LONDON (dpa) – Is Sir Paul McCartney suffering a severe attack of sour grapes? The super-rich superstar says the way John Lennon has been turned into a martyr “gets up his nose”.
And there’s another thing. The fact that Lennon’s name appears before his on the credits for Yesterday is a point of contention. McCartney says the famous song is all his own work – in its composition and in its execution on record.Owing to an agreement signed in a Liverpool flat in the early 1960s, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has earned more from Yesterday than he has, “and many bosses later – most recently Michael Jackson and Sony – we still haven’t had a raise”, the pop star says.Is Sir Paul – he was knighted in 1997 – beginning to worry at the age of 59 about funding his retirement? Britain’s Sunday Times put his wealth at around one billion dollars in its rich list published earlier this year.McCartney doesn’t believe this figure, although he acknowledges he does not know exactly how much money he has. “I’m not sure my bunch of accountants know either, but I’m very well off,” he said recently.Where the other surviving Beatles have largely sought privacy, content to enjoy their wealth and make a little music with old friends from time to time, McCartney craves the limelight.He reads his poetry, shows his paintings, talks about his deceased wife and new girlfriend, praises foul-mouthed rap-star Eminem and chomps celery for a Welsh band called the Super Furry Animals on their soundtrack Receptacle for the Respectable.The response is almost entirely positive. A standing ovation greeted his appearance at this year’s Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in Wales, where he upstaged another speaking guest – Bill Clinton.McCartney accepted the adulation with customary aplomb, thanking his old English teacher for giving him his literary start in life.Critical opinion is less welcome. When the satirical magazine Private Eye printed his poem Black Jacket – containing lines like: Tears are not tears, they’re balls of laughter dipped in salt – in its Pseuds’ Corner, the star was irked.“My God, bastards. Private Eye isn’t supposed to turn on me. I’m their friend. That’s the last donation I give them,” he said.The professional music critics have also been less than complimentary on his forays into the classical genre, suggesting they have a certain “derivative” quality.McCartney explains his interest in paintings by recalling an encounter with Willem de Kooning. “At the risk of appearing gauche, what is it, Bill?” he asked when confronted with a purple splodge.“I don’t know. It looks like a couch,” came the response from the abstract expressionist.“I though his painting looked like a purple mountain, and he thought it looked like a couch, but the fact that he said that it didn’t matter what it was just freed me,” McCartney said.His own paintings have now been displayed and quietly forgotten.McCartney has always showed a sentimental streak in his work – Yesterday is as good an example as any – and needed Lennon’s sharpness to give that essential edge to the music of The Beatles that made them the voice of rebellion they were through the 1960s.Why don’t we do it in the road and Imagine helped give them that status – something Yesterday would scarcely have achieved.That sentimentality turns to mawkishness when he talks about his late wife and current girlfriend Heather Mills.Wings, the band he formed with Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, had belonged spiritually to Linda, McCartney said this year.“I know we got criticised during Wings for having my wife in the group,” he said. “Linda’s free spirit was the spirit behind Wings. I always thought that Wings was my band. Now I think it wasn’t my band, it was hers,” he said after viewing Wingspan, a film on the band.And his idea of a romantic evening with Mills is candles, a bottle of wine and Frank Sinatra – a far cry from Revolution number nine, number nine, number nine…
