Ambient dreams in rainbow arches

Some days you need to take a break from being Paul McCartney. Way back in 1965, turning out one more ditty for Peter and Gordon, he chose to credit “Bernard Webb” as writer, to see how much the McCartney imprimatur was really worth. In 1966, back off the final Beatles tour, he bought a fake moustache, pulled on some specs, parted his hair and cruised around France in his Aston Martin for a couple of weeks, rediscovering the pleasures of anonymity. 1977, following Wings’ triumphal US tour, he dreamt up a fake biography and entire press campaign around the mysterious producer of his big band rerecording of Ram.

The temptation is clear. He may no longer be the most famous man on Earth - he’s worked with Michael Jackson and frankly he’s welcome to the gig - but his planetary celebrity show no signs of diminishing. In the past couple of years the Anthology multimedia campaign has seen the Beatles extravagantly, exhaustively rebooted for a new generation and a new century. He’s been knighted. His childhood home has been bought by the National Trust, lovingly restored to 1950s austerity and opened to the public. And there’s even word that Jann Wenner might finally let him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Is this why one Friday night in October 1998, he’s chosen to pull on a ski mask, shades, studio cans and a big yellow sou’wester (a fireman’s helmet was presumably too Brian Wilson/Fleegle from the Banana Splits) in Studio 1 at Abbey Road for a primitive webcast? There’s no mistaking the left-handed Epiphone Casino, the Hofner bass and irrepressible thumbs up demeanour - but tonight, Matthew, he is underground ambient enigma The Fireman, debuting his lush, fluffy, fluid second album, Rushes, to a worldwide audience of nerds with dial-up internet, streaming direct to your desktop at 32 kb/s.

How do you classify your music? asks Angela Coniver at aol dot com, who has e-mailed in with a question.

“Ambient dreams in rainbow arches,” replies the disconcertingly earthbound cockney glamour model who is the Fireman’s spokeswoman for the evening, bringing an air of Saturday morning Swap Shop to proceedings.

What is the Fireman’s musical bent and where did he learn to play so fluidly? wonders Jane at Voicenet.

Hidden in the Rushes, the Fireman smooths his bent hose daily.

What inspired you to do this album? asks Dennis Willard.

Night skies, flowing streams and whipped cream fire extinguishers.

Is this then, simply the latest daffy chapter in the ongoing campaign, teased at for years, but fully engaged in earnest with the publication of the official biography Many Years From Now, to re-establish Paul’s credentials as an authentic surrealist and the properly avant-garde Beatle? The moptop who hobnobbed with Ginsberg and Burroughs, checked out Stockhausen and Delia Derbyshire and was neighbours with Spike Milligan and Willem de Kooning? The Paul who initiated Carnival of Light and is now a serious composer premiering at Carnegie Hall, as well as patron of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts?

It is indubitably all this, but there’s more to Rushes than whipped cream.

He had started work in a fever back in February, calling Youth down to Hog Hill Mill to record the sounds and sensations of early spring whistling into East Sussex: the wind in the manes of Linda’s appaloosas, the smell of fresh licorice, the slosh as the old earth thaws and turns to mud once more. There was an urgency in his voice - he wanted to capture it all.

It could put you in mind of the almost mystical rapture of Dennis Potter, interviewed by Melvyn Bragg just a few years before, when he sucked on his champagne and morphine and spoke of the white plum blossom in his garden seeming like the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that ever could be.Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were…

Though Youth doesn’t know it as he makes field recordings of the horses galloping by, their snorts as their breath steams in the morning light, her voice as she calls across the yard, the whistle of the kettle - Linda’s cancer, first diagnosed in 1995, has spread. This will be the McCartneys’ final spring together and Paul wants to create a grand psychedelic psilocybin love song, a dream collage with elements of all the times and places they’ve loved: the glens of Kintyre, the Tanque Verde river, the beach at Amagansett, the fields of Peasmarsh, not to mention all the astral realms they’ve tripped through together.

When his mum died, of the same disease, 40 years ago, the 14-year-old Paul had emotionally shut up shop (not for the last time). His first response was to ask Jim how they were going to manage without her wage packet. He was shocked to the core at his father’s sudden tears. 

You expect to see women crying, or kids in the playground... He said in Anthology. But when it's your dad, then you know something's really wrong and it shakes your faith in everything. But I was determined not to let it affect me. I carried on. I learnt to put a shell around me at that age. 

Here’s a key to his art, and one reason he chimed so sweetly and sourly with John - the soppy, sad-eyed balladeer was a practiced, hard-boiled unsentimentalist, able to recollect and dissect raw emotion with a film director’s detachment. But he’s older now, and wiser, and now he’s determined to open up all the doors of perception. Not like some pious old mystic, cross legged and patiently awaiting the next bardo. But with the full enchilada of experience - not just the birdsong and bees wings, but a raw, earthy, unvarnished yawp, full of sex and drugs and pie-eyed, goofy grandeur.

So is this why the need for the mask, the hat, the shades and the whipped cream fire extinguishers as he performs as the Fireman at Abbey Road, six months later, just a week after Linda’s birthday? So no one will see if he cries as makes music that somehow captures the spirit of the final words he whispered to her as she passed last April?

You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It's a fine spring day. We're riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is a clear blue…