Beatles 5: Paul
Halloween 1967 and Paul McCartney is watching the sun set over Nice.
He’s flown out with Mal Evans and cameraman Aubrey Dewar on what is, even by his own sensationally capricious standards, a whim - without money, luggage or even his passport, gliding past customs officials, hotel managers and restauranteurs on sheer Beatles charm. He feels untethered, invincible. This is his moment.
All day he’s been wandering along the seafront nonchalantly, unmolested, pulling soulful poses for the camera, but right now he has reasonable claim to be the most famous person who has ever lived. It was his face the camera zoomed in on just three months ago, when the Beatles were beamed into 400 million homes, insisting “All You Need is Love” on the first global TV broadcast. It was his idea to recast the boys as a winsomely psychedelic variety band, resolving the fracturing, kaleidoscopic intensity of the group, the moment and their music into a single irresistible image and album. And it’s his force of will that is now insisting they press on beyond unprecedented triumphs.
“Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane” might have only got to number two back in February, impertinently held off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck, but the Beatles have rolled through 1967 like some magical liberating army. For all the darkness and hysteria that finally forced them off the road, it sometimes feels like the last six years, ever since Brian Epstein first stepped down into the Cavern one lunchtime in 1961, have been charmed, a fairytale of showbiz success, too corny for even the most pie-eyed Hollywood script. But in 1967 sensationally powerful uncanny magic is at work. Every drug-fuelled studio whim, every conceptual folly, every old sketch of a song, somehow turns to solid gold in Studio 2 at the Abbey Road studios, as though they really are the dotty camp wizards, pottering around a phantasmagorical laboratory, that they’ve just played on film.
The sudden devastating death of Brian Epstein at the end of August has pulled everything shuddering to a halt. With George mooning after the Maharishi, John increasingly besotted with a strange Japanese artist he’s met at the Indica Gallery and Ringo engrossed in an everlasting game of chess with Mal, Paul considers it his responsibility to save the Beatles. He at least is determined the group is not going to fritter away the rest of the decade cross-legged on some ashram in India.
In the absence of a Brian to march them out on another tour of baseball stadiums, holy temples and provincial fleapits, Paul has got them back on the road, committing to a televised trip through the west country for the BBC. If he isn’t literally driving the Magical Mystery Bus, he’s most definitely drawn up the roadmap - albeit a perfectly circular one, enigmatically signposted “fat woman”, “small man”, “dreams”, “stripper and band”, and, underlined and all in caps, “LUNCH”.
The Magical Mystery road trip through September brings home just how much he’s taken on. For the past six years the boys have been born aloft on the magic carpet of Brian’s impeccable, immaculate solicitude, floating from VIP lounge to stage via limousine, armoured vehicle, private jet and helicopter with barely a clue of the graft that keeps them afloat.
Now it’s somehow Paul’s job to book rooms for 50 people at the Atlantic Hotel, Newquay, get a chartered coach unstuck from a narrow bridge outside of Widecombe in the Moor, hire a stripper at the Raymond Revue Bar and construct a Busby Berkeley staircase in an RAF hangar in Kent. The one truly magical moment of the whole shebang might be the knees up around a pub piano one evening in Perranporth, and typically the cameras weren’t even running.
What should have been a lark, a spree, kids finally off the parental leash, like when he and George would hitchhike down to Devon as teenagers, is turning out to be, well, a bit of a drag. Which is why he’s here, freezing his arse off on some French hillside with Mal and cameraman Aubrey, shooting a soppy dream sequence and miming to “Fool on the Hill”. Gazing out to the horizon, like Caspar Friedrich’s wanderer in a belted mac or Roger Daltrey, Paul McCartney can see for miles and miles and miles…
He can already feel the sheer maddening palaver of editing ten hours of film into a cosy 60 minute home movie, sandwiched between Petula Clark and Norman Wisdom in the BBC’s Boxing Day schedule and the reception it’s likely to get. He surely has an inkling that the cat-herding fiasco of corralling cast and crew is only a taster for what’s to come with the launch of the Apple Boutique and then the whole shambolic Apple Corps media empire. And, as he mimes along to the words of “Fool on the Hill”, he can even foresee the Beatles inevitably trooping out to India, before coming out from under the spell of the Maharishi and, eventually, reluctantly, returning to the studio once more.
But as twilight fades over Nice, Paul can’t help but feel that some larger, grander spell is waning. He’s come south to chase these last waning rays, but the sun is finally setting on the long enchanted summer of 1967. What else is coming to an end? Tomorrow is Le Toussaint, all Saints Day in France, the national day of remembrance. It’s the year’s turning point from light to dark. Everything in Nice, he suddenly realises, is going to be shut. There used to be a way, he’s sure of it, but in the cold evening air, Paul suddenly wonders if even he still has the charm to get back home.
