Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (67 page)

Paul and George sat in the editing suite with Ringo looking at the last programme. George was on the screen, talking about the split, and Paul turned to George sitting next to him and said, ‘I didn’t know you felt like that. Is that really how you felt?’ George said, ‘Of course it was.’

Watching the
Anthology
footage proved emotional for Paul. ‘I get to see my dad again. I get to see my mum again, I get to remember what she did again,’ McCartney explained to readers of his fan magazine,
Club Sandwich
, still hyper-sensitive about anything to do with his parents. Listening to the tracks selected for the
Anthology
CDs also brought back memories, not always pleasant ones.

In volume one there are a few songs that I would have preferred not being there, like ‘Besame Mucho’ which portrays me as a cabaret artist, whereas in my soul I am a rock and roller … But because the others wanted it in, because George Martin wanted it, I could put down my slight reservation and say, ‘Cool. If you guys like it, then it’s got to be alright.’ And it’s a very nice feeling to be on a team like that. The minute a thing is done and it’s the Beatles, I’m happy with it.

With no touring commitments in 1994, and no new solo album to worry about, Paul used his free time to enjoy life with Linda at Blossom Farm, the couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary in March. He wrote some new songs and composed some more orchestral music, sat for interviews with Barry Miles for their forthcoming book, and did lots of painting, a hobby Paul had become increasingly passionate about, spending many afternoons in his Sussex studio and working on pictures when he was in the United States on holiday. During his annual summer break in the Hamptons, Paul took inspiration from visiting the elderly artist Willem De Kooning, a Long Island resident and fellow client of Eastman & Eastman. Fired up with enthusiasm after his meetings with ‘Bill’, Paul bought art materials from the same local store De Kooning used, then went home to paint. His pictures were often inspired by objects he picked up on the beach.

Stories about Paul’s painting got into the press and in response he was contacted by a German curator, Wolfgang Suttner, who said he wanted to show Paul’s pictures at the municipal gallery he ran in Siegen, the birthplace of Rubens. McCartney invited Suttner to Sussex to discuss the idea, meeting him in the estate house he used as his art studio. The German found room after room of the farmhouse filled with Paul’s pictures, stacked up and hung on the walls. Paul explained that he’d always drawn and painted pictures, from when he was a boy, that he had won prizes for his artwork at school, but he suppressed this side of himself when he met John because John was the art student. After the Beatles broke up he had made one or two pictures. Paul showed Wolfgang a 1971 drawing,
Hooray for Stella
, which he made to celebrate the birth of his youngest daughter. He also revealed that he’d covered the kitchen door at High Park in Scotland with pictures. But it was only after John had died, and Paul himself had turned 40, that he began to explore this side of himself properly, painting large, colourful semi-abstract portraits and landscapes. Paul was wary of showing these in public in case he was mocked. To make him feel more relaxed about the idea of putting on a show, Suttner invented a fiction whereby Paul was a young artist named Paul Miller whom Suttner had discovered and was going to introduce to the German public via his provincial gallery. That way there was less pressure. McCartney fell in with the idea and began to talk with enthusiasm to Wolfy, as he addressed his new friend, about staging their exhibition, though, as with many of Paul’s projects, there would be a time-lag before he got around to mounting the show.

Linda, who regularly staged exhibitions of her photographs these days, as well as publishing books of her pictures, was increasingly busy with her vegetarian food empire in 1994, opening a dedicated veggie factory in the UK, and going to the USA with Paul to try and sell veggie meals to Americans, who proved more resistant than British consumers.

Paul’s parallel pet project continued to be the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, which was at last under construction, Mark Featherstone-Witty having lined up the necessary £12 million ($18.3m) funds. Roughly a third of the money was coming from the European Union, a third from the British public sector, the final third, including Paul’s £1 million, from private donations. ‘And then we discovered we got the figures wrong,’ groans Mark. ‘It was a very sticky moment.’ The problem was that putting a new roof on the Inny proved more expensive than expected, prompting a lecture from Paul about financial prudence, not long after which Mark had another in a series of angry confrontations with his Lead Patron.

The conversation took place before a luncheon in London in October 1994. ‘At some point I’d mentioned my mother was Jewish, probably to try and cement some sort of solidarity with Linda, mistakenly,’ says Mark Featherstone-Witty, who says he then listened with bewilderment as Paul told him that his late father had once advised him that Jews made good businessmen, but he hadn’t found it invariably true. ‘He went on to note a line of Jews who had failed him in his business life, notably Brian Epstein and Allen Klein,’ Mark recalled, ‘and rounded the list off by saying, “And now I’ve got you.” I wondered what had prompted this reflection and concluded that it was probably the overspend on the building, which was clearly worrying him more than I had anticipated.’ Paul’s comment was odd, especially so considering he’d married into a Jewish family and benefited from the Eastmans’ advice all these years. His comments also seemed to echo the time Paul’s manager had apparently harangued Mark for bringing a ‘gay’ friend to an MPL party.

Reflecting on the luncheon conversation about Jews, Mark says he hasn’t ‘got the foggiest’ idea whether Paul is anti-Semitic, noting that it would be remarkable if he was. If one took Jews, and gays, out of show business the industry would be seriously depleted. Thinking over what Paul had said, Mark could only conclude that his Lead Patron was just looking for ways in which to vent his doubts about LIPA, and about Mark himself, while Mark had no choice other than to take the abuse. ‘I’m always conscious you’re not nasty to people who can’t answer back [and] I couldn’t risk him backing off from it. It was a sort of nightmare really if he did decide that [he wanted to pull out].’ Mark got his own back in a small way when he published a little-read 2008 memoir,
Optimistic, Even Then
, in which he recapped these awkward moments with Paul and his staff. He sent Paul a copy. In reply, McCartney acknowledged that he could be ‘a right bastard’ sometimes, which Mark interprets as an apology. ‘That doesn’t stop him being a right bastard, of course.’ Despite awkward moments like this, Paul continued to help Mark raise money for LIPA, bending his own rules to accept a £25,000 cheque ($38,250) from the Hard Rock Café, something he fretted about because the restaurant serves meat. Fortunately, veggie burgers were also on the menu. Paul agreed to receive the presentation cheque when the words ‘in recognition of the sale of Linda McCartney’s veggie burgers’ were added.

Paul would have to re-open his own cheque book to make LIPA a reality. Although he was keen to raise as much money from others first, his underlying commitment to LIPA shows a generous side to his character that is often overlooked or underplayed by his critics. Paul is tight-fisted, they say. There are in fact numerous examples of the star being very generous, such as when a call came through to Hog Hill Mill in 1994 from Horst Fascher, the German pugilist the Beatles had knocked about with in Hamburg. In recent years Horst had taken up with a Hungarian girl, who had given birth to their daughter, Marie-Sophie, that February. German doctors warned Horst that Marie-Sophie would not live long because of a heart defect. Horst had already suffered the death of one child. ‘So in my angst that I lose a second child I called Paul. I thought Paul has better doctors in England,’ says Horst, who wept on the phone to one of Paul’s assistants, saying he had to speak to the star. ‘Then after 20 minutes he called me back. And he said, “What’s happened?” I said, “Paul, can you help me?” He was saying, “Horst, whatever I can do for you, I do for you.”’ True to his word, Paul arranged to have the Faschers flown from Hamburg to London in January 1995, and accommodated in the capital while 11-month Marie-Sophie was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital. A team of American surgeons were then flown in to operate on the child. Despite the best treatment, she died 13 days later. ‘Then it came to the payment. Paul said, “I take care of everything. You don’t have to [worry],”’ says Fascher. ‘And he flew us back and all of that.’ Horst believed the whole thing cost about $190,000. ‘I said, “Paul, how can I pay you back?” He said, “Horst, forget it. Only don’t tell anybody, because I don’t want the big
Can you help us
?”’

This wasn’t an isolated example of Paul’s philanthropy. For some time Paul and Linda had backed a campaign to re-open their local NHS cottage hospital in Rye, which had closed in 1990 when a new district hospital opened in Hastings. Local people thought Hastings too far to travel and, after Paul and Linda had marched with their neighbours, and donated almost a million pounds to the cause, a new 19-bed cottage hospital and care centre was opened in Rye, with a ‘Strawberry Fields’ day room. In a quieter way, Paul and Lin helped out with many local charitable causes, in Sussex and Kintyre, earning respect and affection in the communities.

A year on from recording ‘Free as a Bird’, Paul invited George and Ritchie back to Hog Hill Mill in 1995 to record another ‘new’ Beatles song, based on a second demo tape Yoko Ono had supplied, Jeff Lynne again producing. ‘Real Love’ was another slow love song, this time with all the words in place, which made it less of a challenge and thereby less fun for Paul, who nonetheless wanted to continue with this reunion project, eager to complete a third Lennon track. George Harrison said no. He wasn’t even sure ‘Real Love’ was good enough to release (he was right, but it was nonetheless in 1996) and he didn’t want to make any more records with Paul and Ritchie, which Paul thought odd considering the
Anthology
had been created partly to help George. So the three-quarters Beatles reunion was over. But now that the grave had been exhumed, the ghosts of the past were not easily put back to rest.

James McCartney had reached an age when he was asking his father about the Sixties. A discussion about the song ‘My Dark Hour’, which Paul had made with Steve Miller during the rancorous end days of the Beatles, led McCartney to hook up with Miller again, at his home studio in Sun Valley, Idaho, to record a song titled ‘Young Boy’, the lyrics of which express the sort of conversation Paul and Lin may have had about their son as he approached adulthood. The track worked well. Later in the year, Miller came to Hog Hill to record a second song with Paul, a sloppy blues they named ‘Used to Be Bad’. This also turned out successfully. Paul brought Jeff Lynne in to produce a series of other new songs he’d been working on recently, including ‘The Song We Were Singing’, which described Paul’s working relationship with John, and ‘The World Tonight’, which also referred to their past. These were some of the best songs Paul had written in years, though it would be some time before the public heard them.

At the same time, Paul was continuing to compose orchestral music, no longer with Carl Davis, but with a friend and colleague of Davis’s, the English composer and arranger David Matthews. ‘I know after
Liverpool Oratorio
Paul felt he’d like to do more things himself,’ says Matthews. ‘Carl felt perhaps [he] wasn’t sufficiently acknowledged as a co-composer … they did have a slight falling out.’ As a young man, David worked as an assistant to Benjamin Britten, whose music Paul enjoyed, Matthews becoming a prolific and well-regarded composer in his own right, publishing a number of symphonies and concertos, and working on a celebrated arrangement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, which Mahler left unfinished at his death. Matthews strove to make his additions to the score sound like Mahler, rather than his own work. This was also true of his collaboration with McCartney.

Their first meeting, at Hog Hill Mill on 17 January 1995, was very pleasant. Says Matthews, who was a year younger than Paul and had developed an appreciation and respect for the Beatles’ music in his youth, as many serious composers did in the Sixties:

Well, certainly he’s very nice and very friendly, and very easy to talk to and very modest. I remember him saying, ‘I’m Paul McCartney.’ I thought,
Well, yes, I do know that!
[laughs] He would say things like, ‘We did an album called
Sgt. Pepper.’
‘Oh yes!’ … I learned he was writing a symphonic piece of some kind, which at this stage he was quite vague about.

It gradually emerged that Paul was working on a piece titled
Spiral
, inspired by his interest in Celtic mythology, a subject he also explored in painting; the history fascinated Paul because it was the story of his own ancestry. Paul had recorded a demo on piano, getting an assistant to transcribe the music. He now wanted to develop the score with Matthews. Creating orchestral music in this way was slow work. And what exactly was McCartney trying to achieve?

‘When I met him I thought,
What does he really want to be?
He wants to be a composer. OK. See if I can try to get him to do it all himself …

My business was writing the score down and suggesting things that he wouldn’t necessarily think of,’ explains Matthews.

I had to make him aware of the whole range of dynamics, how a [piece of music] can be phrased. Take this, [hums a piece of orchestral music they made together]
da-da-dar
, how is that to be phrased? Should it be
da-da-dar
[staccato] or should it be
dar-larrrr
, and if it’s
da-da-dar
you put staccato dots over the notes and if it’s
dar-larrrr
you put a line over it, and you see that’s not something he would know from playing music by ear.