The pull of Kintyre... why Macca will never give up the music and the memories
DEEP into the encore of a three-hour concert, Sir Paul McCartney sprang a surprise on his audience of 15,000 last week. ‘We can’t come to Canada without doing this next song,’ he told them. A few guitar strums later, the former Beatle was telling the people of Hamilton, Ontario, in song that his desire was always to be on the Mull of Kintyre.
Soon the stage was filling up with pipers – the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada Pipe Band, 25 strong and in full kilted regalia.
In a country fascinated by its Celtic connections, the singer’s seldomperformed Scottish waltz was rapturously received – perhaps even more so than it would have been back in the land of mists rolling in from the sea.
But then, here in Scotland, a suspicion persists that the love McCartney sings of in Mull of Kintyre has long since faded, that the words of the song ring increasingly hollow.
Little may he have realised it on stage in Canada but it is now half a century since he first set eyes on this most out of the way corner of Scotland and, almost immediately, became a property owner there.
At one time he considered building a life on the Kintyre peninsula. But in the present century, sightings of the landowner are rare indeed. He has visited the area just once in the past five years.
It was in the summer of 1966, at the height of the Beatles’ success, that the young pop prince found a bolthole in the back of beyond that met all his criteria.
He wanted somewhere in Scotland as far removed from the Swinging London scene as possible and remote enough to discourage even the most ardent fans from making the journey.
High Park Farm, a few miles from Campbeltown, Argyll, was certainly out of the way. And the long, winding track that led to the tumbledown farmhouse was perfect too. Only the most rugged of vehicles would be able to negotiate it.
For the remainder of the Sixties, this rural idyll served as a retreat for one of the most famous men on the planet. And, as both the Sixties and the Beatles ended, this was where McCartney disappeared to lick his wounds, finding solace in the simple rhythms of life in the Scottish countryside.
It was here on the farm that Sir Paul and his late wife Linda became shepherds, equestrians and, later, vegetarians – here too that, in the early 1970s, police found marijuana plants in the greenhouse, resulting in the only appearance by a Beatle in a Scottish sheriff court.
But all these years later McCartney’s enthusiasm for the Kintyre peninsula he made famous across the world appears to have cooled.
Far from wishing always to be there, he has not been seen in the area for years. Recent reports have suggested the place is falling into disrepair.
There is, of course, an obvious reason for the singer’s apparent reluctance to visit: memories. This was the place where he spent much of the 1970s with Linda, who died of breast cancer in 1998. It was she who told him she could make a home there and it is with her that he must associate life at High Park Farm.
Now on his third marriage, why revisit the past with someone who was not involved in it? Yet, says a source close to the musician, ‘He’ll never sell it. It will always hold a very special place in his heart.’
At the age of 24, with six Beatles albums and more than twice that many hit singles under his belt, McCartney was by 1966 already in the super-rich tax bracket paying eyewatering sums in income tax under Harold Wilson’s government.
The advice for those keen to avoid becoming tax exiles was to invest in property. This and the growing need for an escape valve from London’s goldfish bowl prompted McCartney to put out feelers for a suitable retreat in Scotland.
It was not long before a three bedroom farmhouse with assorted outbuildings and 183 acres of land crossed his accountant’s radar. Kintyre residents Mr and Mrs JS Brown had decided to sell the place where they had run a small dairy herd for the past 19 years. Their asking price of £35,000 reflected the fact rather a lot of work would have to be done on the house.
Two prospective buyers had already been shown around the property when the Browns received word from their solicitor in Campbeltown that they had another viewer. His name was Paul McCartney and he would be chartering a plane from London for his visit.
So it was that McCartney and his then 20-year-old girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, flew to Campbeltown Airport then caught a taxi to the gate of the farm where they were met by the farmer’s wife Janet Brown.
She showed them around the prospects and cooked them a meal of ham and eggs before they set off back for London. ‘You couldn’t meet nicer people,’ she commented later.
She also told journalists: ‘Our farm has been up for sale for a while now but what a surprise my husband and I had when we saw the famous pair. Paul told me that it had always been his ambition to own a farm in Scotland.’
McCartney had worn sunglasses, she said, while Asher, dressed in a trendy pyjama suit, looked even more out of place in rural Argyll. In the accompanying picture, Mrs Brown stood at her stove and held the frying pan she had used to cook her famous guests’ meals.
ENCHANTED by the scenery and splendid isolation of the farm, McCartney wasted no time in snapping it up. He told the Campbeltown Courier it was ‘the most peaceful spot I’ve ever come across in the world’.
Yet, as the author Philip Norman reveals in his new biography of McCartney, the arrival of the Beatle in the rural community’s midst was by no means universally welcomed. ‘Kintyre people were staunchly traditional church-goers and Sabbath observers, protected from the outside world by their peninsula, and deeply suspicious of strangers.’
As word went round the peninsula that a Beatle was moving in, some feared the area would become a magnet for druggy rock stars and debauched fans.
‘We had no Swinging Sixties here,’ said Campbeltown taxi driver Reggie McManus later. ‘And a lot of people thought we were going to be invaded by hippies with all their drug taking and free love. You might almost have said an alien had landed on Mull.’
Those fears soon dissipated as McCartney and his girlfriend started showing up for occasional weekends at the farm. ‘Everyone realised he was just looking for a place to escape to, where he could be himself and that he only wanted to be left alone,’ said Mr McManus.
Eschewing luxuries, they bought second-hand furniture from Campbeltown and made some of their own from wooden packing crates found in an outbuilding. According to Nor-
man, the Beatles’ 1967 song Fixing a Hole was inspired by McCartney’s solo efforts to repair his new farmhouse’s perennially leaky roof.
It was with a new girlfriend, New Yorker Linda Eastman, that McCartney’s visits to Scotland became much more frequent.
To his surprise, she had fallen in love with the farm on sight and could picture them raising a family there. Through much of the 1970s that is what they did.
It was not all rustic back-to-nature contentment. The turn of the decade found McCartney in despair, glugging whisky and smoking copious quantities of cannabis as he mourned the dissolution of the Beatles and tried to come to terms with his new ‘unemployed’ status.
‘I hit the bottle. I hit the substances. It was one of the worst times in my life,’ he later remembered.
A degree of self-control had been restored by 1972 when McCartney had formed a new band, Wings. But that was the year PC Norman McFee paid an unannounced visit to High Park Farm on what he said was a routine security check.
Having just attended a drugs awareness course in Glasgow, he instantly recognised five plants in the ramshackle greenhouse as cannabis.
Some suspected police were tipped off by unsympathetic neighbours. McCartney himself blamed the drug bust on Argyll’s finest having too much time on their hands.
‘It must have been like the coppers were sitting around thinking, “We’ve got a slack day, boys, let’s bust Macca,”’ he said.
Nevertheless, when McCartney flew up to Scotland by private jet to plead guilty in Campbeltown Sheriff Court to growing cannabis for personal use, the fears voiced six years earlier by the Sabbath observers appeared to have been realised. They had a drug-using rock ’n’ roll outlaw in their midst.
The folk song he started working on at the farm a few years later went some way towards making amends.
McCartney had no great expectations for his love song to the southernmost tip of a little celebrated Scottish peninsula. He knew it was totally out of step with the punk movement dominating the music scene in 1977 and his instinct was it would flop.
‘I don’t know. I think it’s a bit too twee and sugary,’ he told those urging him to release it as a single.
HIS instinct, of course, was dead wrong. The song not only outsold every single he had released with the Beatles but boosted the Kintyre economy by as much as 20 per cent for years afterwards.
Yet the best days of the McCartneys’ love affair with Scotland were probably behind them. With the arrival of a longed-for son, James, that year and schooling to consider for their daughters, the family decided it was impractical to base themselves for weeks or months on end in the Scottish wilds.
They settled instead at another farm, Peasmarsh in East Sussex, purchased several years earlier.
Much had changed in the dozen or so years since the High Park Farm deeds were signed. McCartney had bought huge tracts of the surrounding land when it had come up for sale and it was now more an estate than a farm. Moreover, the livestock no longer went to market.
Gazing out at their sheep from the dinner table one day, the family suddenly fell silent as they realised they were eating leg of lamb. Thereafter nothing was slaughtered.
By the beginning of the 1980s, however, the farm was largely being run on the McCartneys’ behalf.
And, while people stayed in the tied cottages which made up an estate now covering 600 acres, the former Beatle was, for the most part, an absent landlord.
Following the death of his wife in 1998, visits to the Scottish farm would fizzle out almost entirely.
But at a memorial for her in London’s Trafalgar Square, McCartney had a piper play Mull of Kintyre in memory of their time there.
Later a bronze statue of Linda, commissioned by her widower, was unveiled in Campbeltown. McCartney and his second wife Heather Mills visited the memorial garden where it stands in 2005 with their toddler daughter Beatrice Milly.
Today McCartney’s family visit their Scottish farm much more often than the head of the household himself. Yet sources suggest he remains determined to run it – or at least have it run – as a viable operation.
Life may have moved on but when the 74-year-old sang last week of being carried back to the days he knew then, only the hardest heart would not have believed part of him longed to go there.