Paul McCartney (62 page)

Behind the chirpy smile and unruffled tone was a self-confessed ‘born worrier’ who more usually woke up feeling ‘a ten-ton weight’ on his shoulders because Wings still hadn’t reached the level of musicianship nor received the critical recognition he wanted. It scarcely counted with him that ‘Live and Let Die’ had become the most successful Bond theme to date, spending two weeks at number one in the Billboard chart. Nor that Red Rose Speedway had reached number one in the US and five in Britain and ‘My Love’ been hailed as an instant classic. He now hated everything he’d done on the album, believing he’d been trying too hard. Even Linda, usually the staunch defender of every note he sang and played, thought it ‘a non-confident record’.

The very fecundity of his talent brought nagging insecurity. What if he should wake up one morning and find his extraordinary facility with music and words had flown away in the night? As insurance against that awful day, he constantly worked the incomprehensible mechanism in his head, never passing a piano without sitting down and trying out yet another idea.

During a pre-tour holiday with Linda and the children in Montego Bay, Jamaica, he’d hung out with the Hollywood stars Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen, who were on location filming Papillon. One evening, Hoffman challenged him to come up with a song there and then about the recent demise of Pablo Picasso, whose dying words had reportedly been an exhortation to drink to his health. As a result, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ (a country number, of all things) was waiting to be used somewhere.

Wings were due to make a new album in the late summer (just as the Beatles used to) to catch the Christmas market. Feeling he’d exhausted the possibilities of British and American studios, Paul decided to make it in some more interesting, out-of-the-way place and asked EMI for a list of their recording facilities around the world. It turned out that they had one in Nigeria’s capital, Lagos. He booked Wings in there for most of September, visualising ‘gorgeous African music, African culture… lie on the beach all day, then breeze into the studio to record’.

Rehearsals took place throughout August in Scotland, where Wings had begun, though now in surroundings more spacious than Rude Studio. Paul had recently purchased nearby Low Ranachan Farm from its retiring owner, Archie Revie, so adding to the seclusion of High Park Farm as well as its very basic amenities. Low Ranachan had a large barn where the band could rehearse–hence ‘Big Barn Bed’–and a grey stone cottage where they could live. It was just over the hill from High Park, so Paul and Linda could come to rehearsals on horseback.

The Wings crèche was about to expand still further. Following their European tour, Denny Laine had married the 20-year-old ‘supergroupie’ Jo Jo La Patrie, who was now pregnant and installed in the cottage at Low Ranachan. The baby was due to arrive at around the time Wings departed for Nigeria, but Denny still intended to go with them.

The Low Ranachan barn sessions began on an optimistic note. ‘Paul had written some great new songs for the album,’ drummer Denny Seiwell recalls, ‘and we were sounding really tight as a band.’

But tensions soon developed between Paul and lead guitarist Henry McCullough. The bony Ulsterman was the most wayward member of the line-up, the only one besides Paul to have been busted for drug-possession, in his case while touring Canada with the Animals. A more immediate problem was his heavy drinking and the embarrassing scenes to which it could lead. At the McCartney family reunion shown in James Paul McCartney, he’d had a boozy altercation with his girlfriend, Sheila, then spent the rest of the night wandering the Liverpool streets barefoot in a rhinestone-studded jacket. And during a performance of ‘My Love’ on BBC1’s Top of the Pops show, he’d spoiled the rhapsodic mood by throwing up.

For some time, McCullough had been chafing at the way Wings’ much-touted family atmosphere could be broken at any time by some authoritarian gesture from Paul. After a one-off guest appearance at a London club with jazz singer Carol Grimes, he’d been carpeted and tersely informed that Wings members played only with Wings. One week, he opened his (still) £70 pay packet to find that £40 had been deducted, without consultation or warning, for the hire of an extra amplifier.

But the real bone of contention was Paul’s insistence that all Wings’ guitar breaks must be meticulously planned in advance while McCullough, still a bluesman at heart, played his best when improvising. On the ‘My Love’ session, for example, he’d departed from the script to extemporise one of the great slow rock solos. Paul couldn’t help but pardon him then, but made it clear that he shouldn’t make a habit of it.

The final breaking-point came two weeks before the band’s departure to Nigeria. ‘We were in the barn,’ Denny Seiwell remembers. ‘Paul wanted Henry to play something a certain way, and Henry didn’t want to do it. Both of them were just having a real bad day.’ Finally, there was an angry exchange which ended with Paul storming out, mounting his horse and riding home. Realising it was the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of being left alone with a loaded revolver, McCullough got in his car and drove away, never to return.

Seiwell, too, had grown unhappy about the way Paul ran Wings, in particular his apparent reluctance to divvy up the proceeds of their recording and performing successes. ‘At the start, it was understood that we’d all be part-owners of the band, and share in its rewards, but there was never a contract. It was all done on a handshake–on trust.’

Yet after two years, Seiwell was receiving the same flat salary of £70 per week when, as a top New York session-drummer, he used to earn $2000. ‘The European tour had sold out every night, but Paul said he’d still lost money on it. Things had gotten so bad with me financially that to pay off my American Express card, I’d have to go back to New York and do a few quick sessions.’

For his £70, he was expected to be on call 24 hours a day and do whatever was asked of him, however loosely music-related. During the European tour, Paul had simultaneously been working on a film about a cartoon character named Bruce McMouse who lived under Wings’ stage and interacted with them like Jerry from Tom and Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh. The human characters were filmed first at Elstree Studios, with the cartoon one superimposed afterwards. Hence the tough 6’ 2” Seiwell was required to converse with an imaginary talking mouse on his outstretched hand.

He also felt that Paul should not have let a talented guitarist like Henry McCullough go so readily. ‘The band’s musicianship really deteriorated after Henry left. Denny Laine was an okay guitarist, but nowhere near the same league. And without him, it was going to be that much harder to hide Linda’s mistakes.’

A few days before the band’s scheduled departure to Lagos, Jo Jo Laine gave birth to a son, to whom she and his father also gave the Christian name Laine. ‘I heard from Denny that when the baby was born, Paul and Linda hadn’t sent flowers or even a card. That got to me for some reason,’ Seiwell recalls, ‘and the night before we were to leave for Africa, I phoned Paul and told him I was quitting.’

This eleventh-hour loss of two key sidemen would have made most people call off the Nigeria venture, or postpone it until suitable replacements could be found. Denny Laine–still on for the trip despite his newborn son–thought it a fatal blow. ‘They were both such brilliant musicians. And Henry’s Irish sense of humour and Denny’s New York one made such a great combination. They were my kind of people.’

But Paul decided to go ahead anyway, if nothing else to show the defectors they weren’t as important as they believed. ‘I thought “Screw you”,’ he would remember. ‘“I’ll make an album you’ll wish you’d been on.”’

So a severely clipped Wings consisting of Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, plus the McCartneys’ three children, departed for Lagos on 29 August. At the airport, Laine half-expected Denny Seiwell to have had second thoughts and be waiting to rejoin them, but he hadn’t and wasn’t.

Nowadays many Western rock bands go to Africa to make albums but in 1973 Paul was a pioneer. And, as with many pioneers, what he found was not what he’d expected. He’d visualised Nigeria in terms of ‘gorgeous African music [and] African culture’, a riot of sound and colour that would make Glam Rock seem drab by comparison. He hadn’t visualised arriving as a VIP observer on the aircraft’s flight deck and realising that neither the pilot nor co-pilot seemed able to find the runway of Lagos airport among the misty tracts of jungle beneath. He hadn’t expected it to be monsoon season, when every afternoon brought ferocious rainstorms in drops the size of wet crowbars.

Nor had his concept of ‘African culture’ included the repressive military regime of President Yakubu (‘Jack’) Gowon, which membership of the British Commonwealth did little to restrain. It was only three years since Gowon had ruthlessly crushed the country’s would-be breakaway state of Biafra, causing a million deaths from genocide and famine–and providing one of John’s reasons for returning his MBE decoration to the Queen.

Also in the Wings party was Geoff Emerick, the Abbey Road sound-engineer who’d worked with the Beatles almost throughout their recording career and whom Paul had hired to sort out possible technical glitches in the month of recording ahead. For the quiet, suburban Emerick, downtown Lagos came as a stupefying culture shock. As the group’s minibus wove through nightmare traffic, Denny Laine reported seeing a man knocked off his bicycle and apparently killed, all without the slightest reaction from passers-by. Noticing quantities of white-sheeted figures among the crowds, Emerick asked the bus-driver who they were. ‘Lepers,’ came the casual reply.

EMI’s studio was located in Wharf Road in the port area of Apapa, facing the Atlantic, a link with Liverpool in more ways than one. Paul’s uncle Will Stapleton–the only member of his family thus far to do time in prison–had been serving on a merchant ship called the SS Apapa, bound for West Africa, when he’d pilfered £500 from a cargo of banknotes, and had come ashore in Lagos to spend some of the loot.

Paul’s instinct about bringing along Geoff Emerick was one he soon had cause to bless. The studio possessed only the most basic taping and mixing equipment and had no soundproof recording booths. An adjacent lean-to served as a record-pressing plant, whose operatives currently worked ankle-deep in rainwater.

Emerick set to work on making the control desk fit for purpose while Paul charmed the studio manager and tape-operator–whose names turned out to be Innocent and Monday–and persuaded them to bring in carpenters to build soundproof cubicles. When their labours seemed to be flagging, he picked up a hammer and joined in himself.

The trio then began laying down the tracks that had been rehearsed by a quintet at Low Ranachan–Denny Laine on guitar, Linda on keyboards, Paul on bass, drums and everything else. The atmosphere, Laine recalls, wasn’t that of a band but of two producer-musicians putting an album together. Paul never mentioned Henry McCullough or Denny Seiwell, and Laine surmised that he shouldn’t either.

They stayed in the upmarket suburb of Ikeja, occupying two rented villas–Paul and family in one, Laine and Emerick sharing the other–on a private estate with walls and round-the-clock security. Heather, Mary and little Stella quickly adapted to their new surroundings, catching multicoloured, befrilled lizards in the exotic garden, giving them names and keeping them as pets like the lambs at home in Kintyre.

Not so poor Geoff Emerick, who was terrified by the outsize spiders and other creepy-crawlies that shared his living quarters. Fun-loving Denny took pleasure in collecting the largest, least attractive specimens killed during the day and leaving them on his housemate’s pillow like hairier versions of the bedtime mints distributed by luxury hotels. Unable to stand this rock ‘n’ roll prankishness any longer, Emerick moved into a local hotel, whose cockroaches proved hardly less intimidating.

Ikeja’s many hangovers from British rule included a country club where Paul took out a membership so that they could all use the pool and relax between recording sessions. One pleasant discovery among the many unnerving ones was that no one objected even to the most overt smoking of marijuana.

Every expat they met stressed the need for perpetual vigilance in what was one of Africa’s most impoverished and crime-ridden cities and cautioned against going anywhere on foot after sunset, even in the protected environment in which they were staying. Thinking this couldn’t possibly apply to the short distance between the two villas, Paul and Linda decided to walk back to theirs one evening after a discussion of the day’s work at Denny and Emerick’s.

They had gone only a few yards when a car pulled up beside them and the driver called out, ‘Are you travellers?’ Mistaking it for the offer of a lift, Paul politely replied that they were all right, thanks. The car moved ahead, then stopped and five men got out, including ‘a little squat one’ holding a knife.

Linda, as always, put herself in harm’s way to protect Paul, shielding him from the knifeman and screaming, ‘Leave him alone! He’s a musician!’ Paul handed over the bag he was carrying, exercised his charm to the utmost, and the gang allowed them to go on their way. ‘Later, the people at the studio told us how lucky we’d been,’ he was to recall. ‘In Nigeria, robbery carried a death sentence, so thieves often killed their victims to stop themselves being identified. If we’d have been locals, we would have had it.’

The stolen bag contained lyric-sheets and cassette demos of album tracks rehearsed in Scotland that he’d intended to use as guides to the made-in-Africa finished versions. However, during his early songwriting days with John, he’d acquired the habit of memorising everything he wrote, both words and arrangements, so the loss was delaying but not disastrous.

Between visits to street markets with the children and looning around palm trees for Linda’s camera, he worked his two-person band relentlessly inside the rickety studio on Wharf Road. At times, the opening words of what would be his title track seemed only too apposite: ‘Stuck inside these four walls… sent inside for ever… if we ever get out of here’. And, at regular intervals, ‘the rain exploded with a mighty crash’.