Paul McCartney appears on the cover of MOJO magazine 364 (March 2024) to promote Band on the Run. The first new MOJO of 2024 featuring an exclusive interview with Paul McCartney, and more interviews with many artist. Plus a 15-track CD of premium grade powerpop with every issue.
Paul McCartney Interviewed: “Can you imagine trying to start another band after The Beatles?”
Paul
McCartney speaks exclusively to MOJO about the messy dissolution of The
Beatles, the impossible act of following them and remembers his fallen
Wings bandmate Denny Laine.
Minutes before Paul McCartney calls Mojo from Brazil, news comes that Denny Laine has died.
“I heard that Denny was getting better, there was hope for the future, but obviously not,” says McCartney of the singer and guitarist who stuck with him in Wings through good times and bad. “It’s very sad because Denny was great. Can you imagine trying to start another band after The Beatles? With Denny, we managed it.”
In the early ‘70s Paul McCartney knew all about having work to do. The end of the band against which all others must be judged left him in a depression, exacerbated not only by feeling he had peaked aged 27 but also the law suit he filed on December 31, 1970, in response to John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr appointing Allen Klein as Beatles manager. The old group fell apart. McCartney needed a new group. It turned out to be his family.
“Yes, that was the feeling,” says McCartney. “After the end of The Beatles I was faced with certain alternatives. One was to give up music entirely and do God knows what. Another was to start a super-band with very famous people, Eric Clapton and so on. I didn’t like either so I thought: How did The Beatles start? It was a bunch of mates who didn’t know what they were doing. That’s when I realised maybe there is a third alternative: to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way. It was a real act of faith. It was crazy, actually.”
The inspiration came, strangely enough, from Johnny Cash. “We were in bed one night,” he recalls, “newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine. There they were, playing with some country musicians I had never heard of, looking like they were having fun. I thought: here’s Johnny, he’s back, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said: Do you want to form a band? And she went: ‘Sure.’ That’s how our relationship was. Do you want to go and live on a farm in Scotland? ‘Why not?’”
Not just any farm in Scotland, but one that would provide McCartney with the solace he needed after the dream of The Beatles ended in litigation and despair. High Park near Campbeltown is a surprisingly modest three-bedroom farmhouse that McCartney bought for £35,000 in June 1968 – a wise investment, given that it went on to inspire McCartney and Denny Laine’s 1977 mega hit Mull Of Kintyre. With 183 acres of land, it was a refuge from Beatle mania. It soon became a refuge from The Beatles themselves.
“The greatest thing about High Park was that in London, we were swimming through treacle with business,” says McCartney, still sounding pained at the memory. “Every afternoon I had to go into the Apple office to face the latest horrible development. ‘Allen Klein said this, and what do you think of that?’ It was turgid, honestly a bad, bad time. Here’s me, got into rock’n’roll to have a good time, and now I had this sluggish life, dragging my way through one mess after another. Everything at Apple was about dealing with old things, and the brilliance of me and Linda was that we wanted to do new things. She had a romantic American dream of Scotland, which was lovely because it cued into mine.”
McCartney, his 1970 solo album, featured a back cover photograph of the singer in the Scottish wilds, baby Mary poking out of his sheepskin coat. Yet the declaration of rural independence was a premature one. McCartney vs Lennon, Harrison, Starkey and Apple Corps opened on January 19, 1971 at the Royal Courts Of Justice in London, with McCartney engaging in the 11-day hearing to free himself of their 10-year partnership agreement, held onto by Klein, which meant all proceeds from individual projects went into the Beatles account. It also meant his earnings were frozen and he and Linda were living on her savings. McCartney wanted to sue Klein, but since the turtleneck-clad New Yorker had not been party to the original Apple agreement he had to sue his former bandmates instead.
“All these meetings were going on and there would be a call: ‘You have to be in a meeting at three o’clock.’ Suddenly it was: Sorry, can’t make it, don’t live in London any more. Now I’m on a farm in Scotland, and like most of our decisions it was stupid and brilliant at the same time. We got to know each other, we got to farm, we got to be in nature, we got to be free. With Klein I had to resist every little thing, every decision being made, while the others were very gung-ho: ‘Yay, he’s great!’ It took them years to say: ‘Actually, he isn’t so great. And now we’re going to sue him.’”
“I wasn’t motivated by having a fabulous group. I was motivated by not wanting to leave my wife behind..."
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