Paul McCartney (87 page)

The New World Tour brought a terminal rift with Richard Ogden, his manager (and Linda’s) since 1987 and the main reason for his latter spectacular revival. Despite having argued against most of the tour’s unwise decisions, Ogden felt the blame was being unfairly put on him. After returning from the Oceania and US legs, he received the massive snub of being told by Paul to ‘stay home’ during the remaining ones. He therefore handed in his notice. The next day, Paul called him in and fired him, having apparently not seen his resignation letter. As he was clearing his office, he received a phone call from the editor of the News of the World, Piers Morgan, offering him £150,000 for ‘the inside story of Paul and Linda’s marriage’. He declined it.

The following morning brought a letter from Morgan, upping the offer to £250,000. Again Ogden declined it. The music business doesn’t make ’em like that any more.

‘This letter comes with love from your friend Paul’

Just after the Beatles’ break-up, Neil Aspinall, their former roadie, now Apple’s managing director, had begun compiling a definitive film record of their career. The resultant 90-minute cinema documentary, entitled The Long and Winding Road, could have been released in the mid-Seventies but, thanks to the conflicting demands of its stars–Magical Mystery Tour syndrome reborn!–it had sat on the shelf as numerous unofficial film biographies came and went.

By the time of John’s death, Aspinall’s plan had changed to a television documentary which, even John seemed to accept, must reunite the four of them in some way. Although that idea had perished on 8 December 1980, there clearly was still vast commercial potential in bringing the three survivors back together on-screen. The problem was the bitterness George still felt towards Paul.

George’s solo performing career might have tailed off, but he’d seemingly found ample fulfilment elsewhere. HandMade Films, the company he’d started with his manager, Denis O’Brien, produced some of the most successful British movies of the 1980s, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Time Bandits to Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday and A Private Function.

His second marriage, to Olivia Arias, had proved happy and calming, and given him a son, Dhani. He remained a stalwart of the Transcendental Meditation movement (which latterly had claimed to give converts the power of flight). With his friends Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty he’d formed a spare-time supergroup called the Traveling Wilburys, playing a gentle brand of country-rock which the music press dubbed ‘skiffle for the Eighties’. Yet all these years on, he still seethed about the way he’d been treated in the Beatles; how his songs had always been pushed to the margins by the Lennon–McCartney juggernaut and, most of all, how Paul used to boss him about in the recording studio.

The documentary idea resurfaced in the late Eighties, then immediately sank again when Paul got his extra one per cent on Beatles back royalties from EMI and George, Ringo and Yoko joined forces to sue him, George most determinedly of all. EMI settled the dispute simply by giving the litigants their own extra one per cent each. Yet the old grudge continued to smoulder. ‘Paul McCartney ruined me as a guitarist,’ he told an interviewer on BBC radio–though it evidently hadn’t stopped him playing. He seldom missed an opportunity to take a poke at Paul, whether for suggesting (around the time of Flowers in the Dirt) that the two of them might write together or for doing so much Beatles material onstage: ‘He’s decided he’s the Beatles. I’m not interested. It’s in the past… There won’t be any reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.’

But by 1990, when Aspinall raised the documentary idea yet again, things were rather different. HandMade Films had suffered a run of costly flops, like Shanghai Surprise starring Madonna, and, having underwritten the company personally, George faced possible bankruptcy. A surge in Beatles interest, and Beatles income, thus was manna from Heaven, albeit with Macca attached. His one proviso was that the project’s McCartney-saturated title The Long and Winding Road should be changed, which it was, to the neutral The Beatles Anthology.

Still, when the Anthology was publicly announced–by Paul–in May 1991, George denied that it signified a reunion, in terms suggesting he hadn’t softened all that much: ‘No, it can’t be possible because the Beatles don’t exist. It just comes every time Paul wants some publicity.’

The multipart documentary combined the film footage Neil Aspinall had collected–much of it never aired before–and ‘talking-head’ interviews with Paul, George and Ringo and TV and audio clips of John. There would be testimony from a few close associates like Aspinall himself, George Martin and their former press officer, Derek Taylor (who had come out of retirement to handle the project’s publicity), but no wives, present or past.

There was a conscious effort to avoid the nostalgia of unofficial Beatle film-histories and make it all feel crisp and contemporary. The director, Geoff Wonfor, had previously worked on Channel 4’s outré pop show, The Tube, where he’d come to Paul’s notice after doing an item on one of Linda’s photographic exhibitions that particularly pleased her. The interviews were to be conducted by Jools Holland, the famously irreverent musician and former Tube presenter who’d first found fame in the New Wave band Squeeze.

Alongside the documentary, three double CDs were to chronicle the Beatles’ career on record, with out-takes and alternate versions of songs etched on the memory of millions, mixed with snatches from old radio and TV shows and studio chatter. The first, covering the years 1958–64, included their first professionally recorded tracks: Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and Paul’s surprisingly mature country song ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. There were also items from the audition tape that got them turned down by Decca in 1962 for eccentric choices, usually traceable back to Jim McCartney, like ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Besame Mucho’.

Here and there, history was somewhat rewritten. The CD’s collage-style cover–created by their old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann–had an image of the band in their black leather days, but with the head of their then drummer, Pete Best, obliterated and Ringo’s superimposed.

In 1962, when the Beatles were on the brink of fame, Best had been brutally sacked in favour of Ringo, without any compensation then or ever afterwards. The rumour at the time had been that he was too good-looking for his bandmates’ peace of mind and that Paul in particular had chafed at the adoring screams of ‘Pete!’ wherever they appeared. After fronting his own band for a while, he’d drifted out of music and spent 20 years as a local government official with the most tragic eyes in Liverpool.

However, when the Beatles made the Decca tape, Best had still been with them, so was due a share of royalties from ten tracks used on the Anthology. The first he knew about it was a phone call from the one who’d been so keen to get rid of him–the first time they’d spoken since it happened.

‘Some wrongs need to be righted,’ Paul told him. ‘There’s some money here that’s owing to you and you can take it or leave it.’ Best took it.

As Paul was beginning a double journey through his past with interviews for The Beatles Anthology and his own authorised biography, he received some news which gave it special poignancy. Ivan Vaughan, the boyhood friend whose birth-date he shared, had died from pneumonia.

‘Ivy’ had been Paul’s classmate at Liverpool Institute and lived over the garden wall from John. It was he who brought those two very different friends of his together at Woolton church fete, with such momentous consequences for music and popular culture.

Studious Ivy, in fact, had followed the career path which once beckoned to Paul, reading classics at London University, then becoming a teacher. From time to time, he would find himself pulled into his old school friend’s rarified world, as when his wife, Jan, provided the French words for ‘Michelle’. Later, he’d been one of Paul’s only two travelling companions to LA for the first, top-secret tryst with Linda. And when Apple Corps’ first idealistic prospectus included a school, to be run on hippy lines utterly unlike the Inny, he was the obvious choice as its head.

After the axing of the Apple school project, he and Jan had moved to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer at Homerton College. Then, in his late thirties, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His courage and fortitude were shown in a 1984 television documentary, Ivan: Living With Parkinson’s Disease, narrated by Jonathan Miller and subsequently turned into a much-admired book.

Paul had always kept in touch with him, just as John had from New York; indeed, there were moments when concern for Ivy seemed about all they had left in common. ‘Ivan still talked to both of them in a kind of weird private language they’d used when they were kids,’ Jan Vaughan remembers. ‘It was more like a code, because no one else could understand a word of it.’

He and Paul last met at the Liverpool Oratorio’s London premiere, a glitzy gala occasion at the Royal Festival Hall. ‘By that time, Ivan found going anywhere very difficult. But he was determined not to miss Paul’s classical music debut.’

He died in August 1993, while Paul was in the midst of the New World Tour. Though not a surprise, the news was devastating for one whom that shared birth-date made practically a blood brother. Yet it also stirred fond memories of skiffle-playing days a million miles from high-tech stadium rock; of tinny acoustic guitars, checked shirts, church halls and a tea chest bass whose player disguised his lack of musicality with the proud inscription ‘JIVE WITH IVE THE ACE ON THE BASS’.

Paul had already been spurred by Spike Milligan to try his hand at poetry; now the passing of his friend made him do so again, this time showing more emotion than he ever had in words before. The blank verse ode he sent to Jan Vaughan was entitled simply ‘Ivan’:

Two doors open

On the eighteenth of June

Two babies born

On the same day

In Liverpool

One was Ivan

The other–me.

We met in adolescence

And did the deeds

They dared us do

Jive with Ive

The ace on the bass.

He introduced to me

At Woolton fete

A pal or two

And so we did

A classic scholar he

A rocking roller me

As firm as friends could be.

Cranlock Naval

Cranlock pie

A tear is rolling

Down my eye.

On the sixteenth of August

Nineteen ninety-three

One door closes.

Bye-bye Ivy.

When the verse appeared in print some years later, ‘Cranlock Naval/Cranlock pie’ would be puzzled over as much as any Beatles lyric of yore. ‘I recognised it immediately as part of the private language Ivan and Paul used to speak to each other,’ Jan Vaughan remembers. ‘But I never had any idea what it meant.’

The Beatles Anthology was to absorb almost all Paul’s attention during 1994 and spell the end of the postWings band that had worked so well since 1989. ‘He told us he had to go away and be a Beatle again for a year,’ lead guitarist Hamish Stuart recalls. But in case it appeared that he’d totally succumbed to nostalgia, he left behind some music showing himself still very much in the present.

By the early 1990s, ubiquitous hip-hop and ‘dance’ music–as if no one had ever danced to music before–was changing the record producer’s role, for so long defined by figures like George Martin. Producers of the modern school were sonic scavengers who no longer devised original vocal and instrumental configurations, but remixed existing tracks and sampled–i.e. filched–scraps of old pop classics displaying the old-school producer’s art as ironic punctuation to a tuneless machine-made beat.

No one stood for the traditional studio system, and melody, as strongly as Paul but, as always, he was determined to stay current. After the New World Tour, he had approached one of Britain’s foremost young performer-producers, Martin Glover, who played bass with the band Killing Joke but remoulded sound for the dance music crowd under the pseudonym Youth.

Paul’s initial idea was merely for parts of Off the Ground and Wings’ farewell album, Back to the Egg, to be remixed for the huge venues where dance music was played. Instead, he ended up collaborating with Youth on a whole album of ‘sound-collages’, reviving the love of experimental music which John Cage and Luciano Berio had implanted in him during the Sixties.

There was a strong mystical strain in Youth and he was surprised to find one in Paul also. Their recording sessions were always timed to coincide with pagan festivals like the Summer Solstice or the Equinox. ‘I thought of him as a Master Bard–but at the same time, I got a strong Catholic feeling from him, too. I remember him telling me once how much he disliked the Tarot.

‘One day he had to go off somewhere with Linda, so he left me alone working at the Mill. When their helicopter came back, it was very late, they’d had a few glasses of champagne and their kids were with them. Paul said to me, “Do you mind if we stick around and watch?” as if it wasn’t his studio I was using. They all stayed, dancing around to the music until the sun came up.’

The finished album was titled Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest. As Paul had undertaken not to release anything under his own name during The Beatles Anthology, it was credited to The Fireman–descendant of the one in ‘Penny Lane’ with the hourglass and ‘in his pocket… a portrait of the Queen’.

A crucial element in the Anthology was the good relationship he now seemed to have with Yoko Ono after years of mutual coldness and mistrust.

Their rapprochement had begun in 1988 when the American author Albert Goldman published an unauthorised biography entitled The Lives of John Lennon. In 800 vitriolic but ill-informed pages, John was portrayed as a schizophrenic, epileptic, autistic, hyper-neurotic, bisexual thug whose several crimes of maniacal violence included an unprovoked attack on his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, adduced to be the direct cause of Sutcliffe’s death from a brain haemorrhage in 1962. Musically, he did not come out well either; according to Goldman, his songs mostly employed the structure of the same nursery rhyme, ‘Three Blind Mice’.