Paul McCartney approaches 80

Macca closes in on eighty

Aubrey Malone chronicles the life and times of Paul McCartney, the Peter Pan of Pop

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now, Will you still need me Will you still feed me, When I’m 64.

It was way back in 1967 when Paul McCartney wrote these words. He was 25 then. 64 must have seemed ancient to him. Now it probably sounds like a whippersnapper. He will be eighty on June 18. John Lennon died at 40 in 1980 so it’s double figures on his old buddy.

He hasn’t lost his hair but it’s a bit snowier. ‘Will you still feed me?’ I’m sure someone will. Paul could afford to have his dinner flown in from China any day of the week with all the money he has. His fortune was estimated at £730 million in 2015.

Does he look 80? Okay, so he’s not going to be asked for an ID card to get a pint in a pub but he still has that baby face.

What’s his secret - a relaxed temperament? Affability? An unwillingness to get ruffled no matter how many occasions inform against him?

Maybe the surprise is that he’s still around at all after all. Eighty isn’t young for anyone, least of all someone who’s been stomping across the world for the past six decades. He may not have smoked as much pot as Bob Dylan, or drunk as much whiskey as any of the Rolling Stones but neither has he lived like a monk. Paul was always the ‘nice’ Beatle, the most uncomplicated one. He never had Lennon’s street cred. If you look at interviews of the Fab Four today you’ll see Lennon being contentious, Ringo pulling faces, George looking intense and Paul well Paul being just there. He’s the type of guy you could bring home to your mother. In fact you could bring ‘Sir’ Paul home to the Queen Mother. It probably comes as no surprise to us to learn he sang in a church choir as a boy.

The debates still go on about who was the real genius of the Beatles. Who was the best songwriter? Get out your notepads and compute whether Lennon or McCartney wrote the most Number 1s. Who had the most covers made of their compositions? (I believe there have been over 2000 of Yesterday - a McCartney song – so that ends that debate.). rock one. John looked more the business in the leather, didn’t he? Check out any footage of that time and you will see what I mean. Their first manager Brian Epstein cleaned them up just as if Colonel Parker cleaned Elvis Presley up. ‘Elvis died after he came out of the army,’ Lennon said. Maybe a bit of Lennon died after Epstein got hold of him. The Cavern was riotous. That to me was real Beatlemania. When they got into their smart suits and became uniform mop heads, they turned into the world’s first boyband. Especially with those banal lyrics about wanting to hold hands and telling us, all we needed was love.

Later came the maturity with songs like Norwegian Wood, She’s Leaving Home, Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, etc. etc. By then the group that caused teenage girls to faint had all but disappeared.

Paul with his fellow Beatles promoting their final album Let It Be

had been filmed on it from the waist up ten years before. The Beatles were filmed from their fringes down. And still the girls screamed.

Epstein died in 1967. His death spelled the end of the ‘old’ Beatles. By now he’d outlived his usefulness for them and he knew it. The boys now wanted to become men. He was like a father whose children had grown up almost without him noticing it.

He took to pills and overdosed. Usually it’s the singers that go that route rather than the manager but Epstein had other problems. A gay man in a homophobic world, he was lonely.

Lennon knew him better than McCartney. Lennon knew everyone better than McCartney. There was even a rumour they’d had a fling. People used to say, ‘John will try anything.’ McCartney was more straight (laced).

Paul took more control of the group afterwards. He was the main man behind the TV movie Magical Mystery Tour. It flopped. That seemed to say something to people. Would Lennon have made a better job of it?

By now the gloves were off between them. Epstein had kept their rivalry under wraps while he was around. Now, like any family that’s lost their dad, they fought more openly. They were still producing good work. Today The White Album is regarded as one of their most versatile. At the time it wasn’t seen as anything. Why? Because it wasn’t your typical Beatles album. But who cared about such terms anymore? It should have been about the music now, not the brand.

The end of the decade saw the end of the Beatles as well. Making music had stopped being fun by now. And with this quartet, fun was a huge part of what they were about. You didn’t hear too much about the Maharishi or all that psychedelic stuff either. Were they becoming – whisper it – normal?

The common wisdom is that Yoko Ono broke them up. It was hardly that simple. Lennon was ready to leave anyway. Not many people liked Yoko. That seemed to make John groove to her all the more. McCartney went into a depression. Why wouldn’t he? The past decade had been a rollercoaster. Now he had to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He couldn’t spend it thinking about yesterday. (Or ‘Yesterday.’)

He tied the knot with Linda Eastman and she pulled him out of it. Linda wasn’t any more popular with the public than Yoko was. Could she sing? Could she play an instrument? Maybe it didn’t matter. She was company for Paul on stage. And on the farm he bought when he was with Jane Asher in the mid-sixties.

Lennon was more agitprop, doing bed-ins and love-ins like an overaged hippie. But he went ‘native’ too, baking his own bread with Yoko. for pop stars. Managers liked the fans to think things like, ‘Any day now, Paul will give it up for me’ even if they knew in their hearts he was more likely to fly to the moon. It was what kept the pot bubbling over. And the tills ringing. Now there was nothing to lose.

He cut a few albums in the seventies but nothing to pull up trees. Never mind. Better half a career than none at all. Linda got him into vegetarianism and animal rights. With her he also formed a new band, Wings. The public didn’t like it any more than they liked her. ‘What would you call a dog with wings?’ went the (sick) joke. Answer: Linda.

He did his best to avoid doing Beatle material but that very avoidance made you aware of it all the more. You couldn’t help thinking: Poor Paul. He’s never going to be able to re-heat the soufflé.’ He proved us wrong with albums like Red Rose Speedway, Band on the Run, Venus and Mars.

By the mid-seventies he’d started to insert some old Beatles tracks into his sets. ‘For old time’s sake,’ he explained. Or was it because he was running out of new material?

Mull of Kintyre came along in 1977. Those who were attracted to the cute Paul now loved him even more. Those who didn’t went the other way. They said, ‘It should have been sung by Cliff Richard.’ By the end of the seventies Wings had become flat in the same way the Beatles had by the end of the previous decade. Then something happened that changed all of our worlds. Lennon was gunned down

Paul McCartney with his wife Nancy Shevell

in cold blood on a New York street for no better reason than his assassin, a pathetic nobody called Mark Chapman, wanted to become famous. It was the most absurd murder in music history. Or history period. We all remembered where we were when it happened just like we did when JFK or Elvis died.

Lennon had been producing some seriously good music since the Beatles folded. His post-Beatle career had taken off in a more exciting way than McCartney’s had, leading to much kudos from the music press. Dying as he did made him even more admired. Premature death was always a good career move for pop stars. Ask Elvis.

McCartney was asked for his reaction to the killing. He was caught off the hop and said the worst thing he could have, ‘It’s a drag.’ The comment totally trivialised what happened. It made him out to be jealous of the attention his old friend was getting. Their rivalry was extending beyond the grave, becoming posthumously toxic.

He said the comment came out the wrong way, that he meant he was depressed about the killing. Nobody really believed him. When you’re explaining you’re losing.

He went through a bad time for the next few years. Arguments about who was the ‘real’ leader of The Beatles got re-cycled, with Macca usually coming out second best. ‘It got so bad,’ he sighed, ‘I almost felt guilty for not having died.’

As always, music came to his rescue. He recorded like there was no tomorrow, trying every new format he could think of. Sometimes it even worked. In 1982 he had a hit with Ebony and Ivory, duetting with Stevie Wonder in a way that reminded you of the old Lennon/McCartney collaborations. We needed to remember it wasn’t always bad between them.

Three years later he starred in a movie, Give My Regards to Broad Street. It wasn’t much better than any of the Beatles films he’d made but that wasn’t the point. It did what they did, i.e. sold an album.

Live-Aid gave him a different kind of profile in 1985. With Linda he’d become involved in a lot of causes. Bob Geldof now provided him with an even bigger one. Four years later he showed his generosity again. The profits from Ferry Across the Mersey were donated to the Hillsborough disaster fund.

Ends of decades always seemed to spur him on to reinventions. This one was no different. In 1989 he went on the Paul McCartney World Tour. He was nearly fifty now. It was too late to stop.

His experiments with orchestral music at the start of the nineties truck many people as smacking of desperation. It’s better to draw a line under it. For the rest of the decade he kept as busy as he’d always been, showing the energy of people half his age as he bopped his way around the globe. Every day of his life, it seemed, he was either in a recording studio or on a stage somewhere. The Peter Pan of pop, forever young.

But then tragedy struck. Linda died of cancer in 1998. He was distraught. Theirs was a marriage made in heaven. They’d had three children together and he’d adopted a fourth that Linda had before she married him. ‘We were just a boyfriend and girlfriend having babies,’ he said. It was a hundred times worse than the end of the Beatles. Who was going to pull him out of his depression this time?

He thought Heather Mills would. He married her in 2002 but it was a disaster. If Wings was the poor man’s Beatles, Heather was the poor Paul’s Linda.

Make that rich Paul. She fleeced him in the divorce courts in 2008, pocketing the kind of money that would probably pay off the Gross National Product of some South American country.

Paul didn’t mind. What was fifty million quid between friends? He had a licence to print money now, hadn’t he?

He moved in with Nancy Shevell the following year and married her in 2011. By all reports she made him as happy as Linda had. Who could begrudge it to him? In 2018 he returned to The Cavern, playing there for the first time in over half a century. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Since then he’s continued to produce music and do the odd live gig too. In between he makes himself available to those who queue up to touch the hem of his garment.

Retirement? Don’t make me laugh. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Legend, guru, humanitarian, memoirist, savvy music scholar, author of an uncountable number of supersonic hits, all around nice guy, seriously talented guitarist, dependable husband, big-hearted father and grandfather, affable interviewee.

Health Lions Clubs fight diabetes

Lions Clubs in Ireland have produced The Silent Assassin, a comprehensive booklet on Type 2 Diabetes

It is packed with useful information on Type2 Diabetes, covering its prevalence, risks, symptoms and what happens when diagnosed.

The publication is part of a wide-ranging Type 2 Diabetes Campaign undertaken by more than 2,000 members of Lions Clubs in Ireland. The campaign also includes intensive social media posting and pr activity by Lions at local level.

In undertaking the campaign, Lions in Ireland are joining1.4m members of 44,000 Lions Clubs throughout the world who are dedicated to fighting the condition known as ‘The Silent Assassin’.

Lions are undertaking an extensive information campaign, through a wide spectrum of media, to make people aware of the growing incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in Ireland. Projects include the presentation of apples and vegetable seeds to school children as a symbol of healthy eating, the distribution of information leaflets and a bookmark, public relations activities and posts on social media. The World Diabetes Day Campaign is undertaken in the context of new research which indicates that the number of people with Type 2 Diabetes in Ireland could double to more than 410,000 in the next 15 years unless a population-wide, comprehensive campaign is put in place.

The research, commissioned by HSE modelled the current growth in Type 2 Diabetes, often linked to being overweight or inactive, and the possible measures used to control it. The researchers said that ‘a prevention programme, based on the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, is estimated to result in a reduction of between 2,000 (0.5per cent) and 19,000 (4.6 per cent ) in the number of prevalent cases of diabetes in 2036 resulting in substantial health and quality of life benefits’.

Ann Ellis, District Governor of Lions Clubs in Ireland, stressed the importance of this initiative. ‘Diabetes is the 8th leading cause of death in the world. It is estimated that worldwide more than 460 million people have Diabetes, and this number is growing’, she said. ‘Lions can pay an important role in arresting the spread of the condition by increasing awareness of the importance of a healthy lifestyle in staying free of Type 2 Diabetes’ The worldwide Lions Signature Project aims to specifically address the risk of Type 2 Diabetes. Eating healthily, increasing the level of physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight, all play a role in preventing or delaying the onset of Type 2 Diabetes. A quick, easy and free test can indicate the degree to which people are at risk of contracting Type 2 Diabetes. To take the test visit:

Ann Ellis, District Governor, Lions Clubs International, promoting healthy living as part of Lions Diabetes Awareness campaign.

A Lions Clubs social media posting

Diabetes Ireland www.diabetes.ie/are-youat-risk-free-diabetes-test/ Diabetes UK (NI) www.riskscore.diabetes. org.uk/start

Further information from John O’Donovan (diabetes@lionsclubs.ie) 087 2866310 Frank Corr, District PRO, Lions Clubs International- fcorr100@gmail.com 086 8274710