5 December 2024

Why Paul McCartney cannot let it be

The great Beatle and the shadow of John Lennon.

Paul McCartney is back in fashion. When, after a three-hour set, McCartney walked off stage at Glastonbury in 2022, the audience seemed to be expressing a country’s gratitude, as 20 days earlier those on the Mall for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations had to the Queen. For Elizabeth II, it was her penultimate public appearance. McCartney, though, is back in December on a UK tour: still hungry at the age of 82 for the appreciation, still, by his sheer virtuosity, wishing to settle scores.

Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back on the Beatles’ January 1969 sessions, the Glastonbury concert and the 2023 Beatles single “Now and Then” are all part of McCartney’s attempt to re-elevate the Beatles into the mythical realm, with the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney at its heart. His implicit antagonist is still Yoko Ono, who has spent the four and a half decades since her husband’s death insisting that the spirit of John Lennon was bigger than the Beatles.

Since Get Back came out at least, McCartney has been winning. The documentary shows emphatically that when the love between Lennon and McCartney was supposedly obliterated, it was instead very much alive. It is evident in the looks Lennon and McCartney exchange in the first song they practise, “I’ve Got a Feeling”. At the Glastonbury concert, McCartney sang this number in the encore as a virtual duet with Lennon. There being no footage of George Harrison’s lunchtime row with Lennon on the seventh day of the sessions, Jackson has the Beatles’ lead guitarist quit the band after emotionally crumbling as he watched Lennon and McCartney sing “Two of Us” to each other. In perhaps the most powerful scene, Lennon and McCartney work through their anguish in a secret code of wordplay. Lennon’s eye-contact is intense as he spills out his need to connect; McCartney keeps turning his head away and insists that what they require is “a schedule of work”. In this story, Lennon and McCartney appear to be taking steps beyond the wounds they inflicted on each other in 1968 in India and the making of the White Album. It is the imminent appointment of the American mogul Allen Klein as the Beatles’ business manager – despite McCartney’s bitter opposition – that looms after the cameras have stopped rolling, and which will tear them apart.

Given McCartney was proved right on Klein, this is a version of history McCartney likes. But the deeper truth Get Back reveals about the implosion is just how far his musical talent had unbalanced not just Lennon and McCartney but the Beatles. Needing to contain McCartney’s creativity, Lennon tried and failed to have Ono join the band during the White Album, as he had successfully done with the artistically gifted but musically talentless Stuart Sutcliffe a decade earlier in Liverpool. McCartney was not the collateral damage from Lennon’s post-India partnership with Ono; he was the reason for it. Largely songless in Get Back, Lennon scolds McCartney: “Because you, you’ve suddenly got it all, you see.” But McCartney was far too intoxicated with his achievements by January 1969 to need to be told such an elementary fact about his superiority. Lennon’s mistake was to think that at the height of his creative powers McCartney could accept the musical retreats he had made as a teenager. Lennon could utilise Klein, though, to shift the battleground to his bandmate’s non-musical weaknesses.

When the music was over, McCartney had the longest descent to Earth. Beyond a need for constant support from his wife, Linda, no 1970s version of McCartney would last. At times, the family lived a hermit’s existence, hippy farming on the Kintyre peninsula. Playing all the instruments on his first solo album, McCartney immediately declared his musical self-sufficiency. But the result, McCartney, is mostly fragments, as if a painful acknowledgement that he was now incomplete and to expect less of him. By contrast, his 1971 statement of intent, the album Ram, then critically savaged and now rightly lauded, is a high-production paean to the promise of recovery through playful creativity. In the middle of the decade, he was by far the most successful ex-Beatle, his new band Wings touring the world with the McCartney children in tow. By the time of Lennon’s murder on 8 December 1980, he had reinvented himself again, having ditched Wings for more solo experimentation on the west coast of Scotland.

Crushed under Lennon’s apotheosis, McCartney was, henceforth, condemned to disappoint. When he has reached greatness since there is sadness: it is music from, and for, a world where Lennon and McCartney stopped singing harmonies and then squandered their multiple chances to create again. He does not write directly from the place his love, rage, fear, remorse, humiliation and griefs might coalesce. There appear shards of revelation. One can perhaps hear it in an unexpected middle eight, the allegories, the repetitions, the surreal turns. But only he knows what the pieces might mean within his incomprehensible life.

For a long time, McCartney’s very adaptation to moving beyond the Beatles was his sin. Lennon had coped with the break-up, so far as he did, by telling a story that cast him as a crusader for art and truth against McCartney’s rampant addiction to pop and commercialism. Viciously unfair and disingenuous as Lennon was, his mask of truth-telling was formidable, especially when his target was the aura of the Beatles and his former bandmate. What Lennon’s rhetorical assault cost McCartney is all too evident. The McCartney of Get Back has a commanding verbal presence. But for the past 40 years, most of the interviews he has given are a repetitive script, his mind too obviously working to control, not reveal; once you have read a few of them, the performance and the contradictions fall hopelessly flat.

If McCartney cares too much about the Beatles to compete in the performance of truth-teller, he will also not conform to the role of the artist. Melvyn Bragg once perceptively said that the 1970s McCartney had made a “magnificent attempt to be seen as, and to behave as, a very ordinary young English man” to hide the fact that “he was a most extraordinary young English man”. But in the classical compositions, the electronic music as the Fireman, the poems, the “Eyes of the Storm” photographic retrospective, and the painting exhibitions he has offered since the 1990s, McCartney’s artistic imagination has become conspicuous.

His need to paint appears an act of reclamation from the years before the descent into the gangster-run Reeperbahn of Hamburg where Lennon and McCartney temporarily stopped writing their own songs. Aged 11, McCartney used a school prize to buy a book of modern art that included drawings by Picasso. Sixth-form McCartney read Tennessee Williams, hung out with Lennon at the Walker Art Gallery and took himself off to the Liverpool Playhouse, reading Dylan Thomas on the bus on the way. Within months of McCartney having joined forces with Lennon in July 1957, they were trying to write a play that parked a Messiah figure in a John Osborne setting.

McCartney’s impulse to create visually was always vulnerable to Lennon’s rebuke, right back to Lennon’s embrace of his fellow-art-school student Sutcliffe. It is perhaps why he started painting seriously only after Lennon’s death. What has poured out thereafter forcefully repudiates the Lennon-Ono charge against his conventionality. Indeed, the compressed, dense textures of his expressionist paintings encompass, in the curator Christoph Tannert’s words, “the apparently deranged”.

In his three electronica albums and his orchestral and choral compositions, Mc-Cartney appears different again, this time in possession of a mystical sense of wonder at a universe in which music, colour and time have their being. In the last movement of his 1991 Liverpool Oratorio, otherwise haunted by pain, there is salvation simply because “God is good”. For a man who before he turned 30 had believed that there was no way home, the earnestness of this composition seems an extraordinary act of faith. Through a character who has never left Liverpool, McCartney tells what appears an emotionally autobiographical story. Shanty is consumed by the ghosts of a past that no one person could bear and gets close in his dreams to secrets that in the light must lay untouched. The adult Shanty judges his father for not warning him what he was getting himself into: as if anyone could have imagined their child shipwrecked by Beatlemania; as if godhead was not exactly what young McCartney wanted; as if it were not Jim McCartney who thought the teenage Lennon a dangerous friend for his son.

The shifting timescapes of the Liverpool Oratorio and the manner by which he transmutes the chaos of his memories into the order of a more recognisable story have an eerie similarity to Dickens’s David Copperfield. Indeed, McCartney should perhaps be seen as a Dickens counterpart, erupting out of provincial England as a subversive popular sensation. McCartney himself loves Dickens. It was Dickens’s London, he told his friend and biographer Barry Miles, that he saw in those heady days of 1964 when he was first “enthralled” with the city. The track “Jenny Wren” on his 2005 album Chaos and Creation celebrates the child character from Our Mutual Friend who survives by experiencing an imaginary world above the wasteland of London.

Like Dickens, Paul McCartney refuses to subordinate his multiple voices to any singular style of composition. In his Beatles pomp, he saw no reason why the music hall tunes and brass bands of his childhood did not belong with the American rhythm and blues and gospel spirit that first made rock ’n’ roll. His capacity to assimilate contrasts into the structure of music places him in an English cultural tradition that he would not necessarily own but without which the Beatles would have been a passing generational fancy. “I am an artist if I go to Paris,” he told Miles. But actually his creative hub is his Hogg Hill Mill studio in Sussex, a converted 18th-century windmill.

There is something very Puck of Pook’s Hill about that choice, as if he knows he already inhabits the realm of an old and disturbed folklore. The stories he tells and retells free-float in a space beyond facts. In this sense, for all his subsequent joys and griefs, he never reached escape velocity from the maelstrom, never did really separate from John Lennon. He is giving us back the adventure of the Beatles as love because that is the story as myth it is supposed to be, the story that retains its enchantment in much of the music they made, and the story that, for a while longer anyway, Paul McCartney still has the will and creative power to make it be. The rest, the human tragedy of the Beatles and McCartney and Lennon, remains only for him.