Paul McCartney (83 page)

‘It was like a psychological war between them,’ Cox recalls. ‘Linda would ask him “Do you want me to come?” and he’d sometimes answer “Yes”, sometimes “No”. That went on for about two weeks before it was settled that she’d go.’

Paul would later say he’d felt no special urge to return to live shows after a lay-off of ten years. But by 1989, the financial inducements had become irresistible.

Tours had once been looked on simply as a means of promoting albums, but were now huge moneymaking operations, grossing double-figure millions from merchandising (a sphere in which the Beatles had earned practically nothing) and the sale of film, television and radio rights. There was also a growing trend for commercial sponsorship–as if plutocratic rock bands were cash-strapped charities–with leading retail brands and business corporations bidding fortunes to have their names printed on concert programmes and tickets. The Rolling Stones’ upcoming Steel Wheels world tour, for example, was guaranteed around $99 million before Mick Jagger had sung a note.

It was a propitious moment, for Flowers in the Dirt had proved the ‘comeback’ album Paul had so much needed and wanted, reaching number one in the UK, charting around the world–though not yet high enough in North America–and containing a string of potential hit singles that live concerts could exploit.

To Richard Ogden now fell the ticklish task of finding a corporate sponsor as impressive as Paul demanded which did not in some way or other offend against his and–especially–Linda’s ethics. The tour was itself to be a means of promoting the environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth to which they both now belonged; a magazine-format souvenir programme, given away free to audiences, contained several pages on FOE’s work and at every press conference Paul extolled the work they were doing to save the planet.

Ogden seemed to have found an ideal commercial partner in American Airlines and was about to seal a thumping deal when Paul suddenly told him to break off negotiations. The reason was that Linda’s mother, Louise, had died in an American Airlines passenger jet which crashed soon after take-off from New York in 1962. By that late stage, the only alternative, found by the tour’s American booker Alex Kochan, was the Visa credit card company. Their upfront offer was $500,000, which Paul considered a paltry sum compared with what the Rolling Stones were getting. But he accepted when Visa promised a nationwide TV campaign to promote the tour’s American leg.

It was to be in no sense a revival or reinvention of Wings: Paul went out under his own name with only Linda representing the old line-up and his Flowers in the Dirt band–Stuart, McIntosh, Whitten and Wickens–as anonymous sidemen. It opened in Oslo, Norway, in September 1989 and over the next ten months gave 103 shows to 2.3 million people across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and South America, travelling 100,331 miles, taking with it 178,000 kg of freight, filling 17 trucks, a road crew of 250 and 365 security staff including seven bodyguards for Paul, Linda and their children, Stella and James.

It was also to be an ‘all veggie’ tour, promoting Linda’s just-published vegetarian recipe-book, Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking. Such a thing was not totally unknown in rock; the Smiths had made their ‘Meat Is Murder’ tour in 1985, forcing their road crew to abstain from hamburgers and even forbidding the sale of hotdogs at gigs. The McCartneys took a softer line, serving Linda’s meat lookalikes to the crew and at media receptions. ‘The vegetarian catering was really great, so it was no hardship,’ Hamish Stuart remembers. ‘But there were quite a few raids on steakhouses on our nights off.’

Above all, it celebrated the band Paul had spent so many years trying to escape. Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles’ two abidingly popular cinema features, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, had been hired to create a film-montage which opened the show with clips of Beatlemania and concurrent news events. The set list included 16 Lennon–McCartney songs including their Swinging Sixties apotheosis, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Despite ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ vaudeville atmosphere and direct address to its listeners–‘You’re such a lovely audience’–it had never before been played to a live audience.

The Beatles segment began with a ceremonial reintroduction of Paul’s Hofner violin bass, which had spent years under lock and key at Peasmarsh. It became the show’s high point when he exchanged his Fender bass for that so-familiar skinny silhouette and tore into ‘Please Please Me’ as a 60ft-high image of his long-ago mop-topped, round-collared self lit up behind him.

But as well as recreating history, he was out to correct it; specifically, the stubborn myth that John had been the experimental, avant-garde Beatle and he merely the soft, safe, ‘tuneful’ one. In the free souvenir programme–of which a million were distributed–readers turned from current Friends of the Earth campaigns to an interview with Paul, pointing out that he, not John, had been the first into experimental musicians like John Cage and Luciano Berio, painters like Magritte and sculptors like Takis. ‘I do think John’s avant-garde period… was really to give himself a go at what he’d seen me having a go at.’

The itinerary included the Tokyo concerts Paul had been prevented from giving in 1980 by an over-zealous customs officer at Narita airport. Coincidentally, his first single from Flowers in the Dirt was an Elvis Costello co-composition called ‘My Brave Face’, something his fellow inmates at Kosuge Prison would well remember. The accompanying video was a veiled reference to his ordeal: a Japanese businessman showed off a collection of McCartney memorabilia, including ancient colour Beatles-footage, then was carted off to jail by police for stealing the violin bass. But this time, he took care with his packing and his Japanese fans were not denied their ration of ‘Paur’.

In America, where he hadn’t been seen onstage for 13 years, ticket sales were at first only middling. Then the promised TV ads from his sponsor, Visa cards, began to kick in prime time across the nation. There was none of Visa’s usual cleverness, just a straightforward sequence of him onstage with the band in LA. ‘A concert like this doesn’t take place every day,’ the voice-over said. ‘And they don’t take American Express.’

It proved a trump card: from playing to an average of 20,000 people per city, Paul went to double shows in full-to-capacity 50,000-seat arenas, outselling concurrent tours by Madonna and Janet Jackson. His two nights at Berkeley’s California Memorial Stadium earned $3.5 million, the nation’s top gross that year. Visa’s magic carried over to Brazil, where he was appearing for the first time; at Rio de Janeiro’s giant Maracanã Stadium, his audience numbered 184,368, the largest stadium crowd ever recorded.

On 28 June 1990, he returned to Liverpool, performing on a specially-constructed stage at the long-disused King’s Dock. John would have turned 50 that year, and a month previously Yoko had organised a tribute concert for him at the Pier Head in aid of her Spirit Foundation charity, which had drawn much adverse comment for too-pricey tickets, irrelevant performers like Kylie Minogue–and the absence of any other ex-Beatles in person. Paul and Ringo merely provided videotape clips while George refused, as he put it, to ‘dabble in the past’. Still, an ever hopeful American entrepreneur had invited the three to mark the reunification of Berlin with a reunion concert at the Brandenburg Gate.

Paul’s own homecoming tribute to ‘Someone we all loved–very much’ included some quintessential John tracks: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Help!’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’. To mark John’s fiftieth on 9 October, he was also to put out a live version of ‘Birthday’ from the White Album (one of their late collaborations which John had subsequently dismissed as ‘a piece of crap’).

The night after Liverpool, at Knebworth Park, Hertfordshire, the music business took a last little poke at Linda. During ‘Hey Jude’, a mischievous sound-recordist isolated her backup vocal, put it onto a tape entitled ‘Linda McCartney Sings!’ and circulated it, to general hilarity.

Admittedly, the crowd singing along were more in tune–but by then her musical abilities had ceased to be an issue. Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking was top of the UK hardback bestseller list and would go on to become the Bloomsbury imprint’s top-selling title until it found Harry Potter.

‘I work my arse off, I do. I work my bloody arse off’

The 1980s had not been kind to Liverpool. Incessant strikes had crippled its surviving industry, raising unemployment to twice the national rate, and race riots culminating in orgies of arson and looting had brought police baton-charges and CS gas to its streets. A far left-dominated city council waged guerrilla war on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government while essential services teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and 15 per cent of the once-proud Victorian metropolis lay derelict. There were thousands of decent, hard-working Liverpudlians who were horrified by the state of things, but the Thatcher propaganda machine portrayed them all as gobby layabouts content to sponge off the benefits system while their habitat disintegrated around them.

That stereotype was enshrined in Bread, Carla Lane’s TV comedy series whose Dingle-dwelling Boswell family possessed all the Scouser’s supposed fecklessness and bombast in excelsis. Yet out of the show came an event which can be said to have started Liverpool on the road back to self-respect.

After Paul and Linda’s cameo appearance, they had become friendly with Jean Boht, who played the Boswells’ matriarch. And it happened that ‘Ma Boswell’s’ real-life husband was the American composer and conductor Carl Davis, famous in Britain for scoring prestigious television series like Thames TV’s The World at War and silent movie classics like Abel Gance’s Napoléon.

Soon after the McCartneys’ appearance in Bread, Davis found himself conducting the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the city’s last uneroded bastions of excellence. The gig resulted in an invitation to compose and conduct something to mark the orchestra’s 150th anniversary in 1991. Remembering his wife’s recent pleasant working experience with the world’s greatest living Liverpudlian, he suggested he should write that something in collaboration with Paul.

Classical music had run through Paul’s work ever since the string quartet on ‘Yesterday’ and the piccolo trumpet on ‘Penny Lane’; he’d marshalled whole symphony orchestras for both Beatles and Wings tracks, and lost count of the number of his songs which had been scored for strings and woodwind. George Martin had always believed him capable of creating some large-scale classical work and repeatedly urged him to try. But he’d always hesitated, feeling himself disqualified by being unable to read or write music and put off by the ‘posh’ aura of the conductors and virtuosi with whom he’d have to work.

Carl Davis was not in the least posh with his television and movie themes and cheery boast that ‘if it moves, I’ll score it’. Before meeting him through his wife, Jean, Paul had seen him on a talk show and remarked to Linda, ‘One of these days, I might get in touch with that guy.’

An invitation with Jean to Peasmarsh offered Davis an opportunity to pitch the Liverpool Philharmonic idea. Unfortunately, a crowd of Paul’s Liverpool relatives also happened to be there, making it difficult to get him on his own. There was an awkward moment, too, when he asked Davis to name his favourite Beatles song and Davis could think only of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, written by John.

At first, the chance to co-compose a choral work for the Liverpool Phil’s 150th anniversary did not seem to excite him. But later, around the tea-table with his relations, he started reminiscing about his days at Liverpool Institute High School; how on hot summer days he would ‘sag off’ class and sneak into the nearby cathedral graveyard to sunbathe on the tombstones. This triggered the idea of a musical autobiography on a scale far beyond ‘Penny Lane’.

Davis expected merely to be Paul’s amanuensis, translating raw ideas into musical grammar as George Martin had always done. To begin with, he adopted a somewhat pedagogic air, explaining technical terms such as ‘rondo’, sometimes pausing to say ‘Let me give you a lesson…’ ‘He tried to sit me down one day with Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,’ Paul would remember, ‘[but] I said, “No, Carl, it’s too late for that, love.”’

He’d also presumed they would be working separately and he’d take the musical lead, pastiching Paul’s style in the same way he’d matched 1920s-ish music to Hollywood silent movies. For the first movement, ‘War’, set in the year of Paul’s birth, 1942, he composed what he thought were sweet, tuneful McCartneyesque cadences, only to have them rejected out of hand. What Paul wanted to evoke was the Nazi bombing of Liverpool as shown on grainy old black and white cinema newsreels, ‘with planes coming over and dropping their bombs and the fire brigade rushing around and bells ringing’. ‘My God, you’re turning me on,’ Davis said, beginning to scribble new notes. After that, the two worked together almost as closely and interactively as Paul once had with John.

Some time passed before Paul knew exactly what it was they were composing. ‘I’d say to Carl, “Is this a symphony?” He’d say, “No, that’s slightly different.” “Is it a concerto then?” He’d say, “No, it’s not.” “Is it a suite?” “Oh, no, God, no.”’ Then by chance he read an inflight magazine article which mentioned the oratorio form, a narrative work on a religious theme, like Handel’s Messiah or Verdi’s Requiem. After checking with Davis that that indeed was what they were about, he titled it the Liverpool Oratorio–the first use of the city’s name for artistic purposes since ‘the Liverpool Sound’.

Close collaborators that they had become, Davis was expecting a Lennon–McCartney-style 50–50 credit. But Paul made it clear that he wanted the billing to be ‘Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio’. As he later explained: ‘I was getting paranoid that Carl would be up on the podium like Stravinsky on heat and I’d be coming over as the scruff from Speke who couldn’t read music.’ Speke was the blue-collar suburb where he’d lived as a small boy before his mother’s job as a midwife allowed them to move to a better area; how revealing that 40 years on, for all the immensity of his fame, he should still have felt its caste-mark.