Paul McCartney (33 page)

For the recording session at Abbey Road, he requested the same classical string backing as on ‘Yesterday’, but this time asked that George Martin’s score be in the more dramatic style of Vivaldi, to whose Four Seasons Jane had recently introduced him. As with ‘Yesterday’, none of the other Beatles contributed instrumentally, though John and George supplied backing vocals. The automatic Lennon–McCartney credit had more justification in this case: John later claimed to have written ‘at least half’ the lyric while always conceding the song to be ‘Paul’s baby’.

The single, issued a day ahead of Revolver (its quality making the old distinction of ‘A’ and ‘B’ sides irrelevant), paired ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with ‘Yellow Submarine’. Though ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was much admired–and almost all the album’s tracks seemed like hit singles–it was ‘Yellow Submarine’ which caught the national zeitgeist on several levels, its intended appeal to children least among them. In the growing drug culture, its title was taken to be a sly reference to yellow barbiturates known as ‘submarines’ because they had to be dissolved in water (a charge its composers would always firmly deny). In the growing industrial strife that underlay Britain’s Carnaby colours, marching strikers amended its chorus to ‘We all live on bread and margarine’.

But the track that most excited critics was the final one on side two, John’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. A bizarrely un-Beatle production it seemed, with its somnambulistic, one-dimensional beat, its squibbling, cawing background (created by multiple tape-loops) as John’s voice, minus its usual sweet McCartney undertow–more like some religious chant or dirge–paraphrased Timothy Leary’s precis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: ‘Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream…’

How typical of iconoclast John, they all said, and what a world away from Paul’s homeliness and tunefulness. No one guessed who’d first turned him on to tape-loops and kept on at him to read The Psychedelic Experience.

‘You might almost have said an alien had landed on the Mull’

Bands who have spent far less time on the road than the Beatles, and suffered far less pressure, usually end up loathing the sight of one another. But when John, Paul, George and Ringo gave up touring, they were still as close as ever and looking forward to the next phase in their collective career.

Those nightmare farewell shows in Japan, the Philippines and America through the summer of 1966 only strengthened the bond between them. At various tetchy press conferences across the US–so different from their first arrival in New York; could it be only two years earlier?–even Paul forgot his usual soufflé-speak to complain of how John’s comments about Jesus had been ‘misinterpreted’. The four then took only a token two-month break from one another before reconvening at Abbey Road to record what would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John used the time to make his solo screen-acting debut in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, George immersed himself in Indian music and religion while Ringo spent his first real quality time with his wife, Maureen, and their two small sons.

For Paul, it was a further opportunity to prepare for the ‘leather-patched sports jacket’ years after he’d turned 30, when he still believed the Beatles would be forgotten and the only career open to him would be as a jobbing songwriter. At the end of 1966, he agreed to score a new British film comedy, The Family Way, adapted from a stage play by Bill Naughton and co-starring father and daughter John and Hayley Mills. Teeming with daring Sixties sex-jokes and double entendres (‘in the family way’ is old English slang for pregnant) its plot unconsciously echoed Paul’s own recent situation with Jane at 57 Wimpole Street: a young man found himself inhibited from making love to his 20-year-old bride because her parents were under the same roof.

In practice, the actual scoring was done by George Martin, as was the performing with a specially-mustered eponymous orchestra. All that was required from Paul was a theme–‘a sweet little fragment of a waltz tune’, Martin called it–to be reprised in different forms throughout the film. Though later released both as an album and a single (and the recipient of a Novello award), his music for The Family Way fails to qualify as the first solo Beatle project because Martin was the credited performer.

Of all the Beatles in this immediate post-touring period, Paul was the one who made most effort to return to a reasonably normal life. A few weeks after the band’s return from America, he set off on a solo trip through France in his Aston Martin, wearing his favourite disguise of costume wig and false moustache and with a ciné-camera in his luggage, having arranged to meet roadie Mal Evans (for the off-road Beatles still needed roadies) two weeks later in Bordeaux.

To begin with, he enjoyed the feeling of being ‘a little lonely poet on the road with my car’, stopping and filming anything that caught his eye with a view to some later documentary, unrecognised by even the most avid young French Beatles fans. The novelty began to pall when he went to a small-town discotheque in his disguise, and was refused entry. Returning there later, minus disguise, he realised that awed adulation wasn’t so bad after all.

Well before the Beatles stopped touring, he’d felt the need of a hideaway more private than Cavendish or even the house in Cheshire he’d bought for his father. As powerful a consideration as intrusive fans was the taxman, so bitterly invoked by George, with help from John, on Revolver. Under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, top earners paid income tax as high as 98 per cent. If Paul didn’t wish to become a tax exile–which he emphatically didn’t–one of the few ways to reduce his liabilities was to acquire yet further property.

This time, obeying the call of the ‘Mac’ in his name, he decided it should be in Scotland. Jane, that born-and-bred Londoner, was all for his acquiring somewhere they could spend time together, away from nosey photographers and fans, and set about researching suitable properties.

One quickly materialised in Kintyre in the remote western Highlands, a narrow peninsula whose south-westerly tip is a savagely beautiful headland known as a ‘Mull’. Seemingly beyond range of the hardiest Beatlemaniac, it also had a peculiar appropriateness for someone of Paul’s mixed Scots and Irish ancestry. Many of the earliest migrants from Ulster to Britain had settled in and around Kintyre; and on a clear day at the Mull, the coast of County Donegal in the Irish Republic was distinctly visible.

In the spring of 1966, Kintyre residents Mr and Mrs J.S. Brown decided to sell their High Park Farm, having run a small dairy herd there for the past 19 years. The farm was situated five miles from the peninsula’s only substantial settlement, Campbeltown, and 14 from the Mull. The price, for the three-bedroom farmhouse, outbuildings and 183 acres, was £35,000.

The Browns had already shown two prospective buyers the property when the Campbeltown solicitor handling the sale told them Paul McCartney would be flying up from London by charter plane to view it. He duly arrived in the Campbeltown taxi, accompanied by Jane; farmer’s wife Janet Brown took them round and before they left cooked them a meal of ham and eggs. Mrs Brown later commented, with true Highland terseness, that ‘You couldn’t meet nicer’.

On 23 June, Kintyre’s weekly paper, the Campbeltown Courier, confirmed the rumour that a Beatle had bought High Park Farm and gave a detailed reconstruction of Paul’s visit ‘in sunglasses’, with Jane in a ‘pyjama’ (i.e. trouser) suit. Next to the story was a picture of Janet Brown at her stove, holding the same frying pan she had used to cook their ham and eggs.

It was, so Paul told the Courier, ‘the most peaceful spot I’ve ever come across in the world’. The farm stood on a slope down to a gentle valley, with spectacular views over both land and water. In the foreground was a small loch; further away, a fringe of white dunes marked Machrihanish Bay, one of many vast, deserted, empty beaches in the vicinity. Of the five miles separating the property from Campbeltown, two consisted of a rutted, boulder-strewn track impassable to all but the ruggedest vehicles. There was no sign of other human habitation on any side; the nearest, another small farm, was three-quarters of a mile away.

As usual in the Highlands, the remote past remained very much part of everyday life. Above High Park Farm stretched a massive upland named Ranachan Hill, containing the remnants of an Iron Age fort. Paul’s domain encompassed the Puball Burn, a natural spring that had given mountain-fresh water for thousands of years, and a ‘standing stone’, a Pictish monument predating the Roman conquest of Britain. This, too, was shown in the Campbeltown Courier, under the headline ‘Something Old… Something Very New’. ‘The arrival of a Beatle,’ the paper said, ‘provides just about the biggest imaginable contrast of ancient and modern.’

That arrival was by no means universally welcomed. Kintyre people were staunchly traditional churchgoers and Sabbath-observers, protected from the outside world by their peninsula and deeply suspicious of strangers. Even fellow Highland Scots who attempted to join the tight-knit community were known as ‘white settlers’. ‘We had no Swinging Sixties here,’ recalls Campbeltown taxi-driver Reggie McManus, who was to become familiar with the rock-strewn road to High Park Farm in years to come. ‘And a lot of people thought we were going to be invaded by hippies with all their drug-taking and free love. You might almost have said an alien had landed on the Mull.’

Fears of rock stars getting high at High Park Farm and stoned figures slumped under the standing stone were soon assuaged. The Browns didn’t move out until the following November and it was several months more before Paul returned with Jane to spend their first night on the property. Thereafter, they often came for weekends, sometimes with friends but more usually by themselves. ‘Everyone realised he was just looking for a place to escape to, where he could be himself,’ Reggie McManus says, ‘and that he only wanted to be left alone.’

The farm, in fact, was somewhat dilapidated, but for Paul–for the present–that seemed part of its appeal. So none but the most essential structural repairs were made to the farmhouse, and no chic interior decorator was turned loose inside it. He bought most of the furniture second-hand in nearby Campbeltown and installed a new electric stove for Jane to cook their (mostly vegetarian) meals. The handyman who’d always hidden inside the Beatle now came to the fore. He built a couch out of old wooden potato-boxes, and when the roof leaked, as it often did, would always find a way to fix the hole.

While revelling in this back-to-Nature existence, he was still as keen as always to be in London with his ‘antenna out’. And now there was more than ever to keep it vibrating.

By 1966, the capital was moving away from its facile ‘Swinging’ phase of boutiques and discotheques. The in-crowd wore Beatle-inspired boots, corduroys and fringes no longer, but the robes, mystic amulets and shoulder-length hair of American hippies, the heirs of California’s once-arty, elitist beatnik community. Nor was it preoccupied solely with clothes and ‘sounds’, but embraced a whole array of causes, grievances, philosophies and ideologies which British youth en masse had never bothered much about before.

Now too large and diverse merely to be an in-crowd, it was becoming known instead as ‘the underground’, a term historically signifying heroic resistance against tyranny, now denoting a general insurrection by young people against all manifestations of authority or convention. Equally redolent was it of London’s actual Underground, with its many intersecting branches: pop (now more widely called rock) music, art, design, leftwing politics, peace activism, Eastern mysticism, sexual permissiveness, anti-censorship, the first stirrings of feminism. Pervading them all, as strongly as the Tube’s own gritty winds, were the feeling of a revolution (even if most if its propagators were the most comfortable of capitalists) and the scent of drugs.

If this above-ground underground had any central marshalling-yard, it was John Dunbar and Barry Miles’s Indica gallery and bookshop. And their friend Paul–that supposedly mainstream and ‘safe’ Beatle–was among its most important supporters and benefactors.

Though not financially interested in Indica, he was full of ideas for extending its scope and influence. One was a ‘sound magazine’ in vinyl disc form containing all the most notable current performances in the capital, not only music but drama, readings and lectures, to be funded by EMI Records together with Brian Epstein’s NEMS organisation. This took shape in his studio at Ringo’s Montagu Square flat, where he’d also recorded the demos and most of the effects for ‘Eleanor Rigby’, often with the great William S. Burroughs as an interested spectator.

The born journalist in him recognised the need to chronicle the underground’s multifarious activities and give it a sense of community. The first attempt at this was a newsletter, named the Global Moon-edition Long-Hair Times, compiled by Barry Miles and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins (whose implausible previous occupation had been atomic scientist). Paul contributed anonymously, setting a readers’ competition under the alias of a supposed ‘Polish New Wave film director Ian Iachimoe’ (the sound of ‘Paul McCartney’ backwards).

Out of the Global Moon-edition Long-Hair Times came London’s first underground newspaper, the International Times, co-edited by Miles and Hopkins, with substantial financial backing from Paul. On its appearance in October 1966, threats of legal action from the august daily Times forced the abbreviation of its name to IT–a term then without any connection with computers. True to pop art’s worship of Hollywood movie icons, its mascot was the original ‘it girl’, Clara Bow (though the image on its masthead actually was of another silent-screen goddess, Theda Bara).

The paper’s launch party, billed as ‘a Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy/Blowout/Drag Ball’ took place at the Roundhouse, an old machinery-shed in north London that was to become the underground’s equivalent of the Royal Albert Hall. Two thousand people attended, including Italy’s coolest film director Michelangelo Antonioni and Marianne Faithfull–the latter wearing a nun’s habit which barely covered her posterior–and music was provided by a then unknown Pink Floyd. The event mixed glamour and squalor in a way reminiscent of Liverpool’s Cavern: the two available toilets soon overflowed and duckboards had to be laid so the beautiful people could waft around without getting their feet wet. Barely anyone noticed the figure in flowing Bedouin robes that were Paul’s chosen costume-cum-disguise.