Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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СКАЧАТЬ the original songs on the LP are credited to ‘McCartney/Lennon’ (sic), and published by Northern Songs Ltd, details that would cause Paul more angst than almost anything in his career. The first two songs the Beatles released, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’, the A- and B-side of their début single, had been published by Ardmore & Beechwood, the firm Brian Epstein stumbled upon shopping the Beatles around London. Brian was disappointed by the way Ardmore & Beechwood promoted these songs, so when ‘Please Please Me’ was ready he asked George Martin to suggest a new publisher. Martin directed him to another friend, in the small world of the British music business, Dick James.

      George Martin and Dick James had enjoyed a hit together in 1956 when Parlophone released a recording of James singing the theme to the television show Robin Hood. In mid-life, Dick settled down to work as a song-plugger and music publisher, latterly operating from an office on the Charing Cross Road near the junction of Denmark Street, where music businesses cluster. It was Dick who brought the Tin Pan Alley tune ‘How Do You Do It?’ to George Martin, and George assured Brian Epstein that his friend was honest and hungry for success. Like Brian, Dick was Jewish, which helped the two form a bond. Dick also knew how to charm the younger man. Forewarned that Epstein was dissatisfied with the promotion Ardmore & Beechwood had secured for ‘Love Me Do’, Dick telephoned a contact at BBC television while Brian was in his office and talked the Beatles onto the TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars. Brian was so impressed he offered Dick the rights to John and Paul’s new songs. ‘Please Please Me’ and its B-side ‘Ask Me Why’ were duly published by Dick James Music, with a new company created to handle John and Paul’s subsequent compositions.

      The boys wanted a company. ‘We said to them, “Can we have our own company?”’ Paul recalled. ‘They said, “Yeah.”’ Northern Songs was thereby created, named in honour of the fact the songwriters were from the North of England. It was not entirely Paul and John’s company, though. Dick and his partner Charles Silver owned half of Northern Songs. John and Paul were assigned 20 per cent each, Brian the remaining 10 per cent. Furthermore, Northern Songs would be managed by Dick James Music, the publisher taking a 10 per cent commission off the top, which meant that James earned more money from publishing John and Paul’s songs than they did themselves. Under the terms of the deal all the songs John and Paul wrote for the next three years would go into Northern Songs, with an option to extend the agreement for an additional three years. Brian wasn’t experienced enough to know whether this was good or bad. He was, after all, merely a record-shop manager. He took George Martin’s advice that the deal was sound, and it wasn’t unfair for its day. So it was that one February morning in Liverpool, before hurrying to Manchester to do a show, John and Paul signed their songs away to Dick’s company. Paul came to regret deeply the fact he hadn’t taken independent legal advice before doing so, for he was agreeing to more than he realised at the time; ‘we just signed this thing, not really knowing what it was all about,’ as he complains now, ‘and that is virtually the contract I’m still under. It’s draconian!’

      Paul’s other eternal bugbear is song credits, the form of which was also established at this early stage in the Beatles’ story. In the tradition of the great songwriting teams of the past – from Gilbert and Sullivan to Leiber and Stoller – John and Paul paired their surnames together when they became published writers, styling themselves ‘McCartney and Lennon’ on Please Please Me. This suited Paul, but his business partners didn’t think McCartney and Lennon euphonious. ‘You’ll be Lennon and McCartney,’ he was told.

      ‘Why not McCartney and Lennon?’

      ‘It sounds better.’

      ‘Not to me it doesn’t.’ Yet Paul agreed to the change, implemented for the Beatles’ third single, ‘From Me to You’, which went to number one in May 1963, and remaining the form for every subsequent song published in their name. This came to irk Paul when Beatles songs he had written entirely on his own, notably ‘Yesterday’, were credited to Lennon and McCartney, and he could do nothing to change it.

      For the time being, though, there was just the pure, innocent joy of making music and seeing it successful. On one of his increasingly rare mornings home in Liverpool, in the spring of 1963, Paul awoke in his bed at 20 Forthlin Road to hear the milkman coming up the garden path whistling a familiar tune, ‘From Me to You’. It was the moment that Paul felt he’d made it. And now he met the girl of his dreams.

      JANE ASHER

      She was a lovely-looking young woman, just as pretty as Paul had seen in the papers, for Jane Asher was equally if not more famous than Paul McCartney in early 1963, an actress on stage and screen since she was only five years old, recently a regular panellist on the television pop music show Juke Box Jury. Tonight, Thursday 18 April 1963, Asher, two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, was helping review a pop concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC’s listing magazine, the Radio Times.

      The show was the Beatles’ first engagement at what is perhaps the most famous concert hall in England: a colossal, oval-shaped theatre built in the 1860s to commemorate the life of the Prince Consort, Prince Albert, and a venue Paul would return to many times to perform and watch others play. The Beatles were on a bill with a host of other acts including fellow Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers and singer Shane Fenton (whom Paul’s ex, Iris Caldwell, was now dating and would marry) for a show named Swinging Sound ’63, part of which would be broadcast on BBC radio. ‘Noisy’ was Jane Asher’s less than enthusiastic verdict of the concert until the Beatles bounded on stage. ‘Now these I could scream for,’ she remarked, and duly did so for the Radio Times’ photographer, showing herself a good sport. When the Beatles met Jane backstage, they clustered around this pretty celebrity, kidding and flirting, asking – as they typically asked their female fans (even though Lennon was already married with a child, Julian, born the previous month, a fact Brian was keeping from the press) – if she would marry them. Pretty though she was, Jane looked different to what Paul had imagined. Although he had seen her many times on TV and in the papers, these were monochrome media in 1963, leading him to assume that Jane was blonde. In real life, Miss Asher was a spectacular redhead.

      After the show the Beatles, Shane Fenton and Jane adjourned to the Chelsea apartment of journalist Chris Hutchins, where the boys popped pills and drank up all the wine in the flat. ‘John, who could be waspish at the best of times, was in a lethal mood without the required amount of alcohol to dampen the effect of the uppers,’ Hutchins recalls in his memoir, Mr Confidential. Falling into a contrary mood, John invited Jane to tell him and his friends how she masturbated. ‘Go on, love,’ he said. ‘Tell us how girls play with themselves. We know what we do, tell us what you do.’ Other crude and embarrassing sexual remarks followed. Paul rescued Jane from his boorish friend, taking her into the bedroom where they talked of less provocative matters, such as the food they enjoyed. Like her mother, Jane was an excellent cook. ‘It appears you’re a nice girl,’ Paul concluded, having realised that a person he perceived initially as a ‘rave London bird’ was a well-brought-up young woman of whom his mother would have approved. So began the most significant romance of Paul’s young life to date.

      Paul’s new girlfriend was almost four years his junior, having been born in 1946 to Margaret and Richard Asher. Mrs Asher, to whom Jane owed her red hair, was a member of the aristocratic Eliot family, whose seat, Port Eliot, is a stately home at St Germans, Cornwall. The Earl of St Germans was her uncle, the poet TS Eliot a distant American cousin. Margaret Asher was a professional musician, an oboist who had taught George Martin at the Guildhall School of Music. (The story of Paul’s life is filled with similar, almost Dickensian coincidences.) Jane’s father was an equally interesting person: head of the psychiatric department at the Central Middlesex Hospital, an expert on blood diseases, published writer and shrink whose clients had included the Arabian adventurer T.E. Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Dr Asher was an eccentric and depressive. Shortly after Paul and Jane got together, the doc went missing for a time, causing such consternation that the story made the daily newspapers. He ultimately СКАЧАТЬ