Paul McCartney (86 page)

Evelyn Waugh once wrote that the famous write their memoirs or authorise biographies of themselves only when they have lost all curiosity about the future. But despite the gargantuan achievement behind him, all that mattered to Paul was moving forward, staying current and keeping contact with live audiences by every possible means.

The previous decade had seen the rise of America’s Music TV cable and satellite channel, initially playing non-stop pop videos but increasingly a medium for performance that no big name in the business could afford to ignore. In 1991, Paul had been invited to appear on an MTV Unplugged, or all-acoustic, show with his new band: guitarists Hamish Stuart and Robbie McIntosh, ‘Wix’ Wickens (his first bald sideman) dividing keyboards with Linda, and drummer Blair Cunningham (his first black sideman since Billy Preston) replacing Chris Whitten, who’d left to join Dire Straits.

Previous Unplugged invitees had slipped in a bit of electricity somewhere, but Paul insisted that his performance should be totally au naturel. Recorded before a youthful audience of just 200, it mixed Beatles material with old rock ‘n’ roll and R&B and included the public debut of ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, his earliest attempt at songwriting, aged 14. Grief-stricken though he’d been by his mother’s death at the time, it was an upbeat little country ditty with a Buddy Holly hiccup.

The 51-minute set was then turned into an ‘official bootleg’ album–with the same kind of deliberately dodgy-looking cover as Paul’s Russian one in 1988–which quickly charted and would have gone higher if he hadn’t made it a limited edition. Along with that came six more ‘surprise’ live shows, alternating dates in Spain, Italy and Denmark with unlikely British venues such as Westcliffe-on-Sea and St Austell in Cornwall. This was not a man showing the least inclination to rest on his forests of laurels.

In the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts fund-raising campaign, the first task of its founding principal, Mark Featherstone-Witty, was to send appeals to several hundred celebrities and public figures, including the Queen. ‘The letters had to seem to come directly from Paul,’ he remembers, ‘so it was rather like one of those “Write an essay in the style of…” exercises I used to set my class when I was teaching. Paul looked through them and altered a word here and there, but mostly they went out as I’d drafted them.’

The cost of launching LIPA had now been set at £12 million. And in the months that followed, Featherstone-Witty found that having Paul McCartney’s name attached to the project was no magic key to success. ‘The Arts Council wouldn’t get involved because they viewed it as a purely commercial venture for an industry already awash with money. A lot of prospective donors, including Liverpool City Council, assumed that Paul would be meeting most of the costs and saw themselves as the icing on the cake–which was just how Paul saw himself. Everyone wanted to be the icing on the cake. No one wanted to be the cake.’

With Paul’s help, Featherstone-Witty had an impressive list of celebrity supporters, among them the Hollywood stars Jane Fonda and Eddie Murphy and the designer Ralph Lauren. George and Olivia Harrison made a donation through their charitable foundation (although George remembered the Inny only for being caned on the hand and persecuted over his clothes, and took no interest whatsoever in its renaissance). EMI pledged £100,000, a modest enough quid pro quo for the millions Paul had earned for the company over the years. The Queen responded to her fake ‘Paul’ letter with a cheque signed by an official known as the Keeper of the Privy Purse. ‘It wasn’t for much,’ Featherstone-Witty recalls, ‘but the PR value was enormous.’

Paul did his bit by attending four fund-raising lunches, two in London, one in Japan and one in Brussels to solicit help from the European Commission. Yet still only the tiniest dent had been made in the £12 million LIPA needed and Featherstone-Witty was ‘scrabbling around for money’, with little in view but a handout from the National Lottery’s projected arts fund. Then a name from Paul’s distant past came forward to help.

Back when he and John used to long for a tape recorder to preserve their songs, rather than just a school exercise book, the most desirable make was a German Grundig. In 1992, the company was still in business and looking to rejuvenate that very 1950s reel-to-reel image by sponsoring sport or pop music. Grundig offered LIPA a million Deutschmarks a year for five years in exchange for ‘title sponsorship’, meaning that its name would appear below the school’s logo. ‘Paul didn’t like that idea at first,’ Featherstone-Witty recalls. ‘He said he wasn’t putting his name on LIPA, so why should anyone else? But we were suddenly being handed what amounted to about a fifth of the total building-cost, so he accepted it.’

Paul in fact was having serious misgivings about the project, not least his choice of someone with so elaborately double-barrelled a name to be his representative in Liverpool. And the ebullient Featherstone-Witty was not always as feather-footed around him as protocol required. Granted the high favour of inclusion at MPL’s Christmas party, he brought along an uninvited friend who happened to be very loudly camp. That bothered Paul less than the ruckus the intruder was making, and he sent Richard Ogden over with a terse request to keep it down.

Several times he told Ogden he was unhappy with the way LIPA seemed to be shaping and feared it wouldn’t benefit working-class kids, as he’d intended, but that ‘Mark will fill it with gay ballet dancers’. But Ogden convinced him to have faith: it would be his legacy.

The 1989–90 world tour had been a massive earner which put Paul back on top as a concert attraction and turned Flowers in the Dirt into his biggest album since Band on the Run. An unexpected extra dividend had come from the monitoring of record stores along the way, which revealed a major accounting mistake in his foreign royalties from EMI. The resulting back-payment ran into millions.

So in 1993 he was to go out again, visiting the parts he hadn’t reached before, notably Australia and New Zealand (which he now designated as ‘Oceania’), and exploiting the market that had opened up in Latin America. The 77 shows on this seven-instalment New World Tour would keep him performing, with only short breaks, from February to December. The Beatles in Hamburg hadn’t worked so hard–and then he’d been a teenager.

The accompanying album, Off the Ground, made at Hog Hill Mill through 1992, was co-produced by Paul and Julian Mendelsohn, a gifted young Australian engineer who’d worked with Jimmy Page, Bob Marley and the Pet Shop Boys. Mendelsohn’s brief was that it must have a raw, spontaneous feel, with as many tracks as possible nailed in a single take (the same ambition Paul once had for the Beatles’ Get Back). Despite an excellent new band, his list of instrumental and sound effects credits was the longest yet (guitar, bass, sitar, piano, Wurlitzer, electric piano, celeste, Mellotron, ocarina, drums, percussion, congas, mouth percussion, whistling) with Linda’s not far behind (Moog, autoharp, celeste, clavinet, harmonium, percussion, keyboards, train whistle).

As usual, a proportion of the material came from Paul’s irreducible bottom drawer. Two tracks were left over from the Elvis Costello sessions (one with an added horn section scored by his new classical mate, Carl Davis). For hardcore Beatles fans, there was even a memento of the Transcendental Meditation era, written during their visit to India in 1968.

But his main concern at 50, as he said, was to shake off any last suspicion of ‘cutesiness’ and get to grips with the issues which Linda had made important to him. So serious was he that he asked his friend the poet Adrian Mitchell to vet the album’s lyrics ‘as if he was an English teacher. I went through them all with [Adrian] and I can now say they’re poet-proof.’

Thus ‘Looking for Changes’ was an attack on animal testing, represented by ‘a cat with a machine in its brain’ and a cigarette-fed monkey ‘learning to choke’. ‘Long Leather Coat’ was like a rewrite of John’s ‘Norwegian Wood’, about a man lured to a tryst by an enigmatic young woman, only to have his leather coat–that one-time symbol of Beatle chic–drenched with red paint. ‘Big Boys Bickering’ employed Paul’s first recorded four-letter word to denounce politicians for ‘fucking it up for everyone’.

The New World Tour was to be the largest and most expensive he had ever undertaken. At the time, the band with the costliest, most grandiloquent stage-set was U2, but he ran them close with special effects including a pod that swung him out over the audience with a single musician beside him (an idea picked up from Mick Jagger).

Once again, the gospel of vegetarianism was to be spread at every show and press conference. For photo-ops, Paul and Linda often wore T-shirts with red traffic-lights saying ‘STOP EATING MEAT’ or green ones saying ‘GO VEGGIE’. But this time, the McCartneys’ animal-rights agenda had a much harder edge. Underlining the theme of ‘Looking for Changes’ in Off the Ground, the tour proclaimed their solidarity with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals–PETA–the hard-line pressure group against animal testing. PETA’s message was woven into the show’s back-projections: joyous sequences from A Hard Day’s Night or The Beatles at Shea Stadium segued to harrowing footage of actual cats ‘with machines in their brains’ or monkeys ‘learning to choke’.

The tour was also to be a fund-raiser for the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. In America, there would be a special $1000 ticket which entitled the holder to attend the soundcheck–when Paul might well come over and say ‘hello’, though this wasn’t guaranteed–as well as watching the show proper from a block of elevated seats in front of the sound-mixing desk. That money would not be part of the tour revenues but go directly to LIPA.

In 1989–90, the tour arrangements had been largely in the hands of Barrie Marshall, a British promoter uniquely skilled both in selling rock shows to the public and handling everything on the road, including the budgeting. Despite the huge profitability of that outing, and Marshall’s efficiency and total honesty, Paul decided that on the New World Tour the budgeting should be done in-house at MPL.

It was to prove a major error, for MPL’s people based their figures on the huge attendances in 1989–90, unmindful of how circumstances had changed meantime. Then, Paul had been returning after an absence of a decade; now it was only two and a half years. Nor would he be touring on the back of a hit album: Off the Ground had not sold badly but, compared to Flowers in the Dirt, it had been a commercial and critical disappointment.

A large part of the tour’s massive overhead was to have been absorbed by a sponsorship deal with Volkswagen cars–a seemingly perfect match as VW’s most famous model was the Beetle. However, Linda objected that linking up with a car manufacturer would compromise the McCartney stance on protecting the environment (as if their own vehicular fleet and frequent flights by Concorde, the most polluting aircraft ever, didn’t already do that). So at the eleventh hour, with a major advertising campaign ready to roll, the deal was called off.

With no time to find a new commercial partner, the only option was Grundig, to date the main corporate funders of LIPA. They agreed to re-allocate a year’s worth of LIPA money to sponsor the tour in Europe, but there was further delay while Linda satisfied herself that tape recorders posed no threat to the planet and Paul was persuaded to do a low-key ad for the company. He didn’t sign the contract until four days into the tour, backstage at the Festhalle, Frankfurt.

With LIPA thus firmly embedded in the tour, he began to have fresh doubts about the whole project, the money it was costing him and whether star quality in the performing arts really was something that could be learned. His unease had been fed by a conversation with the Christians, the new-era Liverpool band with whom he’d appeared on a charity single, ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey’, after the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. Despite their youth, they all held the traditionalist view that rock couldn’t be taught but had to be learned on the job.

The result was another uncomfortable Macca-moment for LIPA’s principal-in-waiting, Mark Featherstone-Witty, who was in Germany scouting for prospective students. ‘Backstage before a show, Paul suddenly put me on the spot about my background in education and theatre,’ Featherstone-Witty recalls. ‘“Go on,” he said. “Do some Shakespeare.” I tried to explain I was going to be the principal, not head of acting.’

The real malaise set in in ‘Oceania’–Australia and New Zealand–where ticket sales had been unaccountably light and Paul frequently found himself playing to crowds of 30,000 in spaces built for 50,000. The next stop was America, which this time promised no free TV ads from Visa cards, only an anticlimactic $1 million from the Blockbuster video store chain. Both Richard Ogden and the US promoter, Alex Kochan, urged him to bypass the giant stadiums on MPL’s itinerary and play smaller arenas where he’d been guaranteed a capacity crowd. But to the man who’d (twice) effortlessly filled the Maracanã in Rio–and who, in other circumstances, was happy to perform for the tiniest audience–that was tantamount to admitting failure in advance. Consequently in America, too, he found himself playing to blocks of empty seats.

There, too, the show’s animal-testing footage created a media controversy which PETA’s representatives–very different from the gentle, personable Friends of the Earth on board last time–exploited to the maximum, turning off audiences still further. Even Paul’s most loyal American fans didn’t care for the sermonising which interrupted the magic Beatles moments they’d paid top dollar for. The special $1000 LIPA ticket created further bad press after some holders claimed not to have had the expected meet-and-greet with Paul. One aggrieved party went so far as to wave a banner saying ‘$1000 LIPA SCAM’ when he was in mid-performance.

Determined to change the mood, Paul extended the tour until 16 December. ‘Not that I need the money,’ he took care to stress, ‘but I still feel that if we bother to get out there like everyday working people [sic] we’ll see some kind of reward.’

He also released another album, Paul Is Live, with highlights from his American and Australian shows earlier in the year, packaged with a blatant Beatles come-on. Its title referenced the ‘Paul is dead’ rumour in 1969 and its cover pastiched the ‘clues’ to his alleged demise on Abbey Road. But here his only companion on the famous zebra crossing was an Old English sheepdog named Arrow, one of Martha’s offspring. For hardcore Beatlemaniacs, there were differences from the original image to spot; for instance, that he now wore shoes instead of walking barefoot and had his left, not right, foot forward. Nonetheless, it proved the lowest-selling live album he’d ever released.