maybe I'm amazed ❤️‍🔥

BACK IN THE WORLD

Howard Sounes: To accompany the tour, MPL commissioned a 100-page programme that included information about acid rain and deforestation, and exhortations to turn veggie. Unusually, the programme was given away free. Alongside didactic articles about vegetarianism in the tour programme, Paul took the opportunity to tell his audiences his life story.

Philip Norman: Written by Barry Miles who had given him his entrée to avant-garde art and music in the mid-1960s. Miles had gone on to author a string of books, from anthologies of pop-star quotes (including by the Beatles and John Lennon) to a critically-acclaimed life of Allen Ginsberg. Paul was not the first top-echelon rock star to take this step, normally associated with royalty, politicians or major figures in literature or the theatre. In the early 1980s, Mick Jagger had received £1 million for his life story from the illustrious house of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, but then come up with so little interesting information that the book was aborted and Jagger had to repay the whole advance. An official McCartney biography would therefore be starting a new genre. Despite the hopes of the Bloomsbury imprint, Linda’s publisher and MPL’s next-door neighbour, the book was signed in the UK by Secker & Warburg, a division of the Random House group. Paul at first wanted it to deal solely with his ‘London years’, from the onset of Beatlemania to the end of Apple, but Miles persuaded him to include his childhood and to continue the story after the Beatles’ break-up, though it was still not to be a detailed chronology of his life with Linda or of Wings.

Barry Miles: Andrew Wylie, my agent, suggested Paul McCartney as the subject of my next book, 'but it has to be authorised,' he said. I wasn't sure I could even reach Paul. I hadn't seen him for at least ten years; when Linda came on the scene she made sure that all his old pals that knew and liked Jane were excluded, so I didn't know how he would react to the idea of a biography. I wrote to him, weeks went by and I almost forgot about it. Then one day I answered the phone and he simply said, 'It's Paul. I think it's a good idea. You were there, you knew all the people, you're the right person to do it.' He also spoke the famous line, 'Have your people get in touch with my people.' Well his people were of course Eastman and Eastman, tough New York lawyers and Andrew was really no match for them so Paul finished up with almost all the money. The negotiations were very long and very painful, but when we did at last start work it went well.

[...]

Fortunately Paul agreed to be interviewed and over the next three or four years we recorded 40 or more tapes; some at his house in Cavendish Avenue by Regent's Park, or at his office at 1 Soho Square, where he would loll on the sofa and reach up behind him to casually rub one of de Kooning's Woman series with the back of his hand. But mostly we taped the interviews at his recording studio on Gun Hill in Sussex or at his Sussex home. One of his members of staff would pick me up at Hastings station and drive me to the venue. I usually got there before him if it was the studio. There were always freshly made sandwiches on plates for the staff, wrapped in cling film so they didn't dry out. In the room above the studio Paul could this time reach out to quickly play the opening notes to 'What'd I Say' by Ray Charles on the actual electric organ that Charles used at the Atlantic Records studio. Or, if he felt inclined, he could grab the actual double bass used by Bill Black on Elvis Presley's Sun recordings, or tinkle on the harpsichord, bought from the Abbey Road studio sale, that he used on Beatles recordings. (He also had Rene Magritte's actual paint-splattered easel, as well as his palette, a selection of conté crayons, paints and even his eye-glasses). Sometimes Linda would drop by, and was, in fact, very helpful, giving me a very good account of how they met and of the time spent in New York together before they married.