Barry
Miles, Many Years From Now
Tom
Doyle, Man On The Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s
I
have spent the summer with Paul McCartney. I don’t pretend I will ever be privileged
enough to spend time in the presence of Macca, but in preparation for reading
Philip Norman’s 864 pages on him that appeared in the Spring, I thought I would
return to some of the other popular books written in the last twenty years. All
of this, of course, is no more than window dressing and biding my time for the
main event, which will be Volume 2 of Mark Lewisohn’s magnum opus about The Beatles, due sometime in the next decade.
Barry
Miles’ book, from 1998, is a curious read now, being that it was written when
Paul’s wife Linda was still alive, when he was untroubled by the ‘armageddon’
of his messy and expensive divorce of Heather Mills. The passing of Linda is a
touching coda.
Barry
Miles – or just plain ‘Miles’ to his friends – was around McCartney at the more
exciting points of the sixties in London, and as a result he writes best about
this time. He was a co-conspirator at the Indica Gallery, and his commentary on
how fresh and exciting it all was it a pleasure to read. He knew McCartney the
Everyman, who stayed on in The Smoke when the other three Beatles retreated to
country mansions and white Rolls Royce motor cars with chauffeurs.
A
curious omission is the ending of McCartney’s relationship with Jane Asher. She
was a large part of his life for a long time. Miles writes about the
domesticity of Paul and Jane, but then glosses over the end of the
relationship.
He
writes much better about the beginning of Paul’s life with Linda, including a well-crafted
section about their time together in New York City. John Lennon is so firmly
embedded in the memory in NYC that it is easy to forget that McCartney, too,
has an important history in the city.
Miles
writes well about the genesis of many Beatles songs, with quotes directly from
the horse’s mouth. He is careful to counter-balance Paul’s voice with that of
John Lennon. In a way this biography is hung on the music, and it forms the
parts of the jigsaw puzzle that create a deeper vision of who McCartney was in
the sixties and what he was trying to achieve.
He
addresses some well-pedalled Beatles myths, and puts them to bed in a common
sense way.
It’s
a long book, and gives a good broad-brushed approach to the childhood of the
McCartney boys, the early days of the Beatles and then the explosion of
insanity in 1963. However, it almost stops dead in 1970. Perhaps Miles knows
that he could not do the next third of the famous life justice, and perhaps he
thought it would just be too long. Whatever the reason, McCartney is left
dangling at the end of ‘Let It Be’, as if permanently paused. The last section
appears as an after-thought.
For
that reason, Tom Doyle’s book is a useful companion. It more or less picks up
where Miles left off, and is an easier read. McCartney in the 1970s is
overlooked. It was a complicated, often dark and often unpleasant decade for
lots of people, and Paul McCartney was not above the brown-ness of it all.
Doyle
is faithful to the well-known facts, and does well to describe McCartney’s
control of everything without appearing over-critical. He describes the revolving
door of Wings band members precisely and gives a good idea what it must have
been like to work for the workaholic, often in a cold barn in the west of
Scotland. He is particularly interesting describing quite how enamoured
McCartney was with weed, and all the ‘heavy’ problems it got him into in the
seventies. It seems that the Beatles, when crossing borders, had a sort of
quasi-diplomatic immunity. It came as quite a shock to McCartney when he
realised that this way of being treated evaporated as hopes of a Beatles
reunion vanished over the horizon.
Tom
Doyle resists the temptation to speculate about the Beatles in the seventies. A
reunion came pretty close on a couple of occasions. He leaves the reader to
wonder if they would have been any good, or whether the gold-plated
copper-bottomed platinum-disc reputation would have been tarnished. Instead, he
asks the reader to imagine an album containing ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ by McCartney
(which he contends would not sound out of place on the White Album – I am
inclined to agree), ‘Imagine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’.
Admit
it, you are thinking about putting them all together and having a listen.
There
is a lot to say for taking a focus and sticking to it, and Doyle has done well
not to stray too far out of the confines of the seventies. It makes it an
interesting addition to the hundreds already written about Paul McCartney. I
wish in a way that Miles had been more explicit in his introduction and told us
all it was mostly about Swinging London. Either way, they are both good books
that have helped be to understand Beatle / ex-Beatle / former-Beatle Paul a bit
better.
Next
stop is Philip Norman, and then a wait for the main event of another big, big
Beatles book by Mark Lewisohn.
I
thought by now I might be McCartney-ed out. I am not. I just feel spoiled for
choice.
