Interview for Fabulous208

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No matter what they do or where they go we’ll always love The Beatles… we could never forget the guys who began it all. Maybe we love Paul best because he seems to care about us the most and it does make a difference that he’s the one remaining bachelor… OR IS HE? (We think he was when we went to press)

I’d zoomed like a supersonic spaceman up to the thirty-fifth floor of the G.P.O. Tower; been lured by the cherubic sounds of Mary Hopkin into the revolving restaurant; had a glass of champagne thrust into my hand; caught a glimpse of Donovan revolving in the opposite direction and stopped six feet away from… guess who?

Paul McCartney, with his hair brushed back and his side-boards grown long to the extreme. Cool, confident and far more mature than I’d imagined.

I felt dizzy!

To begin with I couldn’t really believe I was there at all which made me feel even more jumpy round the tummy.

“Go and find Paul McCartney,” the Ed had said. And now that I actually had (at a party given specially to promote the Mary Hopkin LP), everything felt very unreal. You see, in my dreams I’d always met Paul through the cloak-and-dagger routine, by turning up on his doorstep as the gasman or pretending to be his new char. All this seemed too easy.

Did I say easy…?

Reaching Paul is like crashing your way through the Himalayan jungle behind a herd of elephants. Everyone, but everyone wants to talk to him, touch him, take pictures of him, beg autographs from him. People swarm like bees round a honeypot and of course Paul is frisky, friendly and polite to them all.

Eventually I cut through the last tangle of undergrowth and grabbed my prey (or tapped him on the arm at any rate!)

“I’m from Fabulous,” I said. “Hello Fabulous,” said Paul and my poor tummy twisted twice. Hooked, like everyone else, on a pair of bush-baby brown eyes.

“I usually find people don’t mind coming up to me,” he said, when I suggested he might not be so awe-inspiring after all. “But I do notice that some people get a bit nervous and that makes me tense as well. I have to make more of an effort to cool them down, and myself in the process.”

Fame is odd. In some ways you need to be far more responsible. You’ve got to realise the price you pay and add up all the irritations before you decide you want to be famous. And wanting to be famous is often one of the best ways of becoming so.

“Fame was just an opportunity to show off, which all kids want,” explained Paul. “I didn’t know I was going to be famous, but I had a feeling I might. Elvis was my idol and fame to me meant a car, a house and a good guitar. Those were the things I wanted as a kid. Because Elvis was very flashy with things like a fleet of Cadillacs, I wanted them too although I wasn’t sure what I would do with more than one car!

“I thought I would probably earn a lot of money. I knew I could sing and write songs and the money that came in was the reward. We all wanted a lot quickly, and we got it. The first thing I bought was a car, a Ford Classic. Then I got banned for a year and at the end I got an Aston Martin.”

When the money began to roll in Paul could have anything he wanted. Naturally he’s proud of his possessions — his dog, his cars, his house in St. John’s Wood — because he’s worked hard to get them. But this can soon wear off.

“By having everything I wanted I know I’ve learned a lot, but I’m not sure exactly what I’ve learned! The whole point about life is possessions and the excitement is in trying to get them. It’s the same with a girl — it’s never so exciting once you’ve got her. But that’s the nature of things. The same with a car, a house, anything you think of as a possession.

“So eventually you get to the point where you don’t mind not having a thing, just as long as you can be near it. Most people wouldn’t understand that because they want to get things — I would never have understood it when I was eighteen.”

Working for something is great but once you’ve achieved it, when you feel there are no more rungs to the ladder, what do you do?

“I’ve gone back to doing things I did as a kid. Like now I enjoy going on the tube and buses. It sounds silly and later on I’ll probably get sick of it. You see, people going to work in the morning don’t look at anyone else, but I like to wander around looking at everyone and being anonymous.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love people to recognise me although there was a time when I found it irritating. Now I just accept it. You have to.

“There are some things that I just can’t do now. Shopping in department stores, for example, is very difficult. If I want to wander around I know the assistants will recognise me. So I stick to smaller shops where, if people do notice me, there are only two or three of them. Sometimes, though, I just feel I want to get out quick.

“Last summer I went and lay on a beach with all the other holiday-makers, listened to my transistor and ate my sandwiches, hoping people wouldn’t recognise me. They did. But luckily we made friends, nobody bothered me and we all had a laugh.”

Friends are fine, but the people who tag on to someone famous just to share the limelight are a different story.

“You get hangers-on and all of that, but you don’t make friends with them and they soon drop away. Still, it makes you value the friendships you had before. Being a Beatle hasn’t made any difference to my attitude to people generally. My parents especially mean a lot to me and I really like them. I never had a problem childhood so nothing has changed there.

“Of course, you can’t help changing. If you four of us have always been ourselves. If you can’t say anything else about John you’ve got to say that. Whatever we’ve wanted to do we’ve done. It’s the only way, there’s no other. You get into a mess if you’re being false. That’s the one thing that’s kept us all relatively sane.

“When you get money, a big car, a bigger house, you can’t help not being exactly what you were. But everyone changes all the time, no one remains the same. And the really great thing about life is that as you get one year older, so does every one else!!”