Mike McCartney: Being a Beatle brother or a Guinness heir, you relax and enjoy your heritage

“It was one of those things. You take the enormity of being the Beatle brother or the Guinness heir, you face it, you accept it warmly, it is your heritage, it’s who you are,” Mike McCartney said of life in the shadow of his older brother Paul.

“As our kid [Paul McCartney] once said to me, “Mike don’t ever forget, you were there”. And it’s true,” he told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.

Another person who was there was Mike McCartney’s friend the Guinness heir Tara Browne. Artists, writers and musicians – including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – were guests at wild parties at his home, Luggala in Co.Wicklow.

Immortalised in the Beatles song, A Day in the Life, after he was killed in 1966 aged 21 in a car crash in London, Browne is now the subject of the Paul Howard biography, I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.

McCartney is responsible for helping Howard paint a picture of Browne’s life at the centre of the London scene during the swinging 60s. The pair got on well, according to the Liverpudlian, because he and the aristocrat both had big names to live up to.

“We had the same problem. We had the same attitude to life because we saw the enormity of the position that we were in. You’re either going to go under and get paranoid or you can just relax; enjoy; just be what you are,” he said.

By: Jennifer Ryan

Source: Irish Times

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