Culture / All he needs is love / John Harris

Paul McCartney is often cast as the Bad Beatle, the one even the fans
love to hate. He has been called petty, uncool, money-grabbing and much,
much worse. John Harris hears his side of the story

All he needs is love

Prague's T-Mobile Park is a scrappy rectangle of land 20 minutes' drive
from the city centre, surrounded by the rusting remains of
-communist-era industry. Today it is spread with a layer of mud, and
rendered yet more unpleasant by the imminent prospect of rain.

Some people, however, have brought their own sunshine. Pressed up
against a security barrier is a fantastically excited middle-aged
Russian man, accompanied by his embarrassed female partner. Watched by a
gaggle of Czech security staff, he spends an hour shouting. "Paul! You
are de best! You still are de best! From Russia with love! You are de
greatest!"

Up on the stage, Paul McCartney is leading his band through a soundcheck
that takes in an apparently random array of music. He begins with Coming
Up, a 1980 solo single released six months before John Lennon's death,
and grudgingly described by McCartney's one-time songwriting partner as
"a good piece of work". He goes on to Honey Don't and Matchbox, 1950s
rockabilly covers perfected during the Beatles' brain-pounding trips to
Hamburg, whose -recorded versions were sung by Ringo Starr. And he ends
with a song from Abbey Road, the album created as the group's last word
to their public. You Never Give Me Your Money is a song populated by all
kinds of ghosts.

The show that follows five hours later is equally haunted by the past.
When -McCartney sings She's a Woman and I Saw Her Standing There, the
vast screens either side of the stage are filled with the image of the
moptop-era Beatles, sprinting from yet another fan -ambush or mugging
for the camera. A rendition of Band on the Run is accompanied by film of
Wings,  McCartney's post-Beatles enterprise.

At the show's end McCartney stands at the lip of the stage alone. This
is a relatively new thing for him: the Beatles took their low bows as an
unbreakable quartet; with Wings and -beyond, he was always accompanied
by his first wife, Linda. It also represents a final -reminder of the
contrasting fates of -McCartney and his two most celebrated colleagues:
while John Lennon and George Harrison have been divested of any
imperfections and installed in that part of the hereafter reserved for
musicians who somehow come close to being saints, Paul McCartney must go
about his -labours in the real world.

This has all kinds of malign consequences. For every virtue ascribed to
Lennon, -McCartney's detractors can come up with a corresponding vice.
John luxuriated in his genius; Paul is hideously unsure of himself. John
sailed out to avant-garde extremes; Paul is a sugary balladeer. John was
always dismissive of Beatles nostalgia; Paul clings to it like a
-security blanket.

McCartney is all too aware of his image problem. His songs have usually
been founded in magnanimity and generosity of spirit, but on four
occasions during our interview, his -descriptions of his place in the
public mind -include the word "bastard".

He traces much of this not to Lennon's death in 1980, but to December
1970 - when, desperate to extricate himself from the impresario -Allen
Klein, he took the last resort of legal -action against John, George and
Ringo. "The fact that I had to sue the Beatles was something that was
very, very difficult, 'cos I could see what that would do in terms of
perception of me," he says. "People could quite easily say, 'You know
what? I'd never do that, no matter if it meant losing everything. He's a
hard-hearted bastard. And a mean bastard. And a money-grabbing bastard.'

"And doing well didn't help. I started doing my own business, and it
started to do quite well. It resulted in that split: 'John's really cool
and Paul isn't.'"

Recent events have only increased the hostility. First came the upsurge
of enmity that -accompanied his marriage to Heather Mills, later
manifested in gleeful dissections of both her alleged tendency to
embroider her -personal history, and rumoured spats with McCartney's
children. Then 2002 saw a splurge of bad coverage around McCartney's
crediting of 19 songs on a live album to "Paul -McCartney and John
Lennon", in contravention of the supposedly unimpeachable
-Lennon--McCartney brand-name. This brought forth a threat of -legal
action from Yoko Ono, and criticism even from Ringo Starr, who -declared
McCartney's actions to be "petty and silly".

"It snowballed," -McCartney admits. -"People were phoning me up saying,
'You're doing yourself no favours with this.' I was like, 'What are you
talking about?' 'Well, you know, you want to knock John's name out. He's
dead. It's terrible: you're walking on a dead man's grave.' I was like,
'Get the fuck out of here.'"

McCartney traces the controversy back to the publication of the Beatles'
Anthology book in 2000, and Yoko Ono's insistence that -Yesterday be
credited to "John Lennon and Paul -McCartney".  He is perfectly happy
with the time-honoured Lennon-McCartney credit; but when the two are
named in full in the Ono--endorsed order, he still feels a twinge of
irritation.

This could all seem silly to anyone who knows even the basic facts about
the pair's partnership. The one who sang lead vocals had always written
most of the song or, if it dated from 1967 or later, all of it. Perhaps
the affair simply proves that if you live as giants, even
common-or--garden -insecurities can easily appear inflated.

"I look like this total bastard trying to screw John over," McCartney
says. "Which I'm not."

The animosity directed towards his second wife still rankles, however.
Perhaps there's something about his place in British culture that means
certain people simply don't like him getting married. As with the
Lennon--McCartney Cool Wars, he traces the explanation back to that
difficult phase of his life -between the late 1960s and early 70s.

"They didn't like me giving up Jane Asher," he says. "They didn't like
that at all. And then I married a New York divorcee with a child and
they didn't like that. This time around I married a younger woman and
they didn't like that. But again, it doesn't matter: what's -important
is that I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. But it reminds me
of the stick Linda got. It's strangely similar. I have a nasty feeling
that some of the people who do it were Paul fans, like some of the
-people I still get strange letters from.

"The British psyche can be very strange," he says. "Some of the people
who do it most . . . well, I rang one or two of those journalists up out
of the blue. They'd just done sustained 'I hate Heather' stuff. It was a
couple of lady -columnists . . . I'd rather not give them the fame. I
just said, 'I've been trying to ignore this, and somebody just gave me a
bunch of press cuttings, and I've just looked through them all, and you
said that. Well, that's actually wrong.'

"It was just nonsense: stories that Heather and I went to bed early at
Stella's wedding. Well, we couldn't possibly have done: we were sleeping
above the karaoke. I just rang them up and said, 'We actually didn't.
You ask anyone who was there.' And they said, 'Well, someone who was
there said you went to bed early.' I said, 'Well, they must have been
pissed or something - 'cos we were up till dawn, in the disco, and I was
on the karaoke.

"And I went down the list. I took a little time. Another thing was:
'Heather's too old to wear above-the-knee boots.' I said, 'Do you
actually know why that is? She's an amputee, love. That's why she wears
those boots.'

"I think it's a phenomenon in the British press, particularly at the
moment, which isn't very helpful for our national identity. It
encourages people to go [he assumes a high-pitched scouse accent], 'Look
at her! Look at him!' Our great organs do it, all the time: 'Ooh! Look
at her! Look at him! Ooh - a footballer! Look at his hair!' It reminds
me of these bloody people off the estate where I used to live - these
dreadful gossips. It's puerile. It's the people you wished you'd left
behind."

McCartney is in Prague as part of a 12-date European tour, a gruelling
warm-up for his date at the Glastonbury festival. "I was asked to do
Glastonbury, and for years I've been sort of half-toying with the idea
'cos it's the great festival; the ongoing Woodstock," he says. "But I
had to get my voice up. There's muscles -involved [in playing a big
outdoor concert]. So I said, 'Let's do a few shows.' And that turned
into a European tour. It does sound a bit silly, or that I'm very
respectful to Glastonbury. I suppose I am."

McCartney is talking in his dressing room, a windowless box festooned
with scarves and cushions, perfumed with the scent from an -incense
burner (but not marijuana; he has, he confirms, given up). He is a
little shorter than you might imagine. His hair, the grey that took hold
during the 1980s and 1990s long since dyed an autumnal brown, looks both
luxuriant and slightly fragile. And if his features have -recently taken
on a new youthfulness, his is still a face etched with experience,
slowly hardening into the same benignly owlish countenance you see in
photographs of his long--departed father, Jim.

His next appointment is with a Czech linguist, employed to teach him 20
or so phrases, so that he can break with the usual rock practice of
yelping "Hello Prague!" and assuming that most of the audience
understand English. He began these compacted tutorials on his last world
tour; as the appreciative response from 100,000 Czechs proves, they
invests his shows with an admirable warmth.

"Most people really get ready before a show," he says. "But my last hour
before a show's like an O-level exam. And it can be hard: Hungarian was
very difficult. The translator kept -saying - and I've forgotten the
exact word, of course - 'Tishush'. And I was going, 'Tishush?' And she
was going, 'No - tishush.' I'd go, 'Tish-ush?' She said, 'No -
tish-ush.' I thought I really had it; we took hours over this. It was a
fuss over the tiniest little thing. But we saw her the next day after
the concert and I said, 'How did it go down?' She said, 'My mother rang
up. In her newspaper it said, 'He spoke Hungarian without a trace of an
accent.' "

If McCartney is quite the European, this phase of his progress - which
began with the release in 2001 of the album Driving Rain - has also seen
him reinstated at the heart of America's musical mainstream. He became
all but ubiquitous in the wake of the September 11 attacks, appearing
alongside the Who, Jon Bon Jovi, Elton John et al at the fundraising
Concert for New York, and authoring the event's musical finale: a
march-time anthem entitled Freedom. Back then it sounded like an example
of McCartney's readiness to cheerlead for the western world. "This is my
right, a right given by God," it went. "I will fight, for the right/ To
live in freedom."

"After 9/11," he says, "I felt there had to be some sort of response.
Some people were just saying, 'No, no - peace at all costs. Nothing must
happen.' And my argument was, 'But peace is not what we're talking
about. Two very big buildings have been taken out, in a place that's
never had that kind of an attack before, with an unseen enemy.' I felt
for the Americans, 'cos I was there, living with them. It wasn't like I
was living in Muswell Hill [north London] thinking, 'We shouldn't do
anything.' Something had to be done."

You can hear that feeling - a kind of non-specific, righteous
belligerence - in the song. In the context of the Iraq war, though,
those sentiments have taken on a new ugliness.

"Exactly," he says. "It becomes a licence to torture, and that's not
what that song's about. It's really a We Shall Overcome thing. And at
that time, playing it in America was helpful, healing, for some
Americans. Now it's all got completely ugly - the whole Iraq thing,
rushing in without the second resolution. It's all gone very wrong . . .
It is crazy that they haven't found any weapons. I think the whole world
is just puzzled by that. So it's ugly. It's now Vietnam."

So Freedom is not being played on this tour? "No, it's not. It's more
ambiguous now. It probably has become identified with the war effort.
And I think that's a bad thing."

He talks about the songs that have made their way into his set-list, and
their ability to spark the odd Proustian rush. When he plays the
Beatles' I'll Follow the Sun, he says, he finds himself back in his
father's house in Liverpool, "looking out through the lace curtains".
She's a Woman, from 1964, takes him back to his salad days at Abbey
Road, "smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, with a smart black jacket
and a white shirt".

And then there is Here Today, the song he wrote in the wake of John
Lennon's death. "At least once a tour, that song just gets me," he says.
"I'm singing it, and I think I'm OK, and I suddenly realise it's very
emotional, and John was a great mate and a very important man in my
life, and I miss him, you know?

It happened at this tour's first show: I was doing fine, and I found
myself doing a thing I've done in soundcheck, just repeating one of the
lines: 'I love you, I love you, I love you.' I did that and I thought,
'That's nice - that works.' And then I came to finish the song, to do
the last verse, and it was, 'Oh shit - I've just totally lost it.'"

Two lines from the song have always -intrigued me: "What about the night
we cried/Because there wasn't any reason left to keep it all inside."

"We were in Key West in 1964," he says. "We were due to fly into
Jacksonville, in -Florida, and do a concert there, but we'd been
diverted because of a hurricane. We stayed there for a couple of days,
not knowing what to do except drink. I remember drinking way too much,
and having one of those talking-to-the-toilet bowl evenings. It was
during that night, when we'd all stayed up way too late, and we got so
pissed that we ended up -crying - about, you know, how wonderful we
were, and how much we loved each other, even though we'd never said
anything. It was a good one: you never say anything like that.
Especially if you're a northern man."