Man on the Run Read online

  Man on the Run

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Tom Doyle 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 239 3

  eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 626 7

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Cover photograph © MPL Communications Ltd

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  To Thomas Corrigan Doyle, for fixing the plug onto

  that first record-player and setting me on my way

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 On the Run

  2 Across the Water

  3 Knee Deep in the River

  4 Road to Anywhere

  5 Life in the Slow Lane

  6 Panic in Lagos

  7 In La La Land

  8 Going South

  9 Lift-offs and Landings

  10 High over America

  11 Float On

  12 Take These Broken Wings

  13 Stuck Inside These Four Walls

  14 The Wake-up Call

  15 End of the Road

  Epilogue

  Selected Discography

  Selected Gigography

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The first time I met and interviewed Paul McCartney, unsettlingly, he kept on stealing distracted glances at his watch.

  It’s tough enough to consider the fact that you’re interviewing the most famous musician on the planet, someone who was being interrogated by other writers before you were even born, but it’s more disconcerting to realise that you’re failing to engage a former Beatle and, as the old song goes, stop his mind from wandering.

  The date was Monday, 15 May 2006, and the location was a photographer’s studio in Kentish Town, north London, where McCartney was having his picture taken by his similarly moon-eyed daughter Mary for one of a series of Q covers to mark the magazine’s twentieth anniversary. I was there to talk to him about his experiences of the twenty years gone, their events and innovations.

  During our half-hour-long conversation, I managed to keep him on-subject long enough to discuss everything from his eyewitness account of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (parked on the tarmac at JFK Airport in a commercial jet that was suddenly going nowhere) to the fact that he couldn’t really get with the iPod since headphones reminded him of work and being in the studio. He then revealed the surprising holes in his knowledge of Beatles history.

  ‘I’m the world’s worst analyst of me,’ he reasoned brightly. ‘Beatles fans can tell you exactly what was going on in the 1960s, and I kinda go, Oh yeah, that’s right. I know Sgt. Pepper was 1967. I know that much.’

  In many ways, he proved as affable, laidback and hey-whatever as I’d imagined he might be. When I’d arrived, he’d instantly seemed to warm to the fact that his interviewer for the day was Scottish (having of course enjoyed a decades-long relationship with the country and its people), had hung around the studio’s buffet table urging me, with typical bonhomie, to try the caramelised vegetables. Yet his head was clearly elsewhere and a heavy air of something hung over him.

  Only when he briefly mentioned his second wife, Heather Mills, saying her first name almost under his breath, in admitting that she hadn’t quite taken to his penchant for the odd spliff (‘She’s violently against it’), did I get an inkling that the rumours might be true that the pair’s marriage was in deep trouble. The previous day, one of the tabloids had run papped shots of Paul mooching around alone on a break in France. Two days after our conversation, his publicist made the announcement that the pair were to split.

  Having done a fair bit of this interviewing thing, I hadn’t taken his semi-detached state that day as some kind of failure on my part, and it was now clear what had been weighing on his mind. But it made me determined to try to hold his full attention, to ask and say the things that other writers might not dare, if and when we should meet again. Printed encounters with Paul McCartney in recent years had tended to be fairly stiff affairs, with many journalists – entirely reasonably, since I’d suffered from a touch of nerves myself – too intimidated to ask him much beyond the ho-hum or draw him into a spot of lively banter, or even just try to have a good old laugh with him.

  Next time, I thought.

  The next time arrived sixteen months later, when I was given the opportunity to meet him in his lair, two floors above the reception of 1 Soho Square, at the offices of MPL, McCartney Productions Limited. This is Paul’s comfort zone, the room where he most often chooses to be interviewed – the dark, wood-panelled Art Deco den having been the centre of his operation since 1975. In this environment he instantly seemed more relaxed, more focused, very much in control and virtually unflappable, even when it came to broaching some of the more difficult times in his life.

  Outside his office door there was an air of brisk business being done by his staff, of meetings being arranged and schedules being plotted. It is no coincidence, you felt, that this man is a multi-millionaire.

  Inside, McCartney, settling on a sofa, was surrounded by Willem de Kooning originals and backlit by his neon-piped Wurlitzer jukebox, which contained the old rock’n’roll 45s that were his sacred texts as a teenager. As we talked, he made his way through a cheese and pickle sandwich, a spare triangle of which he repeatedly offered to me during the interview. He seemed to be disappointed that I wasn’t really keen on it. ‘Go on,’ he urged me, for the third time. I gave in and took a bite.

  ‘So this’ll be vegetarian cheese, then?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘It’s just cheese,’ shrugged the famed animal-rights campaigner, missing the point that I was surprised he wasn’t plumping for the rennet-free variety.

  Up close, McCartney had worn pretty well, given the sheer intensity of his past. Only a wrinkling around the lips and his slightly sunken cheeks gave away his age, with his hair more expertly dyed now than the plum shades of his fifties when – being nothing if not a homemade guy – you suspected he was doing it himself. His hazel eyes flashed with a greenish tinge when caught in a certain light. He appeared trim but moaned that he had a bit of a gut on him.

  ‘You haven’t got a belly on you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sucking it in, ’cause there’s a journalist here,’ he grinned. His cheeks swelled when he laughed, and the years fell from his face, returning the impish Beatle of old.

  Most people, from the Beatles films and his countless TV interviews, have some idea of how Paul McCartney talks. Face to face, however, his tone is more earthy, more Scouse, his speech peppered with lovingly delivered swear-words.

  But interviewing McCartney is a bit like panning for gold. He can be as slippery as a politician, expertly ducking a question and sometimes making you return to it three times before he tackles it head-on. At other points, he begins to drift into old anecdotes that you’ve heard or read him relate dozens of times. In these moments, you’re forced to interject to try to steer him gently back towards less familiar terrain.

  Sometimes, particularly when he digresses, you feel as if he’s growing a bit bored, either by the question or his response to it, and h
e says ‘anyway’, quite definitely, urging you to move on. Other times, you suspect this is a handy defence mechanism when he is finding the line of questioning too intrusive.

  Being a seasoned interviewee, he is well practised in the art of talking a lot while giving very little away. John Lennon once sniffily complimented his former bandmate on being ‘a good PR man . . . about the best in the world’. There remains a fair amount of truth in this, and, ultimately, it forces you to push McCartney harder to get beneath his usual surface spiel. You know you’re getting somewhere when he emits an almost exasperated sigh and says, ‘Look, to be honest.’

  At the same time, perhaps because he is surrounded by reverence most of the time, he seems to relish repartee, to enjoy measured mickey-taking. He is, of course, a man few ever dare to say no to, never mind lightly take the piss out of. But it’s clear that he loves getting back in touch with the rougher, former working-class Macca, who is never too far away.

  On this occasion, with a second meeting scheduled for six days later and in the same location, we were due to talk about the 1970s, an often tumultuous and uncertain time for McCartney. During our chat he began to open up more and more, offering a carefully controlled honesty about his trials during the period: the emotional crash he’d suffered after the collapse of The Beatles; the brutal public bickering that went on between himself and Lennon; the vilification of Linda by press and fans alike; the troubled benign dictatorship of Wings, a band which seemed to suffer from a messy, revolving-door membership policy.

  ‘You could never force musicians to do stuff,’ he stressed, ‘but you’d suggest strongly.’

  ‘I imagine you can be quite . . . persuasive in your arguments,’ I said.

  ‘There were some arguments,’ he conceded. ‘But there were arguments in The Beatles too. It’s unpleasant. But it’s actually quite a good thing.’

  ‘Was it tough finding musicians who weren’t overawed to be working with “Paul McCartney, ex-Beatle?”’ I wondered.

  ‘I don’t blame ’em,’ he replied, deadpan. ‘I’m overawed by me, Tom. It’s true, man. I’m not kidding!’ There was a long pause. ‘No, no, no, I am kidding,’ he smiled.

  At one point I broached the numerous dope busts he’d suffered as an enthusiastic user of marijuana. Did he feel victimised by the police in any way?

  ‘A bit, yeah,’ he admitted.

  ‘It must have been like the coppers were sitting around thinking, We’ve got a slack day, boys, let’s bust Macca,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there was a lot of that,’ he laughed.

  ‘They found plants at your farmhouse in Scotland, they had you in LA with a joint on the floor of your car,’ I went on.

  ‘That’s right, yeah,’ he nodded. ‘That was planted. The LA thing was planted. What it was, by mistake, I ran a red light ’cause I thought, You can do that in America. Which you can. Often you can turn right on a red light. But this had a sign – No Right Turn – that I’d missed.’

  ‘Because you were stoned?’ I ventured.

  He hesitated, before his face spread into a wide grin.

  ‘I might have been.’

  By the end, I realised he hadn’t looked at his watch once.

  Close to a week on, we met up again. McCartney invited me into his office with a beckoning head gesture, as he stood just inside the doorway, messing around on an upright bass. ‘Check out my new bass, man,’ he said, his fingers easily strolling up and down its neck. He looked tired, the years showing on his face. It was the end of a long day.

  We parked ourselves on his office sofa again, in the same positions we’d assumed the week before. He’d obviously given our previous conversation some thought and seemed keen to play down the soft-drug angle, mainly because he figured it would be seized upon by the papers and twisted out of context.

  ‘This is gonna get picked up by the tabloids,’ he said. ‘Macca Exposé. I don’t wanna go on about it too much.’

  I pointed out that Paul McCartney In Weed-Puffing Shock was hardly revelatory stuff.

  ‘It’s all a bit stronger these days, so I don’t want to be the one who advocates it,’ he argued. ‘You don’t want to give some kids the idea, “Well, great, man, let’s go do it.”’

  ‘The Beatles got me into dope actually,’ I confessed.

  ‘See, that’s it,’ he said. ‘But there are people these days who can’t handle it, and I don’t wanna be responsible for any of that.’

  Firmly, and for the record, he claimed to have completely given up smoking weed himself, partly as a result of his advancing years. ‘It’s a bit befuddling,’ he laughed. ‘It’s actually more important at my stage of the game to be unfuddled.’

  He said his friends had noticed how his vocabulary had improved after he’d quit marijuana. ‘They’d say, “Wow, your choice of words has really gone up.” Before I’d go, “It’s like . . . y’know . . . it’s like . . . y’know . . . good.” Whereas now, it’s like, “It’s kinda exceptional.” You’re actually choosing words that fit better, that I know, but I could never remember.’

  If the public perception of Paul McCartney is pretty much frozen in stone, he sometimes seems to be entirely at odds with it. At one point I mentioned the ‘Fab Macca’ image of him as the irrepressibly chirpy Scouser, gooning for the cameras with his thumbs aloft. Surprising me, it lit his fuse and prompted a sweary explosion of only partly comedic rage.

  ‘I have been chastened by the world opinion on that,’ he said, his hackles beginning to rise. ‘You will not actually see me do it.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I said, not entirely buying this.

  ‘Well, have you seen me do it in the last ten years?’ he said.

  I admitted I hadn’t.

  ‘Because I’m suitably chastened by people saying, “You shouldn’t do that.” It’s like fucking school! “One thing you must not do is put your fucking thumbs up, you twat!” So much of what happens reminds me of school. And I think my attitude’s the same as it always was. “Yes, sir.” Waits till sir has gone out the room and then goes, “Fuck off!” Y’know, that’s what we really think. Anyone dares to tell us we’re . . . cunts . . . is a twat . . . Excuse me, I’ve just gone all sweary. You said I was Wacky Thumbs Aloft, you see.’

  ‘Still,’ I contended, ‘it’s quite a handy two-dimensional public image to have, isn’t it? It kind of conceals the guy who gets annoyed or angry or tells people what to do.’

  McCartney seemed temporarily thrown.

  ‘Uh, y’know . . . I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe it is. Like I say, man, I really don’t know. It seems natural to me, y’know. I’m not always feeling in that mood. But I am optimistic and want to remain optimistic.’

  It was in moments such as this that I realised that Paul was not nearly as self-aware as you might expect. Ask him what he himself imagined was the popular image of him, Wacky Macca aside, and he was similarly, and perhaps surprisingly, stumped.

  ‘Oh . . . I don’t know, man . . . I don’t know . . . no, I don’t know.’

  In many ways, it seems, it’s this lack of self-analysis that stops him going entirely mad. Perhaps if he thought too deeply about the fact that he is ‘Paul McCartney’, he might not be able to function.

  One of his more peculiar traits is that he constantly refers to The Beatles as ‘they’ (‘They were the greatest little rock band going’), and even to himself in the third person (‘If anyone’s gonna make a decision,’ he said, looking from the outside in at the warring in Wings, ‘it should probably be him.’). It’s as if divorcing himself from reality allows him to unburden himself of the weight of his legend.

  He spoke about not quite believing he had in fact been in certain situations – such as lining up with the other Beatles for a photo-opportunity in Miami in 1964 as Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) pretended to knock them all out – until he was presented with the actual pictorial evidence. He further expressed this sense of unreality in ‘That Was Me’, from his 2007 album Memory Almost Full
, offering lyrical snapshots of himself playing with The Beatles on the Royal Iris ferry on the Mersey, at the Cavern and on TV shows, while struggling to take it in that he’d actually done all of this.

  As time passed, I found myself interviewing McCartney once or twice a year, both for major features for Mojo and Q and for smaller bits and bobs. The playful approach seemed to work well with him, though he never quite let me forget that I was in his company as a journalist and, ultimately, like any big star burned by the tabloids, he had his misgivings about ‘reporters’.

  ‘But they’re not bastards, they’re lovable rogues,’ he joshed, though a touch spikily. ‘They’re just not as lovable as they used to be.’

  ‘Is it worse now than it was in the 1960s?’ I asked him, perhaps stupidly.

  ‘Well, you know it is,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to ask me. You’re with them.’

  ‘I’m not with those bastards,’ I protested, slightly affronted. ‘I work for music magazines.’

  ‘No, but . . . OK,’ he said, softening his tack. ‘You’re on the side of the fence that gives you access to those bastards.’

  All the same, one later incident in particular highlighted how he didn’t really believe that I was in cahoots with the tabloid scummers. We were going over his experiences of the noughties, taking in the high points and, of course, the low points. It had only been nineteen months since his ugly divorce from Heather Mills.

  What was the one thing he’d done in the past decade that he wished he hadn’t?

  He laughed, a touch edgily. ‘Oh God, I dunno. Well, I did wish I didn’t . . . not really . . . can’t think of any.’

  ‘There is one obvious one,’ I said, knowing I was veering into dodgy territory.

  ‘What’re you saying?’ he shot back, suddenly cool.

  ‘Getting married again?’ I said.

  He laughed once again, more easily this time. ‘Well, OK, yeah. I suppose that has to be the prime contender. But I don’t wanna down anyone. I mean, these things happen, y’know. It’s the ups and downs of life. And it was a pity that it happened that way. But I tend to look at the sort of positive side, which is that I have another beautiful daughter.’