Paul McCartney (90 page)

By this time, a theme for the major work had come into his mind–autobiographical, like the Liverpool Oratorio, but more indirectly so. Since he’d bought his first small farm in Kintyre, he’d been fascinated by the monolithic ‘standing stone’ on the hillside, commemorating the religion and culture of the people who lived there in pre-Roman times. Linda’s photograph of the stone had been in the cover-montage of his first solo album, McCartney. And it was there, or nearby, that she’d won him by saying, ‘I could make a nice home here.’

The piece would be called Standing Stone and celebrate Paul’s Scottish roots, his love of Kintyre and its long-ago Celtic inhabitants. While producing the score with David Matthews, he was simultaneously working on The Beatles Anthology and creating ‘sound collages’ for dance music raves with Youth. ‘I had no idea he was doing any of that other stuff,’ Matthews recalls. ‘Whenever we worked together, his focus was always total.’

Even this didn’t satisfy Paul’s appetite for multitasking, especially now that memorialising ‘Ivy’ Vaughan had turned him to verse. ‘I started thinking of it as a poem,’ he would recall. ‘Every day, I’d get a couple of lines and scribble them down until I had about 20 pages, which turned into sort of a long epic poem.’

Among the rarities on the second Beatles Anthology CD was take one of ‘Yesterday’, recorded on 14 June 1965. Of all Beatles tracks, it was easily the best-known; in the Guinness Book of Records, it had long since displaced Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ as the most-covered song in history with around 2000 alternative versions and more coming out all the time.

Yet it wasn’t a Beatles track at all; Paul had dreamed it complete in his attic room at Jane Asher’s parents’ house and recorded it on his own with a string quartet and input from no one else but George Martin. So alien to the Beatles’ image did it seem in 1965 that it hadn’t come out as a single in the UK, but been buried on their Help! soundtrack album despite not featuring in the film.

The song had huge significance for Paul, epitomising as it did the whole mystery of how music came into his head. Certainly, he never tired of singing it. A couple of years earlier at London-Heathrow Airport, word had got around that he was there to take Concorde to New York, and a crowd instantly formed outside the supersonically-exclusive Concorde Lounge. After a few minutes, Linda came out to announce that he wouldn’t sign any autographs. ‘But,’ she added, ‘he’ll play for you.’ The mini-concert that followed, amid the chime of departure-and security-announcements, ended with ‘Yesterday’.

Nonetheless, for all this time it had carried the Lennon–McCartney credit all John and Paul’s Beatles songs received, irrespective of how much, or little, each had contributed. Being thought the co-writer of ‘Yesterday’ actually became somewhat of a trial to John: once, he’d had to sign the violin of a restaurant musician who’d serenaded him and Yoko with it while they were at dinner.

The injustice, as Paul saw it, went on bothering him for years after the Beatles’ break-up, even after his creation of a band as big as they’d ever been. On the Wings over America album in 1976, the five of his Beatles songs included were credited ‘McCartney–Lennon’.

Now he thought it reasonable to ask for the same for the ‘Yesterday’ out-take on The Beatles Anthology 2, especially since the CD already contained a departure from the Lennon–McCartney formula: ‘Real Love’, the Dakota home demo which opened side one, and was to be released as a single, bore John’s name only.

It was only a few months since Yoko’s pleasant visit to Peasmarsh with Sean, so Linda telephoned her on Paul’s behalf, asking if, ‘as a special favour’, she would allow the credit to be reversed for just this one track. She refused, arguing that Paul on his side had gained glory from songs by John that he’d had little or no hand in, like ‘Norwegian Wood’ or ‘I Am the Walrus’. But her reaction was a visceral one; as inheritor of John’s estate and guardian of his legacy, she would do nothing that even remotely suggested his diminution.

The release of Anthology 2 in March 1996 brought the Beatles back to the headlines, though not in a way Paul relished. BBC radio’s pop network, Radio 1, which had excitedly premiered ‘Free as a Bird’ the previous year, announced that ‘Real Love’ would be excluded from its playlist. ‘It’s not what our listeners want to hear,’ a spokesperson explained. ‘We are a contemporary music station.’

The ban could not stop ‘Real Love’ reaching number four in the UK, but undoubtedly affected its long-term sales. Paul mounted a vigorous rebuttal of the suggestion that the Beatles were outmoded and irrelevant: his press representative, Geoff Baker, issued a statement claiming that 41 per cent of Anthology 1’s buyers had been teenagers, while he himself wrote an 800-word polemic for the Daily Mirror:

If Radio 1 feels [the Beatles] should be banned now, it’s not exactly going to ruin us overnight. You can’t put an age-limit on good music. It’s very heartening to know that, while the kindergarten kings of Radio 1 may feel that the Beatles are too old to come out and play, a lot of younger British bands don’t seem to share that view… I can hear the Beatles in a lot of the music around today.

With the third and final Anthology CD and the compilation of a group autobiography made up of quotes from all four, the reunion had apparently run its course. The all-important peace between Paul and Yoko had broken down and George had become bored with the project even before ‘Real Love’ was finished. Other than Paul, only Ringo seemed to want to keep the groove going.

After decades of having little but their Beatleness in common, there was now the saddest of bonds between them. In December 1995, the same month that Linda’s breast cancer was diagnosed, Ringo’s first wife, Maureen, had died from leukaemia, aged 47. Though long since remarried to Barbara Bach–as Maureen was to Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain–he had rushed to her hospital bedside in Seattle and been deeply upset by her passing.

Paul had always liked ‘Mo’ Starkey, an unassuming woman who’d made no waves in the Beatles’ inner circle, least of all when she was expelled from it. Her three children with Ringo, Zak, Jason and daughter Lee, were like cousins to the McCartneys and to comfort them as well as remember her he wrote a song called ‘Little Willow’, containing one of his special flashes of intuition: ‘No one’s out to break your heart/ It only seems that way.’

In May 1996, Ringo returned to Hog Hill to record two tracks with Paul, produced by Jeff Lynne. The first, ‘Really Love You’, they co-wrote on the spot; the second, ‘Beautiful Night’, had been in Paul’s bottom drawer since the mid-Eighties. It was another adoring anthem for Linda, in direct line from ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and ‘My Love’: ‘You and me together/ Nothing feels so good…’

Only by now, their nights were no longer beautiful but full of pain and dread and helplessness.

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts was opened by the Queen on 7 June. Its final cost had been £18 million, of which £3 million came from Paul. Yet until the last minute, he’d still had misgivings about the project and doubts as to whether its chief fund-raiser and founding principal, Mark Featherstone-Witty, could really make it happen.

‘He was very cautious, obviously not wanting to be associated with a failure,’ Featherstone-Witty recalls. ‘Even when I got as far as putting together some pilot courses, he wouldn’t let LIPA’s name go on them. I had to make them look as if they came from our validating body, John Moores University.’

All such tensions were forgotten as the VIPs poured through the Inny’s unchanged neoclassical portico in Hope Street. Within, the grim Victorian classrooms had been replaced by bright, airy studios and rehearsal-spaces. The former assembly hall, where generations of black-blazered boys had fidgeted through morning prayers, was now the Paul McCartney Auditorium, with sound and lighting to rival the best rock venues. Yet the old school had not been totally obliterated. Room 31 was designated ‘the Alan Durband Room’ in memory of the English teacher who’d piqued Paul’s imagination with the bawdy bits in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

One hundred and ninety students were waiting to begin courses in dance, drama and music. And what had seemed no more than hype at LIPA’s inception five years earlier was there in the prospectus, though already massively over-subscribed: a songwriting class taught by Paul himself.

He arrived alone wearing a formal black suit but no tie–still defying the rigid dress code of his old headmaster, ‘the Baz’–and seemingly in euphoric mood, giving not only thumbs-ups but two-fingered peace signs and strums of air-guitar. Speaking from a lectern in the Paul McCartney Auditorium, he brushed lightly over LIPA’s protracted birth-pangs. ‘It’s been a hard day’s night, but we can work it out… Obviously, one of my feelings now is how proud my mum and dad would have been if they could have been here… but I won’t go into that because I’ll start crying.’

On the inside, he already was. Linda’s first bout of chemotherapy had not been successful and she was facing a second one. The side-effects were so debilitating that she’d been unable to accompany him today.

It was a sign of how grave the situation looked that a month later, she made her will. As she’d always kept her American citizenship, it would be filed in New York, and thus exempt from punitive British inheritance tax. Everything was left to Paul, and to the four children equally after his demise, in a trust fund that would virtually escape US taxes. The 18-page document was signed at Hog Hill Mill–appropriately, on 4 July–with Paul’s assistant, John Hammel, and his studio engineer, Eddie Klein, as witnesses.

Between treatments, she tried to live as normal a life as possible, finding the same total happiness as always with her horses and handling her chemo’s most upsetting side-effect with a horsewoman’s practicality. Rather than wait for her golden hair to fall out, she shaved her head and swathed it in a bandana.

‘It always struck me that there was a parallel between the way Linda dealt with her cancer and the way she dealt with the overwhelmingly hostile reaction to her marriage to Paul,’ her friend Danny Fields would later write. ‘She looked very carefully at her situation, considered the indignities and possibilities and, although there were moments when it seemed she might go under, she came out of her corner, fully expecting to win in the end.’

The media remained totally unaware of her condition and blind to the occasional inadvertent clue. In November, a new book of her photographs, Roadworks, was launched with an exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography, hosted by her daughter, Mary. Linda had arrived with Paul by car but at the last moment didn’t feel well enough to go in.

By now, she had turned to New York for treatment and was in the care of the city’s leading oncologist, Larry Norton, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. Staff there later recalled how ‘she radiated hope’ that lifted her fellow patients’ spirits. Some even thought she’d already recovered from cancer and was around simply to show others it was possible.

‘Let Me Love You Always’

Nineteen ninety-seven should have been such a good year…

It began climactically: in Britain’s New Year’s Honours list, Paul was knighted for ‘services to music’. Although commonplace in other spheres of entertainment, the award was still rare in pop. Bob Geldof had received an honorary knighthood for Live Aid in 1986 but, as an Irish national, was disqualified from using the medieval title of ‘Sir’. The saintly Cliff Richard had become Sir Cliff in 1995 and George Martin had been similarly recognised for his own prodigious services to music in 1996.

The British honours system normally demands a spotless record, so for someone with Paul’s chequered drug history to be made a KBE (Knight Bachelor of the British Empire) set a remarkable precedent. However, it was felt his creation of LIPA and philanthropy towards Rye hospital before that–not to mention his contribution to overseas exports, both in and out of the Beatles–more than redressed the balance.

Actually, initial resistance to giving him his ‘K’ had been on less serious grounds. One can nominate people for honours by filling out a form and submitting it to the government committee which decides the awards. This had been done on Paul’s behalf (without his knowledge) by LIPA’s principal, Mark Featherstone-Witty. ‘But hasn’t he already got the MBE?’ queried a committee official, as if that should have been enough.

Through his press spokesman, Geoff Baker, he made it known that he wouldn’t be using his title in connection with his work and still wanted to be plain Paul to his fans. Many newly-created knights, especially the theatrical and literary kind, affect such simplicity while privately throwing tantrums if ever the ‘Sir’ is left out. In this case it was sincere–and anyway, his name already had infinitely more clout than any honorific could confer.

In March, only two years after leaving art college, Stella McCartney was appointed creative director of the Parisian fashion house Chloé. Following her headline-grabbing graduation show, she had been approached by Chloé to design a younger ‘second line’, but had suggested she should take on their entire output. At 25, she would be replacing 65-year-old Karl Lagerfeld, a legendary figure with his sculpted snowy hair, high clerical collars and never-removed dark glasses.

Throughout the couture world, never noted for its charity, there were mutters that Stella had been chosen more for who she was than what she could do. ‘Chloé should have gone for a big name,’ Lagerfeld himself commented waspishly. ‘They did–but in music. Let us hope she is as gifted as her father.’

On 11 March, Paul went to Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood from the Queen. The crowds outside were not as wild as when the Beatles had collected their MBEs from the same sovereign in 1965 (afterwards claiming to have smoked a joint in a palace washroom) but were still large and vocal. As his limo swept in through the gates, a thumbs-up replaced the palace’s more usual royal wave.

When his turn came, he knelt on a scarlet footstool before his sovereign and received a symbolic touch on each shoulder with the sword of King Edward the Confessor. Watching the ceremony made even the usually super-cool Stella burst into tears. ‘It was just like the end of a beautiful film,’ her sister Mary later remembered. ‘I will never forget that moment.’