Paul McCartney (71 page)

‘McCartneyesque whimsy on punk steroids’

After 1978, Paul and Linda’s main home was their estate in Peasmarsh, East Sussex. What had started out as a weekend retreat became the place where they decided to bring up their children, rather than remote Kintyre or urban St John’s Wood.

There was a particular reason for the move. Paul’s daughter Heather, now a teenager, had never really settled down at any of her expensive north London private schools. She did not shine academically and was teased for her American accent and the dreamy nonconformity she’d inherited from Linda. Even having so famous a father turned into an embarrassment. The cynical rich kids who were her classmates soon winkled out the fact that she was adopted and told her if she ever had any ‘trouble’ with Paul, she should go straight to the press about it.

He later admitted not having given Heather the best advice on how to fit in. ‘I said, “Don’t try and make friends with everyone, just sit in a corner reading a book and they’ll eventually come to you.” [Later] she said, “They never did, Dad.”… She wasn’t desperate or anything, she was just a little sad.’

Hoping she might do better in the egalitarian atmosphere of state education, Paul and Linda began looking for comprehensive schools in East Sussex and were recommended to the Thomas Peacocke in Rye. An interview with headmaster Roy Sooke impressed them both, and their exodus from London followed almost immediately.

Just as Paul’s Scottish domain had done, the original 100-acre Peasmarsh estate began to expand its borders dramatically. Two neighbouring properties, accessed by the same secretive forest-tracks, happened to come onto the market at about the same time and were snapped up by him: 159-acre Lower Gate Farm, to which he restored its old name of Blossom Wood, and East Gate Farm, which came with less land but stood on higher ground with consequently better views.

Waterfall Cottage, ideal as a weekend hideout, was too small to be a permanent home for a family of six. The McCartneys therefore moved up the hill to East Gate, whose farmhouse was backed by a pair of windmill-shaped oast houses, or hop-drying kilns. Rather than restoring the derelict house, Paul decided to demolish it and build a new one.

He could have commissioned the world’s finest architects to create a state-of-the-art dream home hidden there in the forest. Instead, just as he’d been wont to do with album covers, he designed the new house himself. It was no rock-star mansion or folly but a bog-standard four-bedroom structure in red brick with a steeply pitched roof, somewhat like an enlarged version of 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton. Planning permission for the build was easily obtained, but it turned out that an ancient public right of way ran right through East Gate Farm, passing only inches from the new house’s front door. A lengthy legal process was necessary to move it 150 yards away.

Various new ancillary buildings sprang up round about: a stable block and Wild West-style corral for Linda’s horses. A few yards from the main house arose a 65-foot observation tower which, in conjunction with the six-foot wire perimeter fence, looked like something from a German prison camp in the Second World War. Peasmarsh residents were at first mystified and perturbed by what British newspapers gleefully dubbed ‘Paulditz’. The McCartneys hastily issued reassurances: the fence was merely to protect the woodland’s wild life and the tower to allow them to look over the treetops to the sea.

The house was as unpretentious inside as out. The décor was Linda’s usual style of comfortable verging on shabby–soft, neutral-coloured fabrics, stained and scuffed by kids and their innumerable, seldom-house-trained pets. All the ground-floor rooms interconnected–just like 20 Forthlin Road’s–their hub a large kitchen with a stone floor where all family meals were eaten and visitors entertained. Upstairs were a master bedroom with a sun-deck for Paul and Linda and three bedrooms divided among the four children but, pointedly, no guest-accommodation.

Linda became a familiar figure in Peasmarsh village, using its simple shops and becoming a regular at the hairdressing salon, where her fashion sense caused much comment. ‘All that money, yet she still goes round in gym-shoes,’ a fellow client was once heard to marvel. ‘And she doesn’t even bother to do up the laces.’

Early in their relationship she had told Paul how, as a little girl, she used to wake each Christmas morning hoping Santa had left her a horse with a bow around its neck, but always being disappointed. Since then, he’d never minded how many she bought or adopted. Even Drake’s Drum, the racehorse he’d given his father, was now one of her Scottish string, enjoying a happy retirement among the domesticated geese and safe-from-slaughter sheep.

Nothing was too good for Linda’s horses; in fact, the new stable block at Peasmarsh had a modernity and opulence the house never did. One winter day, David Litchfield was there with Paul, looking at two Native American Pinto ponies, newly brought over from Arizona.

‘I said, “Hey, Paul, aren’t they going to feel the cold a bit after where they’ve come from?” “Shut the fuck up,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “the paddock’s got underfloor heating.”’

In March 1978, the Wings album recorded the year before in the American Virgin Islands was released under the surprising title of London Town. Despite the contribution of the two departed band members, Jimmy McCulloch and Joe English, neither appeared on its cover; just Paul, Linda and Denny Laine outlined against a wintry image of Tower Bridge.

London Town spun off an American number one single in ‘With a Little Luck’, a gentle singalong radiating McCartney optimism and touched with McCartney literariness (‘together’ rhymed with ‘inclement weather’). The album peaked at number two in America and four in the UK, but received generally dismissive reviews. For Rolling Stone, so recently among Wings’ chief enthusiasts, it was ‘an irritating melange of lyric fragments, squandered melodies and clever but half-assed arrangements, the whole unrealised mess packaged with a slick, unctuous flair that would have reduced an idea like “Eleanor Rigby” to a two-line roundelay’.

Its British media launch took place aboard a Thames riverboat cruising to Tower Bridge. Alas, the media showed little interest in the album or photo-ops of Paul, Linda and Denny showing London-ness by eating fish and chips from traditional newspaper wrappings. For everyone, the big story was All You Need Is Cash, a spoof TV documentary about the Beatles–thinly disguised as a quartet named the Rutles–by Eric Idle from the Monty Python comedy team and Neil Innes, formerly of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, which aired that same week on BBC2.

Idle’s and Innes’s wickedly accurate parody of this so-called ‘Prefab Four’ included cameo appearances by real-life rock stars like Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood, plus a genuine Beatle, the one usually least known for his sense of humour. George played a television correspondent reporting from outside the band’s business HQ, ‘Rutle Corps’, as behind him a stream of looters ran from the building with photocopiers, TV sets and potted plants.

Innes was the John character, ‘Nasty’, while Idle satirised Paul as ‘Dirk McQuickly’, a moon-faced manipulator who turned out glib tunes without effort and peddled them without shame. ‘Any old slag he’d sell a song to,’ said Jagger of McQuickly–an unkind cut since the Rolling Stones had owed their first chart success to Lennon and McCartney.

Paul admired the Python pranksters and knew Innes well, having co-produced the Bonzo Dog Band’s only hit single, ‘Urban Spaceman’, under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth. Asked jokey questions about ‘Rutlemania’ at the London Town press launch, he expressed the requisite tolerant amusement. In reality, All You Need Is Cash touched rather too many raw nerves, especially with its cracks about ‘Rutle Corps’ and the band’s American manager, ‘Ron Decline’. And after 15 years’ incessant adoration and admiration, it was a sobering experience to be mocked.

He’d decided not to keep Wings’ trio format–well though it had worked in the past–but to recruit a third lead guitarist and a fourth drummer for the follow-up to London Town and subsequent live shows. In contrast with the previous pairings of problematic American with hard-drinking Scot, both new arrivals were English and, for both, Paul had Denny Laine to thank.

Twenty-three-year-old drummer Steve Holley happened to live in the Surrey village of Laleham, where Laine had recently bought a home. Holley attended the Laines’ house-warming party, joined a jam session with Denny and Paul, then was auditioned at MPL and offered the gig on the spot. He was also being headhunted by Elton John, and his own band, Vapour Trails, had recently signed to Warner Brothers, but he turned his back on both prospects without a qualm.

Then, on a David Essex TV special, Laine talent-spotted session-guitarist Laurence Juber, a darkly handsome 26-year-old somewhat like Paul’s teenage hero, Don Everly. London-born Juber, impressively, had studied music theory at London University, played in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and, to round off his CV to perfection, was a strict vegetarian.

To forestall the arguments over money that had bedevilled previous Wings line-ups, both recruits were flown to New York and taken to the East Hampton home of Paul’s father-in-law and lawyer, Lee Eastman. There–‘sitting on a blanket, drinking lemonade’, as Steve Holley remembers–they were offered a yearly salary considerably higher than any of their predecessors’, and guaranteed, however much or little Paul used their services.

In June, he took them to Scotland, to rehearse with Linda and Denny Laine and start on an album he’d provisionally named We’re Open Tonight. Then Linda, that assiduous hen-keeper, came up with a title suggesting a more fundamental fresh start, Back to the Egg. Each side had an egg-related subtitle, ‘Sunny Side Up’ and ‘Over Easy’.

Having risen above punk and every other contemporary pop style, like disco and new wave, the previous year, Paul was now determined to embrace as many of them as possible. On Back to the Egg, therefore, he sacrificed his usual total control, working with an outside producer for the first time since the abortive experiment with Glyn Johns.

His appointee, 31-year-old Chris Thomas, was a former assistant to George Martin who’d supervised some of the Beatles’ White Album sessions when Martin could stand no more of their bickering. Thomas had gone on to work with top bands like Procol Harum, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music, but most famously had produced Never Mind the Bollocks–Here’s the Sex Pistols. No other symbol of old-school rock was so willing to learn new tricks.

Making Back to the Egg would take seven months, in part thanks to Paul’s fondness for unusual locations. In September, work transferred from the Spirit of Ranachan studio to Lympne Castle in Kent, a medieval pile not far from Peasmarsh. Recording took place in the castle’s great hall, with Steve Holley’s drums set up in front of the enormous fireplace; Paul and Laurence Juber recorded guitar-parts in an echoing stairwell, and books from the castle library provided spoken inserts that were read by the owners, Harold and Deirdre Margary, and overdubbed in the kitchen.

After a break lasting the whole of August, work resumed in Abbey Road’s Studio 2. There Paul convened what he dubbed his Rockestra, a symphony-sized ensemble of super-sidemen to perform a catchy but slight instrumental of the same name. The massed talent included David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, John Bonham and John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Pete Townshend from the Who and Hank B. Marvin from the Shadows, plus younger virtuosi like Bruce Thomas, bass-player with Elvis Costello’s Attractions, and James Honeyman-Scott, guitarist with the Pretenders. The drummers were to have included Keith Moon from the Who, but ‘Moon the Loon’ had died of a drugs overdose a few days earlier.

In December, with dubbing still unfinished, Studio 2 was needed for other artistes, notably EMI’s new chart-topper Kate Bush (whose unearthly wail made Yoko’s vocal efforts of yore seem positively normal). Paul therefore moved to the basement at 1 Soho Square, bringing in equipment identical to Abbey Road’s and naming it ‘Replica Studio’. To further the illusion, and hopefully catch a magic vibe, one wall had a huge photograph of the view from the real Studio 2’s control room.

Much was riding on Back to the Egg. Paul had become dissatisfied with Capitol Records, particularly over the promotion of London Town, and when his contract expired in 1978 had signed with Capitol’s arch-rival, Columbia. The label had shelled out an advance of $22.5 million which, with an unheard-of 20 per cent royalty, made him the world’s highest-paid recording artiste. In addition, Columbia’s parent company, CBS, made him a present of one of its choicer publishing subsidiaries, the Frank Music Corporation, founded by the great Broadway songwriter Frank Loesser. He thus acquired the song-copyrights of Loesser’s Guys and Dolls and other classics of American musical theatre such as Damned Yankees, The Pajama Game and The Music Man, the source of ‘Till There Was You’ which he’d sung countless times with the early Beatles. As a final sweetener, he was to have use of the company’s private jet.

Columbia’s CEO, Walter Yetnikoff, had every reason to feel bullish about this epic investment. In March 1979, Wings scored a number five single in America and the UK with the disco-flavoured ‘Goodnight Tonight’, recorded during the Back to the Egg sessions but not to be included on the album. The accompanying video showed Paul and his Wingsmen in 1930s dinner jackets, with slicked-down, shiny hair–yet another reincarnation of the Jim Mac Jazz Band–and Linda in a purple tea-gown, coquettishly fluttering a fan.

In May, Paul, George and Ringo were guests at Eric Clapton’s wedding to George’s former wife, Pattie. Though George had apparently not minded his best friend’s theft of his wife, the occasion could still have been a sticky one. Sexual buccaneer that he was under that dour mystical exterior, he’d since admitted a covert affair with Ringo’s wife, Maureen, explaining it away as ‘incest’.

However, no grudges, ancient or modern, marred the happy event at Clapton’s Surrey mansion, Hurtwood Edge. Paul took the marquee stage and made a gracious speech, name-checking George and Ringo as ‘old flames’. John rang up from New York to congratulate the newly-weds and say he would have come to the party if he’d known about it.