Paul McCartney (70 page)

The crew had brought along a liberal cargo of marijuana, thinking it could be smoked at sea in perfect privacy and safety, forgetting that the island paradise was an outpost of the United States where greater rather than lesser caution in such things ought to be exercised.

Jamming at anchor in the harbour at St John, Wings breached noise regulations that forbade even the playing of transistor radios and, within minutes, the Fair Carol found herself being boarded by paramilitary rangers from the island’s national park. Discovering the culprits to be rock musicians, they made a cursory search for drugs but found none and departed after levying a $15 spot fine. They contacted their colleagues in the US Customs Service, who subsequently visited all three vessels, again finding nothing illegal but issuing a stern warning that they might return.

The episode worsened relations between Paul and the skipper of the El Toro, who had smelt marijuana smoke wafting from the McCartneys’ cabin–and for whom a drugs-offence would mean professional ruin. After an angry confrontation, Paul moved his family living-quarters to another trimaran, Wanderlust. It would all go into a song of that name, destined not to be released for five years, by which time it would seem small stuff indeed.

In June, Queen Elizabeth II reached the twenty-fifth anniversary of her Coronation–the event which had brought 11-year-old Paul his first public writing award. All over Britain, the Silver Jubilee was celebrated in a manner barely changed from Victorian times, with flags, bunting, street parties and commemorative china mugs.

Only one thing marred the tributes to a sovereign whose unchangingness in a growingly insecure world was suddenly noticed and marvelled at. This was the Sex Pistols’ second single, a shrieking parody of the National Anthem whose lyric rhymed ‘queen’ with ‘fascist regime’ and whose cover showed Her Majesty with a punk safety-pin through her cheek. Virgin Records’ boss, Richard Branson, released it on Jubilee Day, 4 June, and held its launch party on a Thames riverboat moored beside the Houses of Parliament.

The single was banned by the BBC and almost every commercial radio station, but still went to number two. Some music papers refused to print its name or that of the Sex Pistols, simply leaving their place in the Top 10 a blank. On the Pistols’ subsequent ‘Anarchy in the UK’ tour, so many shows were cancelled by outraged theatre-managements or local authorities that the destination sign on the front of the band’s bus read ‘Nowhere’.

Wings by now had returned to the McCartneys’ Scottish estate to continue work in the barn-studio now known as Spirit of Ranachan. Linda’s baby was due in September and Paul wanted the final weeks of her pregnancy to be as unstressful as possible.

They would hardly be that. Among the community dispersed around the estate were Denny Laine’s wife, Jo Jo, and their children, Laine and Heidi. Jo Jo deeply resented her exclusion from the Virgin Isles trip and complained incessantly about the accommodation at Low Ranachan cottage, which she later described as ‘a couple of old chairs and some ragged pee-stained mattresses’.

Lead guitarist Jimmy McCulloch was even less in a mood to be exiled to Scotland for an indefinite period. He had been deeply unsettled by the punk explosion which labelled him a ‘dinosaur’ at the age of only 24. Under Wings’ new moonlighting charter, he was simultaneously playing in a trio named White Line with his drummer brother Jack. White Line signed with EMI at the same time as the Sex Pistols, and one day the two bands had found themselves in the same pub near the company’s Manchester Square headquarters. Jimmy shouted at the Pistols that they were crap and, in the altercation that followed, physically attacked one of them, whose name he took pride in not knowing.

He, too, disliked his quarters with the roadies at Low Ranachan, which he referred to as ‘the bunker’. One night, in the grip of boredom as much as booze or drugs, he invaded the storeroom where Linda kept the eggs from her hens meticulously arranged, helped himself to a dozen or so and began hurling them against the living-room wall. This wanton waste reduced Linda to tears and a furious Paul ordered him off the premises.

A few days later, Steve Marriott telephoned from London to say that Jimmy would be joining a relaunched version of Marriott’s band, the Small Faces. He himself then came on the line to confirm his resignation from Wings.

Paul shed no tears over the loss of a sideman who, although brilliant, had caused havoc within the band, not least by his continual sniping at Linda’s musicianship. ‘It’s a pity he’s leaving, but problems have been building up for quite a while now and the rest of us are happy to carry on without him.’ Jimmy’s valedictory statement said they’d ‘had some good times’ and–still provokingly–that ‘although Linda doesn’t know much about music, she’s a nice chick’.

Although Wings was never really the right band for Jimmy McCulloch, it proved the apogee of his career. The Small Faces relaunch came to nothing and he moved on to form another trio, Wild Horses, with his brother Jack, then abandoned that for an unremembered band named the Dukes. In 1979, he was to die of a heart attack after a heroin overdose, aged 26.

Without a lead guitarist, Wings’ album was temporarily stalled–but Paul never could stop working. Things with Jo Jo at Low Ranachan being what they were, Denny Laine had fallen into the habit of walking over to High Park Farm each morning to have breakfast with the McCartneys. One day when Denny arrived, Paul already had a guitar out and was strumming the chorus of a song which he said had been in his mind for the past couple of years.

He had noticed how long it had been since any composer or poet came up with a Scottish anthem in the super-patriotic genre of ‘Scotland the Brave’ and ‘The Hundred Pipers’. He’d therefore decided to write one–an ambitious, not to say audacious idea for a non-Scot, albeit of Scottish ancestry filtered through Ireland and Liverpool. Its theme was the beauty of this lonely peninsula and the peace and seclusion he had found here, epitomised by the gaunt, spray-lashed headland just a mile or so down the road; its title was ‘Mull of Kintyre’. Denny picked up another guitar and, with the help of a bottle of whisky, they finished the song together.

It was based on only two chords, A and D, yet inside them there was a lot going on. The lyric was a direct address to the Mull and its ‘mists rolling in from the sea’–the classical poetic device called apostrophe, which could have sounded absurd to modern ears, but never did. ‘Kintyre’ provided most of the bang-on rhymes, some of them artfully engineered, like its coupling with ‘sea’, ‘my desire’ and ‘always to be here’. And the tempo that seemed as sonorous and measured as a hymn or psalm was actually a waltz.

To complete its atmosphere, Paul decided that the arrangement must include bagpipes. And for once when gearing up to record at High Park, he didn’t have to send down to London. Campbeltown had its own amateur pipe-and-drum band, which turned out for civic festivals in traditional uniform of tall bearskin hats and kilts. The commander, or pipe-major, Tony Wilson, was an impressive figure who had formerly played with the band of the Scots Guards and the city of Glasgow.

Paul invited Wilson to High Park, played and sang the song to him and asked if he could score a section for his pipers. This needed some work since pentatonic bagpipe-notation bears no resemblance to rock chords and pipers hold notes whereas guitarists bend or stop them.

The recording took place on a hot evening in August. Geoff Emerick came from London to do the engineering and the pipers turned up in a minibus, wearing full ceremonial rig of bearskins and kilts. ‘We’re thinking “Where is he… is this a joke after all?”’ piper John Lang remembers, ‘and just then he comes round the corner and says, “Are you ma pipers?” What really impressed me was that he got Tony to introduce him to every one of us and shook all our hands.’

The instrumental track was laid down outside in the long-lingering twilight, with Paul counting the pipers in after the third verse. ‘We got it in the first take,’ Lang recalls. ‘After we’d finished, Paul came along with a wheelbarrow full of cans of beer and all of us partied long into the night.’ Linda, now heavily pregnant, served food and was ‘sweet to everyone’.

Kintyre’s magic was not infallible, however. The song that would immortalise it was barely in the can when Wings’ drummer, Joe English, announced he felt homesick and was quitting the band to return to Macon, Georgia. So for the second time Paul had lost a drummer and lead guitarist together.

English was later to suggest that, like his predecessor-but-one, Denny Seiwell, he’d become disillusioned by his leader’s reluctance to share out Wings’ rewards. But in a testimony on a religious website many years later, he would admit being able to afford ‘two Porsches and 200 acres’ on his drummer’s pay, as well as ‘living a first-class lifestyle’. ‘Both Joe and Jimmy made money from the band,’ Denny Laine says. ‘Same as I did.’

The real problem was that, behind Wings’ fun-family façade, English had acquired a heroin habit even worse than Jimmy McCulloch’s and spent most of his earnings on it. By his own later admission, he overdosed two or three times, once stayed unconscious for 24 hours and grew accustomed to waking up with no idea where he was.

Early in September, the McCartneys returned to London for Linda to have her baby at St John’s Wood’s Avenue Clinic. They had agreed this should be their last child and both hoped for a son, which Paul became convinced it would be after finding an unexplained blue bootee in a pocket of an old overcoat. If so, he was to be called James, after his father and grandfather, and Louis after Linda’s maternal grandfather.

Sure enough, on 12 September, Linda gave birth to a healthy boy. Paul hugged her nurse, then rushed off to phone Heather, Mary and Stella, all of whom had been longing for a little brother.

‘Mull of Kintyre’ was released on 11 November, two weeks after the Sex Pistols’ first, and only, studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks–Here’s the Sex Pistols. The word ‘bollocks’, Cockney slang for balls or nonsense, made it unmentionable in print or on the air and rendered its cover liable to prosecution under British obscenity laws. One Virgin record store-manager was actually put on trial for displaying it, but acquitted when his lawyer persuaded the judge that ‘bollock’ was an Old English word originally not meaning testicle but priest. All of which guaranteed a turbocharged rise to number one in charts that dared not mention its name.

Up until the last minute, Paul felt qualms over sending a waltz about Scottish scenery out into such an environment, rather than ‘something thrashy, fast and loud’. He was doing so mainly at the behest of the Campbeltown pipers, who assured him it would be bought by homesick Scots all over the world. Hedging his bets, he balanced it in a double A-side with ‘Girls’ School’, another collaboration with Denny Laine, featuring lyrics about drug-taking and sexual deviancy in a Catholic convent that might give him some credibility with the new order.

A few days after ‘Mull of Kintyre’s’ release, he phoned MPL to check on progress and was told it was selling 30,000 copies a day. ‘I said, “Don’t get back to me until it’s selling 100,000 a day,”’ he would recall. ‘And by the next week, it was.’

His instinct had been right. Despite all these decades of change and upheaval in popular music, there was still nothing that appealed to the British quite so much as a stirring, sentimental song about the Scottish ‘Heelands’ amid the wail of bagpipes.

In what amounted to a quiet rebellion against punk rock–a rallying-cry for tunefulness, tradition and safety-pins stuck into kilts rather than faces–it spent nine weeks at number one, becoming the first UK single to sell two million on release and the country’s most successful one ever. (To add a final pinch of porridge-salt to Paul’s triumph, that record had previously been held by the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’.)

It went on to be a hit around the world except, oddly, in America–usually second to none in romanticising Scotland–where it failed to make any pop Top 20 chart, reaching only the lower rungs of easy-listening charts. ‘Girls’ School’ received more airplay.

In the process it made the Kintyre peninsula internationally famous, increasing annual visitor numbers by around 20 per cent, to the inevitable detriment of the peace and seclusion Paul had hymned, but with huge benefits to the local economy. It also prompted a surge of interest in bagpipes from the most unlikely quarters. Several Middle Eastern Gulf states subsequently added the instrument to their military bands, competing to recruit Scottish pipe-majors on huge salaries as instructors.

The Campbeltown pipers, whose usual engagements were local parades and sports-fixtures, now found themselves accompanying Paul and Wings on BBC television’s Top of the Pops. Their appearance was on a weekday, so pipe-major Wilson had to ask schoolboy John Lang’s head teacher to give him time off.

The TV studio had been decorated to resemble Scotland and, as the pipers awaited their cue, ‘mists rolling in from the sea’ were supplied in the form of billowing dry ice. ‘We were just taking big lungfuls of air to inflate our pipes,’ Lang recalls, ‘and all that chemical at the back of our throats nearly finished us off.’

Their most-watched television appearance was on impressionist Mike Yarwood’s Christmas show, Paul, Denny Laine and Linda seated on a row of stools–revealing Wings to be reduced to a trio again–and the pipers marching out of a thicket of silvery Christmas trees. ‘Paul was very protective of us,’ says Lang. ‘We were put up in a good hotel and he made sure we had food and drink and were well looked after.’

Nor were rock’s Bastille-stormers totally hostile. One day as Paul and Linda were driving through central London, they found themselves stuck in traffic next to a pavement gathering of ferocious-looking punks. Paul flipped down the sun-visors and the two ancien régime aristos sank low in their seats, hoping not to be recognised.

However, a male member of the group spotted Paul, signalled him to wind down the car-window a few inches, then stuck a lip-ringed, eyebrow-studded, safety-pinned face into the crack. ‘Oi, Paul,’ he said, ‘you know that Mull of Kintyre? It’s fakking great!’