#barry miles

[want2fucku-blog]

[torchlitinthedesert]

Paul tends to edit Jane out of the story of his life. This is partly respect for Jane’s wishes - she’s made it very clear she doesn’t want to be part of The Paul McCartney Story - but even more, I think, for Linda’s. In the Man on the Run documentary, I noticed Paul claiming that he first went “on my own” to see his farm in Scotland, and wasn’t much impressed: he didn’t recognise how beautiful it was until he went there with Linda.

It’s not true - we know he went with Jane - but what interests me is why he’s lying. It becomes a story of how Linda changed his life: through her magic, a property bought for tax reasons becomes a home, a place he loves and appreciates. He does the same thing when talking about his London house in Cavendish Avenue.

He likes telling the story of Linda moving in and being horrified to find a messy bachelor pad with no food in the fridge. It’s one of his anecdotes, told with great fondness. It’s sort of true - 1968 Hot Mess Paul was clearly not house proud - but it neatly deletes the fact that Cavendish Avenue wasn’t always like that. Paul poured a huge amount of care into choosing it, refurbishing it, decorating it. But he did all that in partnership with Jane.

That’s easy to miss, because Paul has edited it out. Describing Many Years from Now, his biography of Paul, Barry Miles says: “Linda had been diagnosed with cancer and through the taping of the questions this fact hung heavily over the proceedings… [What Miles wrote about the Beatles period] was inevitably very much about Jane Asher as well. In some sections, though by no means all, Paul asked for the phrase ‘and Jane’ to be taken out when I was describing some event they had attended together, ‘because it makes the book seem like the Paul and Jane story.’ I could understand why he didn’t want it to seem that way, particularly as Linda was ill, and so I made all the requested changes.”

Why was that so important? Linda was insecure about Jane. I don’t think that’s surprising: Linda was savagely criticised when she and Paul got together, with Jane often held up as the better option, the woman he *should* have married. Plenty of people commented on Linda’s apparent distrust of people who had been friends with Jane. Alistair Taylor, world’s biggest Jane stan, writes that Linda “wanted to remove every last trace of Jane from Paul’s life. She didn’t want to hear her name. She didn’t want to see pictures Paul and Jane had chosen remaining around the place.”

Fast forward to Many Years from Now, where Paul and Miles present a version which frames Jane as the pre-Cavendish girlfriend:

By the time they moved to Cavendish Avenue, Paul and Jane were growing increasingly apart… The relationship hung on, in part, because they were apart so often: if Jane was in a play, Paul would not see much of her unless he attended a performance, and Paul himself was often out of town… They really only saw each other properly on special occasions like holidays - skiing in Klosters in March 1966 just before moving into Cavendish Avenue, and in November on safari together in Kenya - when they would reaffirm their relationship; but the underlying trend was apart.

Paul: During that period with Jane Asher I learned a lot and she introduced me to a lot of things, but I think inevitably when I moved to Cavendish Avenue, I realised that she and I weren’t really going to be the thing we’d always thought we might be.

Got that? Jane barely moved in, they only saw each other on holiday, this is not her space. Except - as with the Scottish farm - that’s not what happened.

In the early 1960s, Paul was living with Jane and her family in Wimpole Street. When he started house hunting, that family home was clearly his model. Like Wimpole Street, Cavendish Avenue is a Regency townhouse. He hired Marina Adams (John Dunbar’s sister) and her husband John to remodel it (John had already remodelled Peter Asher’s room in Wimpole Street). John Adams told Barry Miles: “It was the strangest briefing I’ve ever had. Paul said he wanted to have the smell of cabbage coming up from the basement, which was obviously something he associated with the Asher house.”

That’s from Miles’ memoir In the Sixties, along with a lot more that he tactfully left out of MYFN: “[Paul and Jane] had no furniture of their own, so they had been on a buying spree. Most of it was picked up cheap at Coe’s auction rooms in the Brompton Road (a favourite of the Ashers)… Paul and Jane’s bedroom had a walk-in closet behind the bed, a sunken bath and shower, tiled in blue and white…” From the time, there are newspaper reports of Paul and Jane buying antiques in Chester, with Paul going back to the antique shop with John. Alistair Taylor’s claim that “Jane had decorated Cavendish Avenue” sounds like an anti-Linda overstatement, but she clearly had plenty of input. They’re working on this space together.

And it’s a big part of Paul’s life. On the set of Have I Won the War, John told photojournalist Zdenko Hirschler that “Paul has brought a new house in North London . . . [and] is so busy decorating it that he’s finding little time to do anything else”. Paul also told Maureen Cleave about his new house for her “How a Beatle Lives” series. He’s obviously excited about it: there’s a sense of him building the life he wants.

As well as all the Asher-inspired changes, Paul bought and commissioned lots of art - particularly for his music room, which (like his attic bedroom at Wimpole Street) was at the top of the house. He moved in with the cabaret piano he’d used to write Yesterday, but had it painted in psychedelic colours. And, oh yes: “A waist-high chrome Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture called ‘Solo’ stood beneath a six-foot-high triple portrait of Jane.” (We don’t have to take Miles’s word for this: an interview from December 1966 describes Paul’s music room, including the piano and the portrait.)

There’s such a jump from the barely-moved-in narrative of MYFN to this version, where Paul puts a huge portrait of Jane into his music room, his most personal space. (I love that it was a triple portrait. The binary goes one better.)

If you dig, it’s not hard to find accounts of Jane at Cavendish Avenue - hosting dinner parties with Paul, making lemonade for fans who had dropped in. But these aren’t stories that Paul or Jane want to tell. (Paul’s family don’t, either. Stella McCartney likes remembering her parents’ shared wardrobe, noticing how they wore the same clothes. Even if she knows the space was designed for Paul and Jane’s clothes, she’s hardly going to mention that.)

In recent years, Paul has relaxed a bit about Jane - devoting space to her in Eyes of the Storm, for instance. But it’s a very cautious shift in narrative, and it stops when he moves out of Wimpole Street. Memories of Jane made Linda uncomfortable, particularly if they were too close to home. Decades later, Paul is still quietly deleting them.

[muzaktomyears]

Derek Taylor, the Beatles' publicist, once told me he was sure that no matter how Paul was standing or moving, he always knew just how the crease at the back of his trousers was falling or how his jacket was hanging at the waist. This was not a narcissistic thing as Paul wasn't a dandy; it was just an incredible level of show-business professionalism.

In the Sixties, Barry Miles (2002)

[the-boney-rolls]

I never remember them getting on very well, Jane and [Paul], it was sort of like an act almost, and I can quite see that he would be much happier with Linda because with Jane it would have been very difficult. I love watching people living their domestic life and seeing how that goes. I always thought Jane and Paul were very tense. I do remember very clearly an evening at Cavendish Avenue where she wanted the window shut and he wanted the window open. That really was like a Joe Orton play. It was fucking great. I sat there all night watching Jane get up and open it, and Paul close it, and it was just like, nothing was said. And quite soon after that they split up, which of course I could have told anyone they would. PAUL: 'I got cold feet. It was that, and a few other personal things.'

Marianne Faithful (and Paul), Many Years from Now, Barry Miles, 453

[tavolgisvist]

Paul by Linda, 1968

What I liked about Paul when I lived there in London [September and October 1968] was the books that were around and painting. Paul would say, ‘Let’s paint,’ and he and Ivan Vaughan would get paints and go down in the basement and the three of us would paint on the canvas. It was fun. Paul is so much more cerebral than people think, because he was quote ‘the cute Beatle’. I hate this ‘Was it John or was it Paul?’ thing because they were both talented. They were both artists. They are equal for number one.

(Linda McCartney in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles, 1997)

Linda by Paul, 1968

[paulmacca1966]

i'm so sorry jane.......

[downthepub]

[strwbryfeels]