McCartney has similarly fond memories of his trumpet-playing father, whose love of crosswords he compares to his own approach to writing songs. A midwife in life, she was also a midwife in her afterlife, helping to deliver some of his finest songs. And she is namechecked (“When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me”) in Let It Be, a phrase she liked to use and one that also appears in Hamlet, which McCartney read at school. He wrote more directly about her in the year she died, 1956, in I Lost My Little Girl, a song not released till 1991. He used to deny that she lay behind the words of Yesterday (“Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”) but now accepts she must have been. The biggest influence on McCartney’s music was the death of his mother, Mary, when he was 14. He talks a lot about Lennon, nostalgically and with affection, and is keen to emphasise that they ended on good terms In effect the book becomes an autobiography, with Muldoon playing the part that Dennis O’Driscoll played in the interviews that became Seamus Heaney’s autobiography, Stepping Stones. Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding. And a few of McCartney’s rhymes (pataphysical/quizzical, Edison/medicine) wouldn’t look out of place in a Muldoon poem. On the face of it, the two Pauls have little in common: one a complex poet, the other a pop star.
MC MAGIC SONGS WITH LYRICS ARCHIVE
Spread over two lavish volumes and more than 900 pages, and supplemented by memorabilia from the million-plus items in his archive (photos, posters, paintings, jottings and letters), the book came about through conversations with the poet Paul Muldoon: 50 hours of them, in 24 sessions between 20, covering 154 songs.
Numerous biographies have traced the origins of Beatles songs. It’s a homespun English lyric – “the face that she keeps in a jar by the door” alludes to Nivea cold cream, a favourite of McCartney’s mum – with universal resonance: Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were among the song’s biggest fans. “The secret to successful songwriting is the ability to paint a picture,” he says, and the picture of Eleanor Rigby “picking up rice in the church where a wedding has been” perfectly captures her loneliness, just as the line “writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear” does with Father McKenzie (originally Father McCartney, till a trawl through the phone book turned up a suitable trisyllabic alternative). Take Eleanor Rigby, which began as a song about the kind of old lady McCartney did chores for as a scout during bob-a-job week and who he thought of calling Daisy Hawkins until working with Eleanor Bron on the film Help! and spotting a shop sign with the name Rigby in Bristol. Where the straight-up, irony-free early lyrics wooed their audience through a flurry of pronouns – She Loves You, From Me to You, Please Please Me, etc – the later lyrics aspired to poetry.
When he wrote songs with John Lennon, the chords and melody came first. He has fond memories of his English teacher, Alan Durband, who studied with FR Leavis and taught the young Paul the value of close reading. I f he hadn’t become a musician, Paul McCartney says, he would probably have been an English teacher.
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