"I Never Try to Behave Like an Idiot with Money"

 

I Never Try to Behave Like an Idiot with Money

By John Hunt

Evening Herald

July 7, 1979

    He hired Lympne Castle last month. It sits superbly on a hilltop, commanding the Kentish coastal plain and miles of the English Channel. 

    A few nights ago, in front of the open fire and what used to be the kitchen, he talked of the life that has brought him an income probably 1000 times greater than yours. 

    Didn't he already have as much money as he and his family would ever need? "More, much more. It's ridiculous, like having a gold mine in your garden. But I couldn't ever stop working, if that's what you call it, to me, it seems pretty close to enjoying myself. I'm just a lucky fellow."

     Some see him from time to time with an air of offhand arrogance. Perhaps it is an inheritance of spending his entire adult life, last month, he was 37, as one of the best-known men in the world. 

    Ten years ago, the Beatles broke up. It was not the end of McCartney, just a new beginning. He had to ask himself a question: "Did I want to change my life and become a lorry driver or a brain surgeon, or start off in music all over again?"

     He formed what he is fond of calling "a fun band", Wings.  Building it around himself and his wife, Linda, a lady with no previous musical experience. 

    "I wanted to go back to square one and have a little skiffle group again."

     He said its success hardly needs chronicling. "Mull of Kintyre"  is the biggest-selling single in British pop history, with well over 2 million copies. But internally, it has not always been sweetness and light. For more than the past year, the original members of the McCartneys and former Moody Blue Denny Lane have been playing in the second pair of newcomers in the nine-year life of Wings in privacy, drawing out of them a total commitment to the band.

     To spend such time is a luxury few groups can afford, even fewer cared to strive after perfection as assiduously as McCartney. It was March before they tossed the public the delightful single "Good Night, Tonight"; it reached the top 10 in Britain and the United States. But still, McCartney did not include it in the first LP of the new combination.

     "The record companies wanted it on. But I don't make decisions that way. I'm making records, not running a record store. The album Back to the Egg was released on June 8. No straight recording studio job, but months of assembly in the weirdest places:  McCartney's Scottish farm, the castle, the basement of the firm's offices in London. But what's that? The last original album they issued in April 1978 was recorded on board a yacht off the Virgin Isles.

     "A bit wild, wasn't it? That's the kind of way I'm liable to spend money, but with studio space at £60  an hour, a yacht off the Virgin Isles wasn't as extravagant as it sounds."

     You could see the money rolling away again down at the castle, where they spent four hectic days shooting promotional film for the album. It had a budget of £100,000, and by halfway through day three, nobody was in the least doubtful that the figure could be grossly exceeded. The electricians alone were expected to be paid between £800 and £1000 for their four days' work. All this is to persuade the citizens of the world to buy Back to the Egg, and all this, no doubt, is an allowable expense against tax.

     McCartney neither reads nor writes a note of music. That's no handicap. "If the tune you write is any good, you'll remember it."  But he has the uncanny ability to create both exciting sounds and superb tunes, even if the promotional effort is not successful.

     Wings are not about to wilt. In February, McCartney negotiated a new contract with CBS in North America and EMI elsewhere for their next three albums, £10 million plus at least 75 pence for each copy sold.

     Wings' income is only one slice of the McCartney cake. He and John Lennon, the standard Beatles composers and lyricists, could grow fat enough on those royalties. Informed estimates in the trade, putting that take to date at around £20 million. Either or both could probably live happily ever after, just on the royalties for "Yesterday, the most perfect song McCartney ever wrote. "I like 'Here, There and Everywhere', almost as much," he said.

     But who knows it? One man close to McCartney told me unhesitantly, "I could live off 1% of his royalties." It sounds like something good to say until McCartney himself reminded me that he appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the composer associated with the world's greatest number of sales, 54 million, "Though it must be a bood deal more by now", he said.

     By now, we are talking in Monopoly money, and there was still half the cake to come. His father-in-law, New York show business lawyer John Eastman, found an American music publishing company that was for sale and advised McCartney to take it.  "Nobody. Nobody ever gave me better advice," he said, I now own the rights to Hello Dolly, Chorus Line, Annie, and Grease, crazy, isn't it?"

     So, there is gold at the bottom of the garden. He has oil running off the roof. He can be forgiven a few extravagances. "I've never tried to behave like an idiot with the money. I mean, I just don't want to. It doesn't interest me, buying and selling all that stuff that's playing God. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't play about with people's lives, but I do like being involved with things I know something about, which is music, and it enables us to get things right, to do it the way we think it should be done."

     A family man, they call him, and at the suggestion, he shuffles a little. "I don't talk about that much. It sounds a bit you know, Andy Williams, but it's true.  I don't hang around drinking with the lads because home is where I like to be. And why not? We're ordinary people.  I was just a simple lad from a sort of upper working-class Liverpool home, and I don't suppose I shall ever be anything else."

    " All this razzmatazz, the big deal? Well, people expect us to a certain extent, and we have to do a bit of it. But I like to get back to the basics. Sometimes, when we put the album together, we use just about the best of everything, I suppose, 24-track tape machines and all that. But I don't know what we are doing. Is it really any better than it was in the old days when four tracks were the maximum? It's easy to lose sight of what it's all about, and I don't want to. I drive along the lanes in my Rolls and pass some old bloke out walking his dog, and I wonder which one of us has got it right.