a greater premium than ever before, he suddenly had a chance to get them back.

Seventy-four-year-old Grade, recently elevated to the House of Lords, was in a financial hole comparable to the Beatles’ when he’d snapped up Northern 12 years earlier. Moving from television to feature films, he had produced Raise the Titanic, an epic about salvaging the sunken liner which ended up so expensive and unprofitable that he remarked ‘it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic’. With shares in his Associated Communications Corporation in freefall and his funding from City bankers terminated, he had no choice but to sell off parts of his entertainment and real estate empire.

Late in 1981, he approached Paul’s lawyer, Lee Eastman, offering ATV Music, the division that included Northern Songs, for $30 million. Paul had maintained good relations with Grade and requested a personal meeting at which he asked if Northern might be for sale as the separate entity Grade had originally bought. By Paul’s later account, Grade said yes, naming a price of £20 million. This was almost three times what he’d paid but, if new Beatlemania continued at its present pace, the money would very quickly be earned back.

The negotiations required Paul to join forces with Yoko, who now had sole, and beady-eyed, control of John’s estate. She was content to let him take the lead but thought Grade’s asking price far too high and–according to Paul–suggested offering only £5 million. Reports in the UK business press suggested he was putting up between £20 and £25 million but that Grade wasn’t interested in separating Northern Songs from ATV Music: it had to be the whole publishing division or nothing.

A deal between Paul and Grade was said to be ‘in its final stages’ when four other potential purchasers appeared, among them CBS, the label on which Paul recorded. He and Yoko then jointly announced they were to sue ATV ‘for breach of trust over past Beatles sales and royalties’. Actually it was a revival of litigation over royalty payments begun in 1969 and since in limbo, and was widely seen as an attempt to spoil the impending auction of ATV Music.

Early in 1982, Paul gave an interview about the matter to The Times in a tone that could only offend an old-school showbiz type like Grade–in fact, an early manifestation of Macca. ‘He should not screw me for what he could get for someone else. I’m not interested in buying the whole company. Give me back my babies, Lew.’

Initially, teaming with Yoko seemed to create a bond between them, so much so that Paul felt their past conflicts had come purely from ‘misunderstanding’. ‘Nobody understood John and Yoko,’ he added in his Times interview. ‘I didn’t, to my everlasting sorrow.’

But as the affair dragged on, and their respective accounts of it began to differ, there was an abrupt mutual cooling. Meanwhile, an Australian industrial and media tycoon with the medieval-sounding name of Robert Holmes à Court was quietly buying up shares in Grade’s overall company, Associated Communications Corporation, until by the end of 1982 he held 51 per cent. Holmes à Court, a devout Beatles fan, was not interested in offloading Northern Songs. From that point, the Paul and Yoko coolness became a deep freeze.

If he still didn’t own that five-star chunk of his past work, Paul’s control of the works of other composers continued to widen and diversify. Indeed, his MPL organisation’s acquisition of publishing companies and copyrights had a luck and timing reminiscent of the Beatles in their heyday. For example, MPL hoovered up the music from three hit Broadway shows, Grease, A Chorus Line and Annie, each just a year before it became a huge-grossing Hollywood film. And while he mightn’t have got back ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Hey Jude’, there was some satisfaction in staking his claim to an original song so old that it had escaped the Lennon–McCartney branding-iron.

In July 1958, when the Beatles were still the Quarrymen, they’d scraped together a few shillings to make a record and so hopefully give themselves more credibility with Liverpool dance promoters. Cut at Percy Phillips’s tiny home-studio, one side was a cover of the Crickets’ ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and the other an original Paul composition, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’,

Unable to afford a copy each, the five Quarrymen had to share one ten-inch acetate disc, keeping it for a week at a time, then passing it along. It thus came into the possession of Paul’s school friend John Duff Lowe, who’d recently joined on a casual basis playing piano. At the end of his week, Lowe somehow forgot to pass on the disc, no one else asked for it and soon afterwards he drifted away from the band still with it in his possession.

In late 1981, with even the most mass-produced Beatles memorabilia booming in value, Lowe remembered the Percy Phillips recording session 23 years earlier and the solitary disc that had resulted and was still lying in a drawer at his parents’ home. Having no idea what it might be worth, he decided to put it up for auction at Sotheby’s. The London Sunday Times subsequently reported that the earliest known recording of John Lennon and Paul McCartney performing together was about to come onto the market and was expected to fetch a five-figure sum.

The story brought Lowe a warning letter from Clintons, a London law firm with a large rock star clientele. This forbade any auction of the disc because one of its two tracks, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, was by Paul McCartney and his copyright would thereby be infringed. (In fact, the song had been jointly credited to Paul and George.) A phone number was given on which Lowe could reach Paul to discuss a possible private sale. The number proved to connect directly with Peasmarsh. Linda took Lowe’s call, saying that Paul was out at present and adding, vis-à-vis the Sotheby’s story, ‘He’s not pleased.’

When the two old school-friends did speak, Paul initially seemed to suggest Lowe had no right to the disc and should just hand it over: ‘Come on, Duff, you’re not supposed to have hung on to it…’ But Lowe stuck to his guns that possession was nine-tenths of the law and a price, evidently in the low five figures, was agreed, subject to the authenticity of the merchandise being verified.

This was done rather in the style of a James Bond film with a Wings soundtrack. Paul’s manager, Steve Shrimpton, and a Clintons lawyer travelled to Bristol where Lowe now worked; he fetched the disc from the bank-vault in which it had been kept in a briefcase, the authenticating features (ten-inch shellac disc, yellow label saying ‘Kensington’, handwritten credits) were checked and the money was handed over.

During their phone conversation, Paul had suggested Lowe should come to London after the business side was concluded and they’d have a nostalgic night out together. About a week later, he rang Peasmarsh again on the number he’d been given. But it had been disconnected.

Without a band to keep them on the run, Paul and Linda settled more deeply into Sussex, making it a place to work as well as live. Paul had further extended the Peasmarsh estate by buying Hog Hill Mill, a converted windmill in the nearby village of Icklesham, becoming only the mill’s sixth owner since its construction exactly two centuries earlier. Here he installed a 48-track recording studio where he could make albums without the bother of journeying to Abbey Road.