Paul McCartney: ‘I shook, unable to lift my head off the pillow’
When the Beatles split up in 1970, Paul McCartney was at crisis point. He escaped to Scotland and a year later started Wings. Here, in an exclusive extract from his new book, he reveals what happened next
Compiled from hours of conversation, plus historical interviews and newly discovered, previously unheard accounts from Paul McCartney’s personal archive, a new book, Wings: the Story of a Band on the Run, is a remarkably revealing insight into the life of the world’s most famous rock star. The story begins in 1970, at High Park, a very remote and basic farm without a bath, near Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula in the Scottish Highlands.
On the end of the Beatles
Paul McCartney Leaving the Beatles, or having the Beatles leave me, whichever way you look at it, was very difficult because that was my life’s job. So, when it stopped, it was like, “What do we do now?” In truth, I didn’t have any idea. There were two options: either don’t do music and think of something else, or do music and figure out how you’re going to do that.
Linda McCartney I remember Paul saying, “Help me take some of this weight off my back,” and I said, “Weight? What weight? You guys are the princes of the world. You’re the Beatles.” But in truth Paul was not in great shape. He was drinking a lot, playing a lot and, while surrounded by women and fans, not very happy. We all thought, “Oh, the Beatles and flower power,” but those guys had every parasite and vulture on their backs.
Paul McCartney I remember lying awake at night shaking, which has not happened to me since. One night, I awoke and I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. I thought, “If I don’t do this [lift my head], I’ll suffocate.” I remember hardly having the energy to pull myself up, but with a great struggle I pulled my head and lay on my back and thought, “That was a bit near.”
Linda McCartney Scotland was like nothing I’d ever lived in. It was the most beautiful land you have ever seen; [the farm] was way at the end of nowhere. To me, it was the first feeling I’d ever had of civilisation dropping away. I felt like it was in another era. It was so beautiful up there — clean, so different from all the hotels and limousines and the music business, so it was quite a relief, but it was very derelict.
Paul McCartney I went up there before I met Linda, and I didn’t really like it. I’d expected Scotland to be forests and mountains, and this was hills and virtually no trees. It was underwhelming. I met my neighbour there, an old guy named Ian McDougall. Ian was a real Highlander; you could barely understand what he was talking about. I worked out that I might try to catch the last word in the sentence. So he’d say something and I’d hear “sheep”, and I’d go, “Aye, sheep. The clipping of the sheep.” But I was a stranger there. Then, when I met Linda, she said, “Have you got a farm in Scotland? Can we go there?” We went, and suddenly I saw it through her eyes. And she loved it. Going up to Scotland was real freedom for us. It was an escape, our means of finding a new direction in life and having time to think about what we really wanted to do.
Linda McCartney It was very experimental and basic. In fact, on the track The Lovely Linda [from McCartney], you can hear the squeak of the garden door opening and closing.
Stella McCartney When Covid came and everyone went into isolation, I was like, “This doesn’t feel weird to me.” My parents chose isolation. That was a choice that they made to get as far away from reality as possible. And they achieved it. The driveway coming off the road to the farm — I don’t even know how many miles long that is, but it’s pretty isolated. We had a standing stone [an ancient monolith] outside the kitchen window, for crying out loud.
Mary McCartney They just closed ranks. They were like, “We love each other.” The only way to get through this is to get away from London, be really funky and just do the opposite of city life. Back to basics. Shearing sheep, picking potatoes, horse riding in the middle of nowhere, going to the beach with your kids, just being together. Sing, create music in your back room.
Paul McCartney We put our backs into it, tilling the fields, and grew all sorts in our vegetable garden. We had some seriously good turnips. I learnt some tricks from my dad and his flowers in our garden at home, so put those to good use up in Scotland. And, to this day, it never ceases to amaze me: I put a seed in the ground, the rain comes to water it, the sun comes to shine on it, then something grows and you can eat it… We didn’t have a bath. But next door to our little kitchen, there was a place where the farmers had cleaned the milking machinery. It was a tub that was three feet off the ground, a big galvanised tub. I said, “We should fill this with hot water. We can have a bath.”
The early days of Wings and going on tour
Paul McCartney Our idea was to go to universities and say, “Do you want us to play for you?” It was as simple and as mad as that.
Elaine (Smith) Woodhams [social secretary, University of Nottingham student union] That night, I was in the bar when I was approached by a guy. He said, “We’re with Paul McCartney’s new band, Wings, and we’re on the road looking for places to do impromptu gigs. Are you interested?” First thing I thought was that someone was winding me up, but I said, “Of course we’re interested.” He said, “If you’d like to, come outside and meet the boss and talk about the details.” I followed him outside. There was a red minibus parked in front of the Portland Building. He knocked on the window and the door slid back, and who should be sitting in the driving seat but Paul McCartney. My first impression was, “Wow!” I’d actually thought that when I got outside the building, I might be greeted by lots of people laughing or throwing buckets of cold water at me. Then I think I did the goldfish impression for a bit. Paul said, “My man tells me you’re up for it, so let’s talk about the details.” He said, “What’s the chance of playing the next evening?” I explained that I would have to get permission from the registrar.
Paul McCartney So we said, “We’ll come back tomorrow at noon, and we’ll charge 50p.”
Linda McCartney We stayed in a third-rate hotel there. The manager was a real Hitchcock — thought we were the lowest.
Denny Seiwell (drummer) I’ll never forget we were up north one night. And this night manager, this little bald fellow, came up to us and he had a kid’s pail. And he said, “Does one of you people own that black and white dog?” Paul goes, “Yeah, that’s my dog, Lucky. Why?” “Well, he’s running around the hallways and he shat in the hall. You’re gonna have to clean this up.” So Paul went and cleaned it up. You know, it was magical.
Paul McCartney The idea from the beginning had been to start small… You weren’t sure how you’d go down, because you hadn’t been there in a while, even though some of your songs had been popular. But you kept your eye on the news broadcasts. It was like, “Paul McCartney has not been here ten years.” It was great. It was what we’d been building towards. I’d left the Beatles. I’d started this whole new project from the ground up. And now, Wings was Wings, and not just a follow-up to the Beatles… We were looking for Wings to become something that people knew and loved. A big American tour.
Mary McCartney By the time they were in America for Wings Over America, it became a lot more apparent how famous my mum and dad were. Which before it hadn’t — we hadn’t had that first-hand experience of fans sort of chasing them down.
Paul McCartney That’s what we were aiming for. That’s what we thought when we started Wings. If we do it this way, the old-fashioned way, from square one, there will come a day when we’ll be at square one hundred… Against all the odds and all the trials — and in the face of a lot of harsh criticism — we suddenly woke up one day and realised we’d cracked it.
Recording Band on the Run in Lagos
Paul McCartney Amateurish isn’t quite the word, but even on the plane I got asked, “Would you like to see the landing?” I went, “Yeah, great.” It was jungle… Thick African forest. And it was cloudy. There’s a mist over it all. And the pilots are talking to each other. They say, “I don’t know, can you see the airport?” Because they obviously didn’t have instruments. And one of them is going, “Is that it over there?” Anyway, they landed. I think they went around a few times, but they found it and landed. So we had to get used to this kind of thing.
It was monsoon season, pissing down with rain… And they were building the studio when we got there… We said, “Where’s the vocal booth?” And they said, “Oh, we don’t have one.” So we were chatting to the guys and they were so nice, these two engineers. One was called Monday and the other was called Innocent. They were so great and, yes, very innocent. So we had to show them a few studio tricks. We said, “Well, look, we’ll get some wood, we’ll build a big box, and if you get some Perspex that you can look through, we’ll put that in the box and then seal it too, and have a little door.” So we taught them how to make a vocal booth. We had a kind of crazy time there.
We got mugged one night… [A car drove up and] six people jumped out. The little one had a knife — he was shaking, he was shitting himself, and so was I at this point. I’d suddenly realised what this was. And Linda is a ballsy chick. She’s screaming, “Don’t touch him! He’s a musician! He’s just like you. He’s a soul brother. Leave him alone!” She’s screaming at the top of her voice. “Come on. What do you want, man? Money? Here. You can have it. The tape? Sure! Take it. Camera? Yeah, go on, you can have it all. Go on.” They left. And they actually turned round and came back. We thought we’d dive into the bushes, but luckily they took another turn and screamed off in the car. I said, “Right, we walk fast, very fast, and don’t stop for anything.” Forced march. Got back to the villa…
We got to the studio the next day and the guy who owned the studio says, “You’re lucky you’re white. They would have killed you if you’d been black, because they’d have figured you would recognise them. But knowing you’re white, they know you won’t recognise them.”
Dustin Hoffman I was in Jamaica shooting Papillon with Steve McQueen, and someone said that Paul McCartney was in the neighbourhood and would like to meet me… [He and Linda had flown out for a holiday during a break in recording Band on the Run.] We talked for a while, and when I came back, Paul was in the kitchen, playing and singing. I remember thinking, “You’re like a troubadour; that’s in your genes, like someone out of the 16th century who will just play at the drop of a hat.” And somehow we got into a conversation about Picasso, because he had just died, I think a few weeks before. Paul asked me why I liked Picasso so much… He just started strumming, and I swear by all that’s holy that he began singing this song of the story that I had just told him about Picasso — it just came out of him. [This became Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me) on Band on the Run.] It’s right under childbirth in terms of great events of my life. I mean, I was at the birth of something. I hope by talking about it I can in some way convey what that feels like, to be near a great artist.
On recording Mull of Kintyre
Paul McCartney We had this incident when Mull of Kintyre came out at the height of the punk era. We’re in London in a car and we stopped at the lights, and there’s a big group of skinheads marching like a phalanx. And I tried to avoid eye contact. But one of them saw me. “Hey, Paul. What’s up, mate?” “Great, come up to the car.” “Mull of Kintyre. Love that, great record.” All those little things you wouldn’t expect.
Denny Laine (guitar, keyboards) Paul said he was having a go at writing a Scottish song but wasn’t sure how people would feel about it — an Englishman singing a Scottish song. The next day, armed with a bottle of whisky, we sat on the steps of a cottage in the afternoon sun and wrote the verses. We looked around at all the hillsides and the glens and everything and just wrote the words and the rest of the song that afternoon.
Paul McCartney We got the pipers and the drummers from the Campbeltown Pipe Band to join us at the farm to rehearse and then record the song, and they were just great. They came over in full dress, with kilts and sporrans, so of course I got dressed up at some point too. We got Mary and Stella to set up a refreshments table, but kept the band away from the ale until the recording had finished. The band was mostly made up of farmers and farmers’ sons. There was an ex-copper from Glasgow in there too. And they were all excited because they hadn’t recorded a song like this before either… After we’d got the best take, it was time to “break out the ale”, and everyone started getting a bit rosy-cheeked. Some of the lads were saying, “Aye, that record will be No 1.” I wasn’t so sure, because the scene was a bit dominated by punk… It ended up selling over two million copies, the biggest-selling single in Britain until Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984.
On the 1980 Japan drugs bust
Paul McCartney I was out in New York and I had all this really good grass. Excellent stuff. We were about to fly to Japan, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything to smoke over there. This stuff was too good to flush down the toilet… In America, President Carter had come out and said he thought cannabis should be decriminalised. Maybe I was thinking, “Hey, it’s no big deal.”
Laurence Juber (guitarist) I was standing next to him [in Tokyo airport] when that bag of marijuana appeared. Linda and the kids had gone through and Paul was behind them. The customs guy was patting a jacket [in Paul’s case] and had this quizzical expression. He reached inside and pulled out this bag of weed, at which point Paul turned white… Within seconds, there were people coming out of the woodwork and escorting us into the back of the customs area.
Paul McCartney It was the maddest thing in my life — to go into Japan, which has a seven-year hard-labour penalty for pot, and be so free and easy. I put a bloody great bag of the stuff right on the top of my suitcase. Why didn’t I even hide it in a pullover? I look at the footage now and I just think, “That couldn’t have been me.”
Mary McCartney I just remember somebody lifting it up and me feeling very confused, like this might be a problem. And then them saying to Mum and Dad, “Whose is this?” Because it was their [shared] case. And I remember them looking at each other, going, “Which one of us is going to do this? Because one of us needs to stay with the kids.” And then Dad saying it was him, and then they took him away. And then us being at the hotel for about nine days and Mum trying to make it relaxed for us. I remember her making sandwiches and going to visit him every day.
Stella McCartney Even a nine-year-old could have hidden skunk weed better than my parents. But you know, I love that they just couldn’t resist it. They were like, “It was too good to leave behind.”
Paul McCartney I made a confession on the night I was arrested and apologised for breaking Japanese law. It probably didn’t help that I had more than I could get through in a month. They still wanted to know everything. I had to go through my whole life story — which schools I went to, my father’s name, our address, my income. I even had to tell them about my MBE medal from the Queen.
Steve Holley (drummer) We were all obviously very stressed out by it, and the brutal efficiency of Japan was shown by the fact that when we rode in from the airport to the hotel, there was a poster every hundred feet saying, “Wings — the greatest rock band in the world visits Japan 1980.” They were everywhere: on billboards, lampposts, buildings, in store windows. It was inestimable how many there were. And in the morning, they were all gone.
John Hammel (long-time road manager) All the posters. Everything got taken down. Instantly. The radio stations went silent on McCartney records. Wouldn’t play anything.
Paul McCartney Now you’ve put your wife in it, you’ve got your kids in it. And knowing how faithful Linda was, I thought, “Well, the kids are going to grow up in Japan. Linda will stay here.” All that’s going through your head: “Have I really done this? You bloody idiot.” So, you’re really blaming yourself. And the next morning, you wake up and you’re in a Japanese cell and they’re putting Japanese food through the grille. It’s like a hot dog roll with a sort of butter in it. A bit of miso soup. And that was it. It was quite a big culture shock. For breakfast I was given seaweed and spring onion miso soup. I was used to cornflakes and eggs and toast.
When I first arrived, I was thinking, “This is a storm in a teacup. I’ll be out in no time.” Then the British vice-consul told me I could get seven years’ hard labour. That’s when it got extremely worrying. I couldn’t sleep for the first three days. It was five days before Linda was allowed to visit me, and I’d never spent a night apart from her since we’d married. It was pretty rough. I had to share a bath with a bloke who was in for murder. I was afraid to take my suit off in case I got raped. But I’d seen all those prisoner-of-war movies and I knew you had to keep your spirits up. So I’d organise singsongs with the other prisoners. There were guys in the next cell and we tried to communicate. I was trying to learn a few words in Japanese, and I could hear people saying konnichiwa (hello). So I turned that into “Connie Chua”. Like a high-school girl, Connie Chua. I could say arigato, thank you, but I couldn’t say much more. So what I did was, I shouted trade names to the guys in the next cell. There were about four of them in there. I would say, “Toyota!” They would go, “Toyota! Toyota!” And then I’d hear them laughing. And then they’d go, “Rolls-Royce!” I go, “Rolls-Royce! Very good.” Then we did this crazy, “Yamaha! Yamaha! Oh, Yamaha, yeah!” I would shout, “Suzuki!” and “Honda!” and they shot back, “Magitatcha! [Maggie Thatcher]” and “Bell’s!” — that’s Bell’s whisky. I’d hear them all applaud. You had to do something, or go mad.
I wasn’t allowed to see Linda for a few days, but then a visit was arranged. It was just like the prison movies: I was behind a grille and we couldn’t touch each other.
Mary McCartney She’d come back with reports of how he was, and saying that he was doing well. But there was definitely this feeling of, “What is going to happen? How long are we going to be here?” I feel like Mum would have just moved the family to Japan.
Yasuji Ariga [prison guard] He is very polite and has made a good impression on the guards.
Paul McCartney I was happy to leave [after nine days], but I’d made a couple of friends in there so the parting was a little sad. As I walked free, I was shaking hands with these prisoners through the letterboxes of their cells.
Mary McCartney They definitely held their nerve. And Dad wrote a little book [Japanese Jailbird] about it afterwards, of his recollections, and gave us a copy of it. Sort of like a diary of his time there. He tried to stay as grounded as he could and just go through the day-to-day ritual of being there.
Stella McCartney He told me off when I put [Japanese Jailbird] onto Desert Island Discs as my book. He was like, “I’ve got grandchildren. I don’t know if I want them to know that.” I’m like, “Dad, I think people know that.”
Wings: the Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney (Allen Lane, £35) is published on November 4.
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