Random Musings

[beatleswings]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SIR JAMES PAUL MCCARTNEY (June 18, 1942)

[laserenitissima]

It's really, really late but happy belated birthday, Paul!

[beatleswings]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SIR RICHARD “RINGO STARR” STARKEY! (July 7, 1940)

[laserenitissima]

Yes, I'm somewhat late with this, but happy belated birthday, Ringo!

[ayeforscotland]

It appears that all parties with the exception of Restore are not going to entertain Farage’s media circus.

Count Binface - it is your time. People of Clacton, please do the funniest fucking thing that’s happened in UK politics for a while.

[ayeforscotland]

Shitposting at its finest.

[laserenitissima]

I have been really enjoying the Count Binface discourse. I really hope he wins the election over that grifting fascist Farage.

[laserenitissima]

Paul = Good Billionaire

I haven't been around here much lately because I was out of the country for a few weeks and decided to take that time to step away from the Beatles, because I was getting a little burned out. I had a nice break, so I'm back!

The BBC has a show where they rate billionaires as good, middling, or bad. They discussed Paul in the most recent episode, and, surprise surprise, the hosts and audience determined that he is a good billionaire. Here's the link:

[menlove-moved]

too lazy to do a bunch of research on this rn so if anyone else is feeling froggy feel free but. this is talking about the ringo television special from '78. it's like the Only mention I've seen of something like this, all 4 beatles meeting up in the late 70s. also very intriguing because I'm not sure when exactly this movie started production but this could've been later than '76 which is definitely Weird. and of course it's just one dude saying this and could be made up or a wrong recollection but. interesting, anyway

(from ringo: with a little help by michael seth starr)

[tavolgisvist]

Ringo Starr begins shooting TV special in LA on February 11, 1978. A bulk of the special will be shot on ten of twelve days through Feb. 22, 1978 (x)

[laserenitissima]

I always thought that it couldn't be possible that they were never all in a room together after they broke up, and especially that John and Paul never saw each other in person after 1976. My conjecture is that they wanted to keep those meetings to themselves, since the rest of their lives were so scrutinized by the public.

I also think that there will be photos of Paul and John together after 1976 that were taken by Linda which will be published after Paul is no longer with us. I say this because I could see that Paul wouldn't want to be endlessly questioned about what they did/said to each other during those meetings.

[muzaktomyears]

Fighting off boredom was always a problem with the Beatles. From the moment they became so popular that they had to hide from their fans, there was a lot of hanging around to do, a lot of time spent waiting in their dressing-room until they were due to go on stage. Finding ways of filling in those hours became almost an obsession. They never handled money - Brian Epstein did that for them - and I doubt whether any of them had an idea of how much they were worth. Even if they had, they couldn't have gone out to the shops without being mobbed. If they wanted anything, they asked Neil Aspinall, their road manager, to get it for them. Brian and Neil pandered to them as if they were sick children, bringing them toys and games that might amuse them and stop them from becoming restless. They brought in electric trains and motor cars which all four would gleefully race against each other. The fans also sent them presents - by the sackful. These would be waiting in the dressing-room before every show and the boys would make a rush for them the moment they arrived. If this was some hours before they were due to perform, as it often was, they would then play until it was time to prepare for the show. Considering how much time they spent cooped up together, the Beatles seemed to get on well together. ‘Of course we have rows,’ John said, ‘but they are never serious. We’ve been hanging around together for years as friends. Usually it’s people who get together just for business who crack up.’

Two Musketeers Anything to pass the time: George and Ringo fool around with fencing swords back stage. A Scalextric model racing-car set went with the Beatles everywhere. They competed fiercely against each other and never seemed to tire of the game.

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today, Terence Spencer (1994)

[laserenitissima]

This is actually sad. It's miraculous that they didn't get sick of each other and break up during that time, because if they had we wouldn't have had any records from Sgt. Pepper onwards, and that would be a tragedy. Not to mention that they would have lost their friendships with each other.

I suppose that because the Beatlemania stage of their career was over by the end of 1966 that kept them from going completely off the rails. They seemed to have more freedom to move around in the world after that. Yes, many drugs were taken, but all four seemed to hang on to reality to a varying extent. I'm also sure their families contributed to that. I can't imagine John's Aunt Mimi, or Paul's family letting them get away with expecting to be waited on hand and foot.

[laserenitissima]

Paulapalooza

The Paul McCartney Project has many links regarding Paul's recent activity around the launch of The Boys of Dungeon Lane! Looking at the credits listing for the songs, it might have been called McCartney 4 at a different time, since the instruments of many songs were played solely by Paul.

I haven't been able to watch every show Paul has appeared on, but I have seen most of the SNL clips and the delightful interviews with Tom Holland from The Rest is History, and Marina Hyde and Richard Osman's interview with him for The Rest is Entertainment.

The Paul McCartney Project

[royaltyisshe64]

in addition to hm's insane belief that she's a hugely successful supermodel, the thing that stuck out to me the most was her little anti-marijuana rant. really? that's what you're going with? do you NOT know who you're marrying?

i have to admit that because there are receipts of hm being a huge liar, i think a lot of that was just blown up stories that probably had some small grain of truth to them, but she manipulated the anecdotes to make herself into wonder woman. you got your leg amputated and you're walking on a prosthetic leg within 6 weeks and going to balls in gowns in 8 weeks? yeah, i'm calling bullshit on that one. there are other timeline issues i had, but that sticks out to me the most. and how fast her agency became successful and she sold it. that sounded all completely made up. there's no way she had a stable of close to 100 models working steadily within months of setting up shop and then she sold the business because it was such a well-run machine that it was becoming tedious and boring. that was a huge lol for me.

i also hated how the she made paul's 9/11 benefit concert and song *her* idea. paul is a known activist. he certainly didn't need her prodding to come up with that idea.

i will admit that i cried at a couple of the amputee stories. especially the little girl who was missing both legs. also the 17yo cancer patient who got to go to harrod's with chris eubanks. i cried when she died, though you could tell that was definitely where it was heading.

i know that as a writer, you need to find your own voice to tell your story. but for a lot of it, i think she (or the ghostwriter. there's no way she actually wrote that. just sayin'...) was trying to be funny or clever, but she came across as just a bitch.

one last thing... when she was finally modelling in paris, she said how she ended her contract because she was so lonely. yet, no matter who she mentions, they are her closest best friend in the world. then she has a make-up artist that she once worked with move into her house? that was kind of sketchy.

i really appreciate all your work on the whole hm clusterfuck project. i want to read about it and know about it, but i'm not interested in her enough to do my own research. so i LOVE that you do all this to make it easy. though i did look up the story of richard branson carrying her down the steps at that beauty pageant event they were judging because that sounded like a huge embellishment. i didn't find a picture of the moment, but i did find an article from 1995 with quotes from each of them talking about it. so at least we know that one actually happened.

Thank you so much for a) actually reading the thing and b) sharing your thoughts! I really appreciate it so much; the knowledge that folks find this stuff interesting/elucidating make the hand cramps and mental suffering (lol) well worth it.

Oh, totally re: the weed rant. I knew that Paul's drug use was a major issue between them, and I totally buy that Paul was overindulging as their relationship began to descend into turbohell and stressors mounted, but I think that even a very occasional joint on his part would have been viewed as excessive and intolerable by her, with her very black-and-white thinking. I also think her stance on weed was the primary factor behind Paul publicly shifting to being very coy about his drug use and at least pretending to have quit - but now that B's an adult, he's once again at liberty to be less cagy (pretty flagrant, in fact).

To me, the wildest bit of timeline (and skiing correspondent @idontwanttospoiltheparty confirms that this is insane unless you're hurling yourself down the slopes with unhinged frat-boy recklessness) is her going to Slovenia immediately after having a breast reduction and a resorbed ectopic pregnancy (oh, and apparently a second ectopic pregnancy as well) and, with no prior experience, skiing black runs in less than a week. Like????? Ma'am????? You can, I suppose, have some kind of innate skiing gift, but the way she's describing the unusual form she had to adopt because she'd literally just had stitches in her chest out makes me think that, barring some truly preternatural ability, that is ludicrous.

Honestly, all the stories where she abruptly changes course when things are running "too smoothly" or are "too easy" - like her Incredible Magical Modeling Agency or getting bored/lonely while being the highest-paid model in all France or whatever the fuck, lol - feel very revealing to me, even if the specifics are potentially complete bullshit. Scenarios where she's not struggling to overcome adversity (and is therefore both perpetual victim and permanent superhero) aren't interesting to her, either to live or to recount. For that reason, among others (I'm not here trying to simplify things to Thing 100% Her Fault She Bad/Crazy/Whatever), I think she may have consciously and unconsciously sabotaged her relationship with Paul, because it was becoming too easy and Mr. I-Can-Fix-Them-No-Really-I-Can was making the difficulty level of her life way too low. If you look at the intentions she's stating at the end of A Single Step - that she wants to slow down and work less (and, implicitly, have a baby) - it flies in the face of her later characterization that all this was being forced upon her by Paul. (She even uses identical phrasing in her allegations against Paul when she's talking about her first husband and other career-killing boyfriends!) And Paul is described as "knowing better" than getting in the way when she's determined to go do something, which is ultimately the conclusion Mr. Justice Bennett reached in assessing their relationship and the veracity of her claims. Now, of course, she could just be putting an equally fantastical, positive spin on it in her book - but that is the trouble with unreliable narrators. Do we err on the side of believing the nice things she says about Paul or the (contradictory) allegations she makes? What balance do we strike in trying to get to the truth? It's a difficult call to make, especially when you're working with a pro-Paul bias, lol. He's not a saint - like, I completely believe that he lost his temper and said some very nasty things at very high volume; that he was drinking and smoking way too much, especially during times of stress; that he can be A Lot to handle (in terms of the amount of energy and attention required to be his girlfriend/wife); and that he did not provide the unqualified, unquestioning career support she demanded (which is... not technically a bad thing, but would be interpreted as such by her) - but her more positive descriptors are often more consistent with other accounts of Paul.

To your point about the Concert for New York City, I can believe that Paul (who literally agreed to Live Aid at the last possible second and was hemming and hawing about whether he could be the Best Boy at goddamn Carpool Karaoke lmao) needed a bit of cajoling. It does seem on-brand for Paul to be worried about the perception of capitalizing on a tragedy when he's got a new album coming out - in fact, I dimly recall (bearing in mind that I was ten years old lol) there actually being some discourse about that at the time. But in a lot of the endeavors HM describes, it does feel like "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting to include her in processes where her contribution was either not instrumental or purely her willfully inserting herself.

Also re: the whole Paris thing, which is so weird from start to finish (if I had a nickel for every time HM describes someone being so psychosexually obsessed with her that they physically attack her and try to hold her captive, I'd have two nickels and that still feels like too many nickels)... there is considerable talk - including on her Wikipedia page, which doesn't imply veracity ofc, but it's been there for ages, which often isn't the case with assertions that could be considered libelous - that that modeling contract never existed at all and that she was a kept woman of some description, running in the kind of circles that included Adnan Khashoggi. It is very, very weird that she never mentions the cosmetics firm by name, or any similar details of her actual work, and I can't find any other source that does. (Which obviously doesn't preclude such a thing existing and me just not being able to locate it.) I am not here to throw shade at anyone doing sex work or glamour photography or whatever - and I can completely understand someone, especially when they're the girlfriend of one of the most famous and beloved figures in the world and trying defend themselves from a tabloid onslaught, not being upfront about that. But that narrative makes a whole lot more sense than something that, frankly, doesn't sound like it could have been fiscally viable for even the largest company's advertising budget. Plus, it is just A Fact that she did more than "three sessions" or "a few weeks' work" doing softcore images. I cannot imagine that, were her characterization accurate, the German sex manual would be that much easier to locate than several months'-worth of high-end French cosmetic ads.

Anyway, thank you so so much for engaging with me on this - it means the absolute world that my bizarre level of knowledge about this relationship is not for naught and that people are interested and want to talk about how cuckoo-bananas this whole thing is, because I feel like we can learn a lot about Paul from this whole episode!!!! And also have... "fun" with unreliable narrators, lol.

[hootiepgh]

you totally nailed her with this descriptor: perpetual victim and permanent superhero. THAT IS HER! i wanted to mention her penchant for victim casting, but couldn't find the right words to say it. you did, though!

i forgot to mention the skiing thing! YES! THAT WAS SO BIZARRE TO ME! i've been skiing. i can be adventurous, but only two levels above the bunny slopes is all i'll go. no black diamond runs for me. those are scary. so, having said that, there's no way in hell she went from the bunny slopes to black diamonds in, like, a few days, though she'd never skied before. especially after massive health issues, including major surgery.

yeah, paul can definitely be sensitive (rightfully so) about taking away support of a charity event by having one of his own projects ready to release. you're absolutely right that he would have been reticent about doing a 9/11 event with a new album around the corner, so he probably did need a bit of prodding. (i can believe that bit of the scenario.) but you're also right that "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that particular anecdote. just another example of heather the superhero. (let's support those first responders! /s) i think she just wanted to insert herself into an important worldwide event.

i hadn't thought about it this way when i was reading the book, but now that you've pointed it out, i agree with you about paul turning coy about his pot use. that timeline works. paul is definitely no angel. people always say the worst, most hurtful things to the people they love the most, so i'm sure there were loud, nasty fights. especially when the relationship started falling apart, but, and maybe this is just the paul fangirl in me, i will never believe he physically abused her. or linda. at that point, she was just trying to drag him through the mud and get what she could by cutting him down. luckily the judge saw through that particular ruse.

something i also hadn't thought about until you said it was the idea of her as a kept woman/sugarbaby. that definitely makes sense. where there any of her pictures of her work from paris in the physical books? because i would think that if that's a period she's so proud of since it launched her career, i think she'd want to show those off. especially if it had been for a prestigious company. which (you're right again!) definitely makes it weird that she never mentioned the name of the client she modeled for. she also definitely played down how much glamour work she did. a long time ago i did an image search of her and some of those photos came up and i was surprised by how many different ones there were. i never searched again, so they may have been deleted for all i know. but she definitely did a lot more than she implied. i'm sure that german sex manual has been buried so deep by now.

thank you again for doing this project!

[royaltyisshe64]

Yeah, I am personally very skeptical of the allegations of physical abuse she made against Paul - it's theoretically possible that Paul changed his behavior radically For This One Relationship and then changed it back (and I think that would have to be the case, bc Paul doesn't have the inescapable iron grip on his image necessary to totally prevent information about himself he doesn't want to be widely available from making it to the public eye, whatever folks suggest; there would either be folks keeping quiet who have no motivation to do so or people who do smacktalk him for some reason sitting on stories that could really harm him), but unlikely. Poor Dot™ seems to be the actual outlier in terms of Paul's bad behavior being bad in somewhat uncharacteristic ways, which is more feasible coming from someone in his late teens for whom this is probably the first Really Serious relationship than it is from someone in his 50s/60s coming out of an overall successful marriage. I could see Paul pushing HM away from him, maybe - which has the potential to be more of an issue than "normal" due to her disability - but a wine bottle shiv is a wholly different level of violence, and doesn't seem like something that's going to crop up out of nowhere later in life without some kind of neurological/cognitive issue coming into play.

I'm also interested in her seemingly contradictory statements about her alcohol consumption - she purports to have sworn off "alcohol" after the incident that involved vomiting oven chips and peas (... don't ask), but she must have meant hard liquor, because she definitely references drinking wine and that sort of thing later. And then, in the fabled divorce papers, there's this massive wine budget included in her projected expenses, even though she again says she doesn't drink. So like... huh??? Not That It's Any Of My Damn Business... but huh??????

(Also I'm really sad about some of the "supporting characters" I liked vanishing from the narrative with no update. Norman, Guy-Whose-House-Her-Mother-Lived-In, you will always be famous to me! She includes a picture in A Single Step of her and her half-sister Claire at her grandma's funeral, so she must have died at some point, but it didn't merit a mention in the book proper for some reason.)

[laserenitissima]

I started skiing when I was six, the age when you feel no fear. Even so, it still took me a couple of years to work my way up to black diamond runs. No way in hell did HM ski them after such a short amount of time, and certainly not just after having surgery. She would have gone down hard and burst her stitches.

WRT Paul and pot - Heather knew when she hooked up with him that he smoked but still tried to get Paul McCartney, famous pot enthusiast, to stop smoking it, which was always doomed to failure. This is a guy who was such a big stoner that he actually went to jail for 10 days because of his love of pot.* If she hated pot that much, this should have been a dealbreaker for her.

I'm curious about whether Nancy already liked getting high, or if it was something Paul introduced her to, and she was game for it. Nancy clearly knew who he was when they got married, though, and it wasn't a dealbreaker, regardless of her experience with pot before that point.

*Yes, I know that he said he put it in his suitcase because he thinks that subconsciously he wanted to get caught so he could pull the plug on Wings. But the fact that he had that massive amount of pot for just himself and Linda is the point.

[royaltyisshe64]

Do you like Michael Jackson and are you seeing the biopic or did you already?

Michael Jackson is... a complex figure, and I personally haven't quite worked out how to balance that fact with his artistic output, some of which I really enjoy. Smooth Criminal and Beat It are all-time bangers and, obviously, I am partial to Say Say Say; he's an incredible performer and a pioneer in many respects, and his place in the cultural canon is completely warranted. But there's also a lot to unpack, which I feel singularly unqualified to do.

I am also terrible at New (as in chronologically recent) Movies, lol. It's unlikely that I will be viewing the biopic in a timely manner for that reason, if nothing else.

[laserenitissima]

This is how I feel about him. When I was a kid I watched the Jackson 5 cartoon. The Jacksons were a mainstay of radio in the 1970s, then Michael came out with the fantastic Off the Wall in 1979, and just exploded from there. Thriller (the album) came out when I was a sophomore in high school. The video premier for the song Thriller was a massive event on MTV. I was one of those kids who made sure I was in front of the TV when it debuted. If you weren't old enough to remember all of that, it's hard to explain how much Michael Jackson dominated pop music in that era. I never bought that record, because at the time I was one of those people who, the more a band/singer got popular, the less I wanted to engage. It's not that I didn't like the music, I did, but it was played SO MUCH that I didn't even need to own the album to hear it all of the time. The only two songs from that record that didn't get airplay were Baby Be Mine and The Lady In My Life. All of the others were singles. I just looked up the track list, and even though I haven't heard some of those singles in decades, I still can sing all of them. They were absolutely ubiquitous.

[destrokkit]

Paul McCartney on Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson (2021) Ep. 2 "Sampling" Pt. 1

[the-paper-apricot]

He's not named here by Ronson (he should have been), but I suspect the "French composer" was Pierre Schaeffer. Here's his 'Cinq etudes de bruits' from 1948. The first movement is 'Étude aux chemins de fer', composed of railway sounds.

The third and fourth movements are composed of pre-recorded piano sounds contributed by Pierre Boulez. In the fifties Boulez also composed pieces for magnetic tape. In fact Boulez had a long involvement with the BBC and it's my own headcanon that he and Paul McCartney must have met at some point, with both of them working in London, but it may never have happened. :)

[sgtpeppers]

getting a george tshirt made that says “but I don’t want to go on the roof” for this

[laserenitissima]

If they don't get Paul and Ringo to do a rooftop concert for the official opening, they're idiots.

[thewalrusespublicist]

Hello thewalrusespublicist! I appreciate your research and attitude to empiric evidence and I truly do like your blog.

I am reaching out to you because I'm interested in what is your view on people who hold some position of authority in the beatledom who hold the belief that Paul's grief and love for John is to a certain degree performative.

For example, Yoko said that only after John's death it became important for Paul to let the world know that John loved him and that Paul himself loved John (implying he's doing it for clout) and that it was up to her to pick up the scraps every time Paul hurt John when he opened up to him and that nobody has ever hurt John the way Paul did. She also said the love has been lost both ways.

Mark Lewisohn also claimed that he thinks Paul was obviously shocked by the news but that he wasn't really mourning evidenced by the fact that he had been spreading untruths very soon after John's death (and because he's an experienced Paul McCartney observer).

Now, what is curious to me is why Yoko is apparently claiming something else publicly (there is also an audio of her and Sean celebrating Paul's reviews tanking) and privately to Paul (who claimed she called to tell him John really loved him. This reminds me of the recent "Yoko called Paul to ask him whether John was gay as if she didn't know" controversy).

Personally, I do tend to at least question Paul's claims of Yoko calling him because it makes no sense to me at all she would be doing that, I am also of the opinion that "All We Are Saying" is not John being positive about Paul at all (especially if you read the whole thing, not just excerpts), rather just very hurt and there is an audio interview for the Love You Make book with Paul calling John and Yoko 'suspicious people' about six months before John's death and more.

I completely understand how people view the opinion that someone is faking their grief as callous and I think it's completely believable for someone to grief their loved one for the rest of their life but I think it's also important to take an emotional step back to see whether there may not be any truth to the fact that it may not be completely as it seems in this particular case without the need to through ourselves out there for a person we don't know personally.

And if Yoko and Lewisohn are talking out of their asses, why?

Hi Anon,

Thank you for your question!

You have sent me a very complex question, which I have a very simple answer to:

Yoko and Lewisohn are talking out of their asses.

I'll explain my reasoning in two sections.

I am well aware that I do have a strong, yet informed, opinion on this which others will disagree with and people are entitled to those opinions as I am to mine. I have a background studying death practices and culture around death and also listen to a lot of podcasts and videos on the topic of death and grief. I would highly recommend anyone that thinks Paul is over-egging or being slightly performative about his grief to listen to accounts of other people that have gone through traumatic loss. Their stories and responses to the loss are near identical in many cases to what Paul has said about John. They dream about their loved ones, think about them everyday and WANT to talk about them all the time. To say that Paul partially wants to talk about John all the time is because we the viewer, listener etc. want to hear him talk about John all the time is in my mind a pretty distasteful and unfair mischaracterization of Paul and reduces him down to a showman stereotype rather than a real person. It's rare that grieving people get the platform that he has to talk about a loved one to the extent that he has. One example I will use from a podcast I have been listening to is a man who among other losses lost his brother in a traumatic way when he was in his early twenties. He felt he couldn't talk about it or process it for years until his mid fifties where he wants to talk about it constantly and does so by spreading the message through his podcast.

My question related to this is: how widespread are we meant to believe the performance is? Is he performing to interviewers over many hours like during the Man on the Run interviews where Morgan became convinced he thought of John all the time? Is he performing whilst bursting into tears during private interviews which are meant to be used for biographies and not for public engagement? Is he performing to his music friends by crying in front of them about a dream he had with John as late as 2019? Was he performing when he made the painting of his and John's faces merged, the classical musical piece recounting John's dying moments and the upcoming movie with John as a main character? Or is all of this actually an extremely human reaction of a man who has lost a soulmate of his?

Now for Yoko and Lewisohn, lets start with Lewisohn as it's more straightforward. First up, never ever trust a man who says that he is a very experienced Paul McCartney observer. Above all because Paul's nearest and dearest have struggled to know what he's thinking, let alone a biographer who has never been on intimate terms with him. Lewisohn had at some point had personal dealings with Paul and had grown to not like him and grew biased against him. A perfect example of this bias is Lewisohn claiming that Paul stopped the Wings magazine because he no longer looked good in pictures, despite it being in the direct aftermath of Linda's death. In Lewisohn's world, Paul's vanity and egotism trumps all private feelings of grief and loss and the root of his behaviour. I personally cannot agree with this take and find that example with the Wings magazine alone shockingly insensitive and shallow. And what untruths are these exactly? What he said in a phone call that was meant to be private and was him ranting? Or something else? I can't think of an untruth Paul said directly but please correct if wrong.

As for Yoko, its integral to remember that Yoko said those comments publicly and privately were at two very separate stages in time. She said those things privately close to John's death when the two were having a truce period and Paul and Linda came round to see her. I am surprised you would question the veracity of Yoko saying these things to Paul as Paul to my knowledge has never lied in that way about anything like that and it's in my opinion highly uncharacteristic for him to lie like that so close to John's death about something that is so personal to him and then repeatedly over the years. This is a man who questioned whether John loved him for years, he isn't going to lie about something that emotionally significant for him. As for the calling to tell him John might be gay, she was telling random guests that at the dinner table and had previously sent random postcards to Paul about his horoscope pre John dying, it's not that unlikely.

For the public statements, she said those excerpts when her relationship with Paul was once again in the pits. Paul was doing well at the time and the fact of the matter is imv that Yoko and Paul naturally don't get on as people, don't understand each other and the history between them makes it worse. And Paul was right in that interview, Yoko and John were suspicious people, and Yoko is quite paranoid and has a history of saying things that are true to her rather than an objective truth. She said stuff like that publicly because it hurts Paul, it puts Paul down in the press, she's insecure about John's legacy and was the ear to a lot of John's rants about Paul and her and John shared in a lot of distorted thinking. I'm not saying that Paul hasn't done anything that Yoko wouldn't fairly feel hurt and distrustful about, but overall she is a poor source on what Paul thinks or feels, especially when she's mad at him.

And finally for the not very nice quotes going back and forth between the two, yes I am of the opinion that there was a lot between John and Paul that needed to be sorted still in 1980. However, that doesn't mean that people don't grieve as a result, the grief becomes more complex and in some ways more traumatic. It's rare that human relationships run smoothly or without difficulty or that grievers only have positive feelings. I get the strong impression that Paul also holds rage and confusion towards John, that doesn't negate the love and grief though.

I think most telling on how Paul feels and fared in the aftermath of John's death are his actual nearest and dearest who out of anyone would have the best grasp on his private thoughts. Mike McCartney said that John was a soulmate to Paul and people didn't realise the amount of love there, Linda said that no one could understand the depth of bond John and Paul had, Paul's son James said he didn't feel comfortable talking about John with his dad as it's too delicate a topic and Paul had been knocked for six by John dying and all the children found John's stool for him as a Christmas present as they knew how important it was to their dad. If the people who know him best in the world talk about a soulmate connection and emotional devastation in reaction to John's death, i'm far more inclined to believe them than anyone else.

[laserenitissima]

I find it completely plausible that Paul thinks about John every day and has dreams about him. My mother died 15 years ago and I think about her every day and have dreams that she and other family members are still alive. It's not fun to wake up from that to realize that it was just a dream. My father died 2.5 years ago and I think of him every day, too. Their deaths were terrible, but in both of their cases I knew it was coming (mom had pancreatic cancer, dad had kidney failure and had signed a DNR), unlike Paul, who didn't get to say goodbye to his best friend and, yes, soulmate because John was murdered. So I don't have any problem believing that Paul's grief is real, and not performative at all.

[hqbeatles]

[laserenitissima]

Love this! Porter Wagoner's hair is something else, and his jacket is fantastic. Dolly is the best, of course. I love how she has her hand on Heather's shoulder. Paul must have been so thrilled at meeting them! They look thrilled at meeting him, too.

[hqbeatles]

[laserenitissima]

Angie McCartney I think was only in her 30s at this time, but she's dressed like she's 65. I think the hairdo, glasses, string of pearls, and hat are really aging. Maybe she was deliberately going for that look, since she was so much younger than Jim?

Paul and Mike look fabulous, but that's not surprising.

[muzaktomyears]

Letters and photos from Beatles’ early days to go on show in Hamburg

Exclusive: The collection, including donations from Paul McCartney’s brother Mike, shows band’s development in early 60s

A rare set of letters and photos from the early days of the Beatles, in which they write about feeling like stars for the first time, is to go on display in Hamburg.

The collection, from an influential period when the band lived in the German city, includes the only letter in existence with words from both Paul McCartney and John Lennon, which was written to the bassist’s brother, Mike McCartney.

The free exhibition, which runs from 8 to 25 May and is part of Hamburg’s annual port festival, Hafengeburtstag, revolves around the original five members of the band during a period that massively shaped their sound and look between 1960 and 62.

Mike McCartney, who donated some of the letters to the collection put together by the Liverpool city region combined authority and the Hamburg senate, said: “It’s fascinating, because they [give] you so many secrets about them as they are developing.”

“It was quite extraordinary, because our kid is just saying what’s happening there in a foreign land, over the water. And it was a very important stage in their development,” Mike told the Guardian.

The letters, also gathered from The Cavern Club and the Liverpool Beatles Museum, reveal the thoughts of Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, as well as those of the original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, who died shortly after the Hamburg period from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21, and the original drummer, Pete Best, who was hired specifically for their first visit to Hamburg.

In a letter from Best to his mother, he recalls how he, Lennon and McCartney felt like stars boarding their plane, having been interviewed by a member of the press about them being voted Liverpool’s number one band.

Photographs taken by Sutcliffe, who was instrumental in the band’s style – and was the first to have the band’s moptop hairstyle, given to him by his fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr – also feature in the exhibition. He decided to stay in Hamburg with Kirchherr while the other bandmates returned to Liverpool.

Mike McCartney said the Beatles did shows “non-stop” during their time in Hamburg, famously performing for eight hours some evenings. “They were on all these pills to keep them going, uppers and downers,” he said. When Paul returned from Hamburg, he was noticeably thinner, Mike said, but it was clear the band had gone to the next level.

“The music when they then played around Liverpool – by god, could you hear the professionalism. The difference was that they had come out of Hamburg, done the hard work – I mean, more than hard work. It was like they were like chalk and cheese when they came back to Liverpool. And they were just out and out the top group in Liverpool, because they were so together, so united, so different.”

One letter from Paul to Mike, written in May 1962, gives an insight into Hamburg’s flourishing live music scene, with Paul revealing how they had been told that the American rock’n’roll legends Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis could soon be visiting the city, and how Paul hoped the Beatles could perform with Berry.

It also features a lengthy passage from Lennon, dictated to his bandmate, which starts with a whimsical poem about keeping your chin up and commiserates with Mike for not getting a job as a hairdresser, without knowing if he actually got it or not, and goes on for several pages, with characters such as Jesus and the F1 driver Stirling Moss all making an appearance.

Liverpool Combined Authority said it was potentially looking at bringing the exhibition home in the future, after a BBC six-part series being filmed in Hamburg looking at the Beatles’ early days.

Mike said he had not kept the letters for any particular reason initially, and that he “didn’t even realise their significance” until very recently. His wife had called him a hoarder for keeping these items for more than 60 years, he said. “But I’m glad that I did, to a certain extent. Because if I hadn’t hoarded, then you wouldn’t have these unique letters.”

Mike was also a musician, in the band the Scaffold, which has a box set of singles and albums available, and he was a photographer, taking pictures of the Beatles in their early days, which later were collected into the book Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool.

He said he and his brother had moved on from using letters to communicate. “Now he does FaceTime, looking like a scruffy get,” Mike said. “He never shaves. I always say ‘you scruffy bugger’. We just talk about nothing … and everything.”

(source)

[laserenitissima]

I hope this ends up in Liverpool - it should! I'd be able to see it. Also, Mike is the best. He and Paul probably talk to each other exactly the same as they have since they were kids.

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

i like your blog and i like your opinions, you don’t fall into overanalyzing john and paul’s relationship. there are so many blogs where it gets annoying because they analyze every little thing john and paul did to the point of treating them like extensions of each other instead of complex individuals with their own issues. it’s obvious we don’t fully know john and paul’s story, we probably only know the tip of the iceberg, and paul will likely keep things to himself because he’s a private man, but there’s a point where a lot of people fall into a completely unhealthy fantasy. these men are from the 60s/70s, they have a very different worldview, and some people struggle to recognize that.

Thanks anon, that's very nice of you to say! :)

To me, real people just aren't puzzles to solve, even when they refer to "secret codes" once in a blue moon in a song. None of us are reducible to one single relationship in the way shipping fandoms tend to do – that behaviour is (more or less) fine for interpretations of art, but we are dealing with assertions about objective facts here.

John and Paul's circumstances were extraordinary in many ways, but there's a certain ordinariness at the heart of their bond which is deeply compelling to me. When John did his "spider hand", it was almost definitely no deeper than a way he liked getting Paul's attention. Me and my best friend have tons of little mannerisms like that, and they're all no more and no less than a continuous stream of non-verbal affirmations of our love for each other.

And that ordinariness is complex – it's a lot more complex than Paul making vast swaths of his discography directly and literally about John.

People have objected to me referring to the recent tenor of Beatles tumblr discourse as a conspiracy theory, but the fact of the matter is that being on the constant lookout for secret clues confirming your theory is just a textbook conspiracy theory, regardless of whether this particular theory is "harmless".

If you see Paul saying a song is about a girl named Jasmine and your kneejerk reaction is that he is lying because he didn't name the people you want the song to be about and you don't think this is a problem because of course you would never apply this sort of thought pattern to more serious issues then… all I can say is I think you are probably overestimating yourself. Humans are suggestive creatures.

Truth is found by formulating a hypothesis and continuously and fearlessly asking yourself why you might be wrong. You stress-test your assumptions and biases, adjust your hypothesis accordingly, until you've exhausted all alternative explanations.* I don't pretend to do this perfectly – it's hard work and it's always comfortable to retreat back to "what I already think makes sense though!" And we're dealing with a lot of unfalsifiable claims here anyway. But one should at least be aware that that's what those are – if Paul could not say anything to you that would convince you McLennon wasn't real, then, in the absence of ironclad proof of McLennon, your belief in it is virtually meaningless to me.

*"no straight explanation" pays lip service to this concept but it's almost exclusively used in bad faith. Most of the time I read it as "I have no sense of imagination."

[laserenitissima]

100%. I have nothing to add to this.

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

oh, i actually wasn’t even questioning paul’s sexuality, i just wanted to know if that theory i read was real 😭 i’ve also seen people mention some kind of “love letter” between brian and paul, but idk how legit that is

tbh i’ve kinda given up on that whole topic because his side is so ambiguous it gets boring, there’s basically no direct info. it’s always john, ian james, mal evans, tara browne, and robert fraser, but the last two were clearly just platonic, and ian james just feels like a close childhood friend

i read a twitter thread saying paul cheated on linda with men and that some of those guys were basically “confirming” mccartney’s bisexuality, and that paul was super image-conscious and allegedly told his manager/publicist to scrub all that 😭 idk if that’s even real. and that diana ross supposedly saw paul and john at a gay club?? but again, it’s all just rumors and it stays in this weird limbo. i’m not even fully convinced. paul is literally an older man living in a time where being gay isn’t taboo anymore, so it would make sense for him to come out if that were the case… unless it’s about privacy or shame or whatever, idk. i feel like i’m lowkey leaning toward that idea just because of what i’ve read, but it’s still really shaky. i think i’m also leaning toward the idea that maybe paul just isn’t comfortable with the bisexual label and prefers to be seen as a man who’s obsessed with women, but obviously i don’t know, that’s his privacy

(this whole paul situation is starting to give me GAYLOR theory vibes i’m sorry 😭 it’s so corny but idk how else to describe it. if i said all that on twitter they’d crucify me 🫩)

i think there’s an interview where paul talks about john and brian during that spain trip, and he says he only ever saw john fucks with women, but that he kinda believes something might’ve happened between them there, he just brushes it off as a “deviation” from john 💀 and it’s so funny to me because it’s like.

Ah! So the love letter story originates from Francie Schwartz' book. She said she found it in Paul's car (bear in mind that would've been almost a year after Brian had died). Francie's generally questionable credibility aside, I don't think she elaborated further on the contents of the letter so whether she was herself reading into Brian's words (and we know Brian could get flowery and dramatic) or whether the letter contained an unambiguous confession is hard to say. Either way, the story isn't implausible, I just don't take it as a given. (Also I would expect if it was true that Paul would have compartmentalized that away and possibly even forgotten about it since)

Concerning men people link to Paul, so much of it feels to me like a transparent attempt to bolster McLennon specifically. These days, Robert Fraser is mostly brought up as someone who ostensibly made John jealous. Tara Browne even more so, since Paul doesn't really talk about him, and it's like all a strange metaphor: Paul wouldn't trip with John, but he would with Tara and We All Know that LSD is just a stand-in for sex, ergo ipso facto etc

As much as I criticize some of the rhetoric on here, I have to imagine it's worse on twitter, because the format encourages shooting off at the mouth with the punchiest one liner (in a way I think has done a lot of damage to internet discourse in general). I have never come across a source confirming Paul cheated on Linda, let alone with a man, and five years into this fandom and following this speculation, I cannot imagine that that would be a thing without my knowing of it (except if it's that member of Fleetwood Mac I wanna say who claimed Paul and George invited him to a threesome....? Didn't that guy like join a cult or something though 💀 I only half remember this story, my main memory was that the source didn't come across as stable and the claim was generally outlandish LMAOOOO)

Thinking it over, I think you're twitter person is possibly taking the plot of the book Rock Bottom (written by Paul's ex-publicist) as a literal description of Paul's behaviour.... That's a whole Other thing to unpack, so I'll leave it at that here.

I think it's possible Paul is bi and private about it or doesn't actually identify as such, but the concept that he's intentionally "dropping hints" in 2026 instead of just coming out irritates me lmao, makes me actively less sympathetic. I don't think that's a real thing, to be clear, I think it betrays a certain Everything Is About/For ME attitude many of these theories carry with them — this idea that content is specifically for you: not only is Paul bi, he wants you in particular to know and he is referencing this fact in a way you can understand (instead of say weaving actual inside jokes of his and John's that we as a third party would not be privy to into his lyrics). Incidentally, that is why the Gaylor comparison is often quite apt. (And one of my hot takes is going on lyrics alone, Gaylors have a stronger case, which is why when people bring up Paul's lyrics I'm like "well. none of this is Cruel Summer tho, is it?" even though I'm not a Gaylor.)

To your last point, I just don't have trouble interpreting Paul as slightly bigoted (especially in decades-old interviews) without feeling the need to wholly condemn him because I realize his heart has mostly been in the right place for most of his life. And I think his relationship with John is too complicated as is for it to be a fruitful avenue for Paul's personal growth.

[laserenitissima]

There's a lot of confirmation bias when it comes to anything John and Paul-related. People who are 100% certain that McLennon is real will find confirmation of that in anything Paul says that sounds even remotely like he's confirming it, but will disregard anything he says which denies it.

I always feel like I have to offer a disclaimer that I don't have a problem with the idea of McLennon, and if John and Paul did have some kind of sexual relationship (consummated or not), it's absolutely fine with me. It's totally fine for them to be bi (not that they need my permission of course!).

However, the reality is that it's conjecture, as there's never been anything either John or Paul has ever said which comes near to confirming that kind of a relationship. If you believe it you're going to read confirmation of it into everything they've said in the past about each other, songs they've written in the past, and stuff Paul has said in the nearly 46 years since John's death. That isn't even touching on the photos people look at and declare that because they're looking at each other in a certain way, or if John is looking at Paul, or vice-versa, it means that they were banging.

What they have said about each other definitely confirms a huge amount of love and respect for each other and the other's talent (How Do You Sleep and Too Many People notwithstanding), and also a pretty codependent, obsessive, and occasionally toxic relationship. There's a ton of proof for all of that. If Paul comes out (pun intended) and says he and John had a relationship, great! But until then, we just have what Paul says about them to go on, and I'm not really all that interested in second-guessing him, finding "clues" in stuff he says, or labeling him as something that he might not be.

Sometimes I think that some people who are all-in for McLennon are perhaps far more interested in that then they are in the Beatles as a group or in their music. The music is #1 for me. Their crazy story is fascinating, don't get me wrong, but the music is far more important. We wouldn't even be talking about them here if their music wasn't so fantastic and ground-breaking. No one would care about Lennon and McCartney's relationship if they had the same amount of success as Gerry and the Pacemakers.