Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (22 page)

Paul had an interest in literature and often quoted, or misquoted, Shakespeare, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to read seriously. The books at Indica - modern poetry and literary fiction mostly - were therefore only of peripheral interest. Although he wasn’t a great reader, Paul did have a voracious appetite for meeting new people and imbibing their ideas, and Miles and his friends were instrumental in expanding his cultural horizons. ‘Through us he met all the art people, people like [the art dealer] Robert Fraser,’ recalls Miles. ‘He got to meet David Hockney [and] Claes Oldenburg, [when] he was over for his first show. He met Richard Hamilton through Robert Fraser.’ Fraser was a hip young art dealer who accompanied Paul on a shopping spree to Paris, where he acquired two works by René Magritte. Paul later bought a third Magritte, a picture of an apple entitled
Le Jeu de mourre
that inspired the Beatles’ record label. These were judicious purchases, relatively cheap in 1966 at two or three thousand pounds each, forming the basis of an extensive art collection. With Fraser’s advice, Paul also commissioned art, hiring Peter Blake to paint a pop art variation on Landseer’s
Monarch of the Glen
, which he hung over the fireplace at Cavendish. An Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture,
Solo
, a reminder of Paolozzi’s student Stuart Sutcliffe, was given pride of place in the upstairs music room.

Although he wasn’t a great reader, through Miles Paul met the American writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and became interested in the ‘cut-up’ technique of assembling stories from random newspaper clippings, a method popularised by Burroughs which later found its way into Beatles’ lyrics. Another writer who caught Paul’s imagination was the nineteenth-century French dramatist Alfred Jarry, a celebrated production of whose play
Ubu Roi
, with sets by David Hockney, Paul saw at London’s Royal Court. One of Jarry’s ideas was a quasi-science he named pataphysics, ‘the science of imaginary solution’, which later cropped up on the
Abbey Road
album. The inquisitive Miles also squired Paul to musical performances by avant-garde composers such as Luciano Berio, who presented an electronic piece in London in February 1966. Paul was furious when the press came to photograph him at the concert, spoiling the ambience. ‘All you do is destroy things! Why don’t you think of people, why don’t you create things? ’ he raged at the snappers. Thankfully, there was no press present when Miles took Paul to see fellow avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, a follower of John Cage, who ‘played’ the piano by tapping the legs of the instrument or reaching inside and plucking its strings, anything but touching the keyboard. From attending oddball events like this Paul became generally aware of and interested in modern composers and their experiments, using atonality, collage, repetition, curious instrumentation and new technology to create, among other works, music made up of spliced tape recordings and tape loops. Inspired, Paul started to make tapes of his own at Cavendish Avenue.

London’s avant-garde set were also a hedonistic bunch of people, and part of the pleasure of hanging out with his hip new friends was that Paul could smoke pot with them discreetly and get laid. Visiting the Dunbars in Lennox Gardens, Paul struck up a relationship with their attractive nanny, Maggie McGivern, who claims to have conducted a three-year affair with Paul behind Jane’s back. ‘Our relationship was a secret from day one.’ She says they met surreptitiously in auction rooms, where Paul was buying antique furniture for his new house, and in Regent’s Park where he walked his new pet, Martha, an Old English Sheepdog. When Jane was away from home, Maggie further says that she and Paul slipped over to Europe for illicit holidays. ‘They saw each other on and off for quite a few years,’ says Miles, noting that Maggie was ‘only one of many’.

Another aspect of Paul’s new London set was connections with the aristocracy. Marianne Faithfull was the daughter of a baroness, and the London scene was as thick with the scions of famous families as it was with the sons and daughters of the working-class. One posh mate was Tara Browne, son of Lord Oranmore, head of the Guinness brewing family, who was due to inherit a fortune when he turned 25. Until then, Tara was living recklessly on credit. Having left Eton, he married at 18, had a couple of kids, then abandoned them, more interested in running his Chelsea boutiques and roaring up and down the King’s Road in his hand-painted sports car. As 1965 segued into ’66, Paul found himself more and more in this moneyed, druggy, fast-paced world of aristocrats, bohemians, writers, artists and beautiful girls, which is to say he was having a wonderful time. The sun seemed to shine every day during the summer of 1966; English music and youth style was applauded; the England soccer team won the World Cup; and the Beatles’
Revolver
was the soundtrack album of the season.

REVOLVER

In these exciting, one might say revolutionary times, Paul must have looked back on the first few years of the Beatles’ existence as a distant, far less interesting age when he and the rest of the group were just learning their trade. Paul certainly seems to have placed a low value on the Beatles’ early songs, judging by the fact that he signed away his rights to their first 56 tunes in the spring of 1966 for a modest one-off payment.

As we have seen, John and Paul had assigned the copyright of their compositions to Northern Songs, a company owned by them in partnership with Brian Epstein and Dick James. They had recently extended the agreement so all their compositions until 1973 would be held in this company. Royalty income from the initial 56 Lennon-McCartney songs, registered between 1963 and 1964, was paid to the boys via another company they’d formed with Brian named Lenmac Enterprises, a combination of John and Paul’s surnames. In April 1966, John, Paul and Brian agreed to sell Lenmac to the now-public Northern Songs for £365,000 ($558,450) of the shareholders’ money, Paul apparently judging it wise to take the cash before these early songs - numbers such as ‘She Loves You’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ - became as obscure as skiffle tunes. From the start, the boys all felt, in common with most people in show business, that their type of music was ephemeral, and that they should look ahead to a longer-term career as professional songwriters in a more mature style. Interestingly, they didn’t dispose of songs written after 1965 in the same way. As a result of the Lenmac sale, Paul stopped receiving royalties directly for those 56 early Beatles numbers, though he and John still owned shares in Northern Songs itself, which now included and was enriched by Lenmac. This was an extremely unwise decision as it turned out, because their early songs proved to be evergreen.

Having disposed of part of the family silver in this careless way, the Beatles returned to EMI in April 1966 to make
Revolver
, a complementary album to
Rubber Soul
, and one in which Paul’s newfound interest in avant-garde music came to the fore, most notably on the track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, featuring John’s spacey vocal, echoing drums, Indian tambura and tape loops which seem to make the sound of screaming seagulls or what one imagines Hieronymus Bosch’s flying monsters would sound like. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is an amazing song, a leap forward for a band that just recently had been yelling
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
at their fans, and Paul’s tape loops are a large part of what makes it one of the Beatles’ ‘heaviest’ tracks. So it is almost schizophrenic of Paul to have also recorded his first children’s song on
Revolver
, the nonetheless delightful ‘Yellow Submarine’, complete with nautical sound effects. Children’s songs would become an occasional, and perhaps underrated, McCartney specialty. They have proved popular with generations of children.

Another uplifting creation was Paul’s ‘Good Day Sunshine’, which again is quite a contrast to the dark ‘For No One’, with its lyric about a love that should have lasted years, providing further insight into Paul’s troubled relationship with Jane Asher. ‘I suspect it was about another argument,’ McCartney told Miles. ‘I don’t have an easy relationship with women, I never have. I talk too much truth.’ When it came time to record ‘For No One’, Paul asked George Martin to get in a French horn player. George hired Alan Civil, the best available. Unable to express what he wanted in writing, or in technical language, Paul sang the horn solo he had in mind to Martin, who wrote notation for Civil, who played the part perfectly first time. It was a mark of Paul’s inexperience that he asked Civil to do it again, as if he could do better, which exasperated producer and horn player. ‘Of course he couldn’t do it better than that,’ recalls George Martin with irritation, ‘and the way we’d already heard it is the way you hear it now.’ Aside from sheer inexperience there was a touch of arrogance in Paul’s request, not rare in young men, but nonetheless unattractive. Musician Gibson Kemp, then signed to Brian Epstein’s management, puts his finger on an aspect of Paul’s personality when he describes him at this point as: ‘Quite serious, sarcastic [and] slightly up himself’.

If we read ‘For No One’ as an insight into the sporadic problems Paul and Jane were experiencing in their relationship, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ suggests a love so nurturing that the singer hopes it will never die. Paul seems to be yearning for a settled, balanced life with a lover who would also be a home-maker, which with the previous caveat about being careful not to interpret songs too quickly as autobiography is another side of Paul’s personality. The problem here is that perfect happiness rarely makes for great art, and lovely though ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is, the song has an insipid quality that became more pronounced in Paul’s songwriting as he got older, as if he determined at some stage not to dwell on the darker side of life. In 1966, however, Paul was still willing to explore all emotions.

There is certainly nothing insipid about ‘Eleanor Rigby’, one of the best songs Paul ever wrote, where the quality of the melody is matched by the poetry of the lyric. ‘I just sat down at the piano and got the first line about Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been. That came out of the blue. I didn’t know where that came from …’ McCartney has said of the creation. He had to work hard to explain this intriguing premise to himself, deciding the tune was about a ‘lonely old lady type’. The mournful melody in E minor, with stately orchestration by George Martin, the strings arranged in the style of Bernard Herrmann, composer of the music for
Psycho
, is a revelation, the words evocative and moving. Too often in his songwriting Paul seems to have no original idea to convey, or particular story to tell. He just fits rhyming words to a melody, like a hack. For all its prettiness, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ sounds like that. In ‘Eleanor Rigby’ he created a poignant, original narrative reminiscent of the isolated broken figures in a play by Samuel Beckett: the story of a lonely woman who dies and is buried without mourners by a priest who seems to have lost his congregation and faith. London may have been swinging in 1966, but in the midst of the Cold War, Britain was also a place where faith in the old religions was fading, and where many feared annihilation in an atomic Third World War. There is a bleak end-times feel to ‘Eleanor Rigby’:

Father McKenzie,
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from her grave,
No one was saved.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

It is surely more than a coincidence that an Eleanor Rigby lies buried in St Peter’s Church, Woolton. Paul had played in this graveyard as a child, and met John at the 1957 St Peter’s Church summer fête. He must have seen this grave and remembered the unusual name. Yet the musician has always resisted the suggestion that he took the name from that headstone. ‘It is possible that I saw it and subconsciously remembered it,’ he says, insisting however that the primary inspiration came from seeing the name Rigby on a shop in Bristol when he was visiting Jane.

MRS MARCOS LOVES BEADLES MUSIC

As the Beatles began to make increasingly sophisticated music with George Martin in the EMI studios they wearied of the profitable but unsatisfying business of performing to live audiences who would rather scream at them than listen to their songs. The shows the boys had played in England and Scotland prior to Christmas 1965 had been typically dispiriting in this respect, and they had no desire to repeat the experience. In fact, the Beatles never toured Britain again. Neither did they have the inclination to continue appearing on every TV show that extended an invitation to them, for surely they had outgrown the likes of
Blackpool Night Out
. So the Beatles decided to cut back on their live television work and produce promotional films to be broadcast in their stead. They started by miming to ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Help!’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘I Feel Fine’, early versions of the pop video.

In the spring of 1966, the band made two further films to promote singles released in advance of
Revolver
, Paul’s ‘Paperback Writer’ and John’s weird, droning ‘Rain’, which in its use of saturated sound and manipulation of tape speed has more than a touch of the avant-garde, showing that Paul was certainly not alone in his musical experimentation. To make these promotional films, the Beatles worked with a New York-born television director named Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had the appearance of the average, trendy young man-about-town, but who - like many people the Beatles were mixing with now - had aristocratic roots. The great-grandson of the 1st Baronet of Rotherfield Hall, a stately pile in Sussex, Michael would eventually inherit the baronetcy, becoming Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Back in 1966, he was plain Michael, 25-year-old employee of the independent television company Rediffusion, working mostly on the pop music show
Ready, Steady, Go!
One day he was summoned to meet the Beatles for lunch at Abbey Road.