Paul McCartney – the down-to-earth genius with a bite

2022-06-18T14:04:20.332Z

Paul McCartney – the down-to-earth genius with a bite Created: 06/18/2022, 15:51 By: Johannes Loehr Paul McCartney, ex-Beatle and musician from Great Britain, performs at MetLife Stadium during his 'Got Back' tour. © Christopher Smith/dpa A working-class child who became an artist of the century: Paul McCartney and the Beatles shaped pop music as we know it. On his 80th birthday he is still re

Paul McCartney – the down-to-earth genius with a bite

Created: 06/18/2022, 15:51

By: Johannes Loehr

Paul McCartney, ex-Beatle and musician from Great Britain, performs at MetLife Stadium during his 'Got Back' tour.

A working-class child who became an artist of the century: Paul McCartney and the Beatles shaped pop music as we know it.

On his 80th birthday he is still regarded as an authority on perfect songs.

Munich/Liverpool – Paul McCartney stands next to the toilet bowl and claps his hands enthusiastically: “Everything sounds better on the toilet!” he shouts rhythmically.

There's nowhere else in the little brick building on Liverpool's Forthlin Road that has a reverb like it - perfect for imitating the sound of old rock 'n' roll records.

"I spent hours here with my guitar," McCartney sighs.

The greatest living musician, world star knighted by the Queen, settles happily on the toilet seat of his parents' house.

The scene is part of a 23-minute video that has now been viewed 65 million times on the YouTube platform.

It's from 2018. Paul McCartney is a guest of hip show host James Corden and traveled with him to Liverpool to visit places from his youth.

Also the low worker's cottage with white lattice windows in which he lived as a boy.

The National Trust, the English monument protection authority, restored it to its original condition and has been offering guided tours to the "Birthplace of the Beatles" ever since.

The Rolling Stones are considered the underdogs - the Beatles really are

And here stands a Beatle, with gray hair and wrinkles around those famously melancholic eyes.

McCartney knows what is proper and lets off anecdotes ("John and I wrote songs here. My father said: Great, boys - but always these Americanisms! Can't you sing instead of this 'Yeah, yeah, yeah': 'She loves you, yes, yes, she does'?”).

But suddenly Paul stops and looks around in bewilderment: his father's piano, on which he once wrote "When I'm 64".

The stairs he ran down to catch the bus (which he later immortalized in songs like "Penny Lane").

The rock 'n' roll toilet.

All of this is now a museum.

His museum.

"I haven't been here since I moved away when I was 20," he whispers to Corden.

"The distance from this place to where I am today - it's phenomenal."

Paul McCartney turns 80

The phenomenon Paul McCartney turns 80 this Saturday.

And the Forthlin Road is still in him.

Or, perhaps more correctly, he would not have made it this far if he hadn't had the tenacity typical of someone struggling from a working-class neighborhood in ramshackle northern England.

Studies show that even in 2022, there will be an immense south-north divide on the island in terms of prosperity.

In the early 1960s, the two parts of the country were worlds apart.

The Rolling Stones, with whom the Beatles compete – staged by managers and the media – are considered the boorish underdogs.

But they come from London, from a cultivated class and can in a way afford to behave like snot on a stick.

The Beatles in Circus Krone in 1966: George Harrison (from left), Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

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With the Beatles, the urge to be in the limelight is more existential.

They are "working class", beaten with the hard Liverpool Scouse accent, have to earn their spurs in dark clubs in Hamburg.

Key lesson: give a party crowd what they want.

Paul McCartney has internalized this lesson.

He still has problems playing newer songs live, he admits in an interview these days.

Because he knows that his fans want to hear the old hits.

John Lennon and he are such a dream couple because they complement each other.

John is also a brilliant autodidact – but quite undisciplined.

Paul has the bite and the greater compositional skills.

His father Jim plays in a jazz band, and when the carpets are rolled aside at family gatherings, he hits the keys.

Paul recalls in his autobiography, Lyrics, "Everyone in the house would listen when he played his favorite songs, but to me it was like class." Paul also shares Lennon's loss of mother.

Mary McCartney, the midwife responsible for the lion's share of the family income, dies when he is 14.

His first words are reportedly, "How are we going to make ends meet without their money?"

Sir Paul McCartney is awarded the Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.

He doesn't seem to deal well with loss, it seems, pushing it away, stoically carrying on.

How much Mary's death shakes and shapes him is shown by the fact that he wrote his first song for her - and later hits like "Lady Madonna" or "Let it be".

The relationship with Lennon is trickier.

He's the head of the Beatles - after all, he led the predecessor band Quarrymen, which the 15-year-old Paul joined in 1957.

But the youngster soon set the tone, remembers Tony Barrow, a former announcer for the Beatles: "Then this guy called Paul McCartney came along, and because he could play a few chords, he was there.

But only as a member of the band.

From the start, if Paul wanted the same job, or better yet, a leadership role with the Beatles, he had to work hard.

And he did.”

Despite all the competition, there is mutual admiration and real friendship - only in this way can the most famous songwriting duo of all time mature.

Both are charming and quick-witted - but while Lennon protects his sensitive soul with cutting sarcasm, the more robust McCartney always remains sweet and nice on the outside.

This seems to be reflected in the songs: John's often harsh, Paul's with a penchant for sweet melodies.

Of course, the image of the mother-in-law flatterer is deceptive.

As is his way, Paul takes matters into his own hands when there is yet another loss to mourn.

When the father's Beatles manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, McCartney said more and more what to do.

When John Lennon loses interest in the band and leaves, it is Paul who tells the world in 1970 that he himself is no longer a Beatle, the "Fab Four" at the end.

Paul McCartney struggles through

McCartney quickly shakes off the depression and becomes the most productive ex-Beatle.

As Lennon spends the second half of the '70s as a house husband and George Harrison and Ringo Starr soon quit touring altogether, Paul wants to know.

With his new band Wings, a kind of family business with his wife Linda, he sets live records and has world hits like the James Bond song "Live and let die".

Of course, this career is not without dents: But McCartney bites through - and often proves to be up to date.

He lets himself be influenced by trends and popular artists - electronic music, new wave, the young Michael Jackson, with whom he duets on his 1982 album "Thriller".

In the 1990s he finally showed that there are no limits for him when he wrote the classic "Liverpool Oratorio".

He collaborates with Kanye West and Rihanna, and he has his 2020 work "McCartney III" re-recorded by young artists.

He is the authority for perfect pop.

Pop icon Paul McCartney has long been a vegetarian

Private McCartney is no less committed.

At a time when everyone is still happily biting their steak, Paul and Linda become vegetarians.

They fight for animal welfare and fight against pollution.

After Linda's death in 1998, which was mourned worldwide, Paul experienced a turbulent second marriage with ex-model Heather Mills from 2002 to 2008.

Since 2011 he has landed in calm waters with New York businesswoman Nancy Shevell (62).

He has five children from two of the three marriages: Heather, Mary, Stella, James and Beatrice.

But he probably can't win a fight: After John Lennon's death, he is labeled by many as "Paul McCartney, living legend (but never as brilliant as the dead legend)".

Since then he has tried to straighten out this skewed view, but basically he has come to terms with his existence as an ex-Beatle.

And he always has the right instincts.

A generation of "millennials" first discovered him through the YouTube video with James Corden.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono give a press conference in bed in 1968 under the motto "Make love, not war".

When McCartney and Corden leave the house where it all began, a crowd has long since formed.

The star walks down a line of fans wanting to shake his hand.

"My brother is named after you!" shouts a man.

"Your songs were played at my father's funeral!" Paul nods in a friendly, but also helpless manner.

"I've been a celebrity for 60 years now," he writes in his autobiography.

"It's still a mystery."

The limousine pulls out of Forthlin Road, Paul waves to the crowd through the window – he's actually reminiscent of the Queen who knighted him in 1997.

Eternally in office, popular with everyone, zero privacy.

Only: She got into it through her birth.

He earned it.

Burning condoms and scrambled eggs - amazing facts about Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney's career has been followed around the world.

However, a few facts are less well known:

Paul knows prison.
In 1960, at the age of 18, he ended up in the Davidwache in Hamburg – just for fun he hung a condom on the wall in the hallway of the “Bambi Kino” in St. Pauli and set it on fire.
Bruno Koschmider, employer of the young Beatles (his employees call him "mein Führer"), reports him for arson.
Koschmider is angry because the band has changed organizers.
Paul is expelled - like Harrison before him.
Koschmider told the police that George is a minor.
Paul released the first album in the MTV Unplugged series in 1991.
The relaxed journey through rock 'n' roll evergreens and early songs is McCartney's best live record - and an incentive for the station to continue the series.
Paul as a painter.
Because of his musical merits, his exhibitions are well attended - but the critics are not very enthusiastic.
In 1999, the expert Brian Sewell was the most unfriendly: "Paul McCartney's pictures are such an outrageous impertinence and so far removed from art that the art critic has no words for them."
When the Beatles received the Order of Merit from the Queen in 1965, many World War veterans returned their awards.
The band behaved in an exemplary manner – even if John Lennon later put it on record that they smoked weed in the palace toilet before the award ceremony.
In the mid-1980s, the McCartneys' commitment to animal welfare took on impressive proportions.
On his 400-acre estate in West Sussex, among others, a tortoise and a bull get their bread of mercy.
One sees Paul roaming through the forest armed with a whistle and disturbing hunting parties by scaring away the game.
In 1969, the University of Michigan published an article jokingly claiming that Paul McCartney died in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a double.
The conspiracy theory "Paul is dead" is tenacious - evidence includes the fact that Paul is the only one walking barefoot across the zebra crossing on the cover of the "Abbey Road" LP.
Fleeing from the fans, Paul becomes a disguise artist in the 1960s, disguising himself with a fake mustache and glasses.
So he walks unrecognized through Paris.
When he is turned away at the door of a nightclub in Bordeaux, however, he has had enough with the secrecy.