Foreword to Electrical Banana

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Paul McCartney was interviewed by Norman Hathaway for the foreword of the 2012 book “Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art“.

lf you think back to mid-’60s visual art, what kind of things spring to mind? What do you remember as being important?

Paul McCartney: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Truthfully that’s what comes to mind if you’re talkin’ about that. It was a very good period for art. Definitely a blossoming. It’s often explained as a result of the post-World War II kids all coming of age at just the right time. And, as well, we all ended up in the same city. We’d come down from Liverpool – various people had come over from America to London: the global village was just beginning and opening its doors. We went to the same parties, same galleries. It was a scene. I mean they talk about the Swinging London scene and that’s what it was. We were seeing a lot of stuff from America and they were seeing a lot from us. So there was a very nice and open interchange of views.

That’s particularly important regarding LSD, as it had such a strong visual component to it.

Absolutely.

l know you’ve always been a drawer and interested in visual art yourself. It must have been fun that once you’d earned a few bob from being in the Beatles, to commission work from artists you admired at that time for record sleeves and things like that?

Oh yeah – it was really great! What an opportunity. I mean – we were always pushing forward through the curtain, looking for the Wizard of Oz. So those of us that liked art – and there were many of us – many English musicians had attended art school, or had had an interest in art (which was my case) but hadn’t attended art school. So we started off and we were lucky in one respect because we had those large long playing 33-1/3 records that provided a beautiful canvas. It was big enough to hold in your hand, and it was big enough for the artist to be able to stretch out. So we had started out using photographs – group photographs; but there came a time where we wanted to try something new. I think it was a hallmark of the Beatles, that we were always attempting to move forward and push through that curtain and we suddenly thought. Do you always have to have a photograph on an album cover? Or is there an alternative? And one arrived in the shape of Klaus Voormann, who was a very good friend of ours from the Hamburg days – we’d known him since he was a student. We ran into him and said, “Look would you do us an album cover?” And he came up with the cover for Revolver. And I really feel that was the starting point of exploration for us with album covers. Previously, jazz records had used illustration, but I think this was the first big one for pop artists. I think once we made that statement – that we used a line drawing, and a crazy one at that, we had alerted our friends and contemporaries to the fact that “Hey, these guys are gettin’ funky!” It was like sending out a signal and it helped bring us into contact with other artists. It meant that if you went to an art gallery or an exhibition or party you would meet people and they would know that you were interested in pushing the boundaries, and you knew that they were, too, so it engendered a great interchange of ideas.

Initially you had hired Marijke and The Fool to work on the Sgt. Pepper’s sleeve prior to working with Peter Blake. ls that correct?

We were hanging with them and they made a lot of clothes for us when they first came on the scene. We got velvet trousers and jackets and things. We also liked their graphic work because it was trippy. I remember going over to their flat, but other than that it was basically just a lot of sitting around, getting stoned, and discussing the artwork, the visuals and the clothes either at their house or my house. Eventually we asked them to paint the side of our building in Baker Street – not realizing that we had to get planning permission from the council, so they made us paint it over.

And did you allow them a free hand with the sleeve design, or did you prescribe a specific idea of what you were after?

I think we discussed it. They pretty much had a free hand, we didn’t dictate. We knew each other well enough and they knew what we liked. We may have said put some faeries hidden in the undergrowth or that type of thing. But by that time, I’d become involved with the gallerist Robert Fraser. He was really knowledgeable about art so I would hang with him a lot. He was gay which worried a few of my hetero friends but it didn’t worry me and we got on great. He collected great art and I was collecting art through him, so when we came to do Sgt. Pepper’s one of the ideas we’d had besides The Fool thing was this idea of Sgt. Pepper having alter egos. Being us – but dressed as alter egos. So it was going to be us posing with a kind of floral clock, the type of thing you would see in Northern towns across England. Robert Fraser, who was listening to me talk about this, said. “Well look. this is really ambitious. you need someone really good -you should get someone from fine art.” So he pulled in one of his artists: Peter Blake. I did a little drawing of how I’d envisioned it and talked to Peter about it. I went around to his fiat and saw his wife Jann Haworth who was making these life-size figures from cloth and different materials – she had a quirky thing going. The idea grew into what it became and then Michael Cooper took the photos.

After all that, Robert Fraser, who’d become important to the process, didn’t feel the Fool’s work would fit with the new front cover and we said, “No we think it’s great and will make a good centerpiece”. So for quite a while we were going to use it. We really liked it and didn’t want to let down our friends who had done this work. But in the end we reluctantly realized that Robert was right and the design became what we all know it as today.

What was the original concept for the Apple shop?

It was meant to be a shop but more than just clothing. It was to be paraphernalia, drawings, artwork and objects. It was going to be – l guess what would become known later as a hippie shop. But it kind of boiled down to just a clothing shop and later we realized we ought not to be there so we ended up giving all the stuff away. Marijke and Simon had some clothes in the shop that they’d designed, but we decided the retail business was not for us.

Let me ask you about Yellow Submarine. Do you remember meeting or working with Heinz Edelmann?

The film was made opposite where my office was in London. They had hired a floor there. We had held initial talks with the creative leads. There were the people from King Features who had started the whole thing by doing a cute Beatles TV series, then they wanted to do a feature. So I thought “Wow! Great – we could do a sort of Disneyesque fabulous feature magical and this and that”. But they – rightly I think – decided it had to reflect the spirit of the times. They wanted to make something more adventurous. They then formed a team of some classic animators and then some very innovative guys, and Heinz Edelmann was the leader of the innovative group. But they were just across the square from my office so I would just go in there and pay visits and see him sitting there at his desk. I remember seeing the Blue Meanies emerge. I’d give feedback. I remember him as being a cool cat, a zany guy.

Right, tell me about Binder, Edwards and Vaughn then.

I remember I first saw a photo of their painted car in the Sunday Times Magazine and thought it was really cool. So I got in touch with them and asked the guys if we could have a meeting. We did, and I told them “I’ve got a little piano I’d like you to decorate in that same style”. And at first they were a little bit reluctant to do anything, but I persuaded them. So they measured it all up, took the panel dimensions, and worked up some designs. Then they painted it and did a lovely job. It became my psychedelic piano which I wrote a lot of songs on, including “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “Fixing A Hole”, and “Hey Jude”. It’s in its rightful place in my music room in London.

Didn’t Dudley actually live with you for a while when he was doing some sort of mural project for you?

Yes. In fact, I recently unearthed the mural. At the time, I had some William Morris wallpaper – Chrysanthemum in a red. It was really cool when I first moved in -rather chic – but after a while it became a bit oppressive. It had outlived its usefulness so we decided it would be a great idea if we painted over it, and eventually by the time we were done, we’d have covered the whole room in a mural, using this paper as the backdrop. Wellllllll … we got to about probably 30″ x 25″. But it’s very cool! We would sit there forever, me and John, and whenever anyone came around – a guy called Stash who was Balthus’s son – Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola – they would have a little go. Dudley did most of the work on it while he was living with me.

Was it Dudley who asked you to create a musical piece for the ‘A Million Volt Light – Show and RaveI’?

I thought I remember Barry Miles asking me to do that, but we could have all been in the same room, and we all said, “Yeah that’s a good idea”. You didn’t really apportion credit back then. You were just hanging – and it was probably just whoever had the joint at the time.

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