Why Paul McCartney cannot let it be....
Paul McCartney is back in fashion. When, after a three-hour set, McCartney walked off stage at Glastonbury in 2022, the audience seemed to be expressing a country’s gratitude, as 20 days earlier those on the Mall for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations had to the Queen. For Elizabeth II, it was her penultimate public appearance. McCartney, though, is back in December on a UK tour: still hungry at the age of 82 for the appreciation, still, by his sheer virtuosity, wishing to settle scores.
Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back on the Beatles’ January 1969 sessions, the Glastonbury concert and the 2023 Beatles single “Now and Then” are all part of McCartney’s attempt to re-elevate the Beatles into the mythical realm, with the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney at its heart. His implicit antagonist is still Yoko Ono, who has spent the four and a half decades since her husband’s death insisting that the spirit of John Lennon was bigger than the Beatles.
Since Get Back came out at least, McCartney has been winning. The documentary shows emphatically that when the love between Lennon and McCartney was supposedly obliterated, it was instead very much alive. It is evident in the looks Lennon and McCartney exchange in the first song they practise, “I Have a Feeling”. At the Glastonbury concert, McCartney sang this number in the encore as a virtual duet with Lennon. There being no footage of George Harrison’s lunchtime row with Lennon on the seventh day of the sessions, Jackson has the Beatles’ lead guitarist quit the band after emotionally crumbling as he watched Lennon and McCartney sing “Two of Us” to each other. In perhaps the most powerful scene, Lennon and McCartney work through their anguish in a secret code of wordplay. Lennon’s eye-contact is intense as he spills out his need to connect; McCartney keeps turning his head away and insists that what they require is “a schedule of work”. In this story, Lennon and McCartney appear to be taking steps beyond the wounds they inflicted on each other in 1968 in India and the making of the White Album. It is the imminent appointment of the American mogul Allen Klein as the Beatles’ business manager – despite McCartney’s bitter opposition – that looms after the cameras have stopped rolling, and which will tear them apart.
Source: Helen Thompson/newstatesman.com
