How Macca killed punk
Forty years after his Scottish waltz stormed the charts ahead of the Sex Pistols, the hilarious story behind the making of the Mull of Kintyre
IT was a blowy day in midsummer 1977 when a pipe band leader named Tony Wilson sat down for a cup of tea in the kitchen of High Park Farm, a rambling structure tucked away on the Kintyre peninsula. On his lap lay a set of bagpipes and opposite him sat Paul McCartney.
At 36 years old, a father of four and with the Beatles long since behind him, McCartney was still trying to figure out his place in the music world. Today though, he had a plan.
‘I said to Tony, “Could you play your pipes while I play the guitar and we’ll see if I can think of something or see what key you’re in?”,’ McCartney recalled years later.
‘Well the row in this little kitchen was unbelievable. They were really loud bagpipes, so I said, “Maybe we should go out in the garden”. So out in the garden we went.’
What happened next became the basis for Mull of Kintyre, one of the biggest-selling records of all time and a song that transformed not just the fortunes of McCartney, but of the thin strip of land that juts out from Scotland’s West Coast and points towards Ireland.
It is 40 years to the day since Mull of Kintyre hit the charts, where its distinctive pipes-led refrain remained at Number One for a stonking nine weeks. It caused an almighty stir in a music scene that was embracing the punk movement and in particular the Sex Pistols, who had released their seminal album Never Mind the B ****** s just a few weeks earlier.
‘Right in the middle of all this anarchy, I suddenly fancied seeing if I could write a Scottish waltz,’ McCartney recalled.
‘This was the time of the Sex Pistols doing Pretty Vacant and God Save The Queen and I liked the spirit of it, but the thought of releasing a Scottish waltz in the middle of all that was... well, I thought, “This is going to be unusual”.’
Unusual was the word. But, eight years on from the break up the Beatles and with five Wings albums already behind him, whimsical self-confidence had become something of a trademark for McCartney.
‘By then, I had really fallen in love with Scotland and one day it occurred to me that no great Scottish songs had been written for quite a while,’ he said.
‘All the bagpipe stuff was from the previous century. I wondered why nobody had done anything much since and then I thought, “Well, maybe I could write one”.’
MCCARTNEY’S love affair with Scotland had started back in 1966 when he was still a fully paid up member of the biggest band in the world and dating 20-year-old Jane Asher. On impulse he bought High Park Farm, near Campbeltown, during a trip north from his native Liverpool (Asher apparently wore a pyjama suit for the occasion, a move that raised eyebrows among the Kintyre locals), and began using it for holidays and as a retreat from Beatlemania, then at its hysterical peak.
While McCartney was undoubtedly enchanted by the peace and tranquillity of the place, there were more practical reasons for the purchase too: he had been instructed by his accountants to put his Beatles royalties into non-liquid assets, safe from the prying eye of the taxman.
It wasn’t until he wed Linda Eastman, however, and his wife saw the place, that he realised its full potential.
‘When I married Linda, she came over from America and she was in love with the whole idea of Scotland. She said, “You’ve got a place up in Scotland?” and I said, “yeah”, and she said, “Let’s go”.
‘Looking at it through her eyes I fell in love with it again.’
When the Beatles broke up in 1969, McCartney retreated to Kintyre to lick his wounds and it was there, over the next few years, that the couple raised their family in cosy rural domesticity and created Wings, the band they formed with ex-Moody Blues musician Denny Laine.
Indeed it was at High Park in the mid-1970s that both McCartneys decided to become vegetarian.
‘We were watching lambs in the fields while Linda was cooking a leg of lamb. The situation struck both of us,’ McCartney said.
‘Linda very graciously always credited me for the idea of going veggie, but we hit on it at the same time in that moment in Scotland. Both of us just looked at each other and said we did not want to eat meat any more.’
By the time Wilson, the Campbeltown Pipe Band leader, arrived at the farm that summer’s day and ended up playing his pipes in McCartney’s garden, the Beatle had a very firm idea of the sort of music he wanted to make. ‘I’m kind of listening to him and thinking OK he’s playing in A so I can use that chord and then D, I can use that chord,’ said McCartney.
‘So I had the basis, and then I wrote the song with Denny Laine.’
Years later, Laine recalled the moment McCartney revealed to him that he was having a go at writing a Scottish song, during a visit to High Park later that summer.
‘[He said he] wasn’t sure how people would feel about it, an Englishman singing a Scottish song,’ the musician said.
Still, the following day the pair sat outside in the Argyll sunshine with a bottle of whisky and their guitars and wrote the now famous lines ‘Mull of Kintyre, Oh mist rolling in from the sea, My desire is always to be here, Oh Mull of Kintyre’. ‘We just looked around at all the hillsides and the glens and everything and just wrote the words and the rest of the song that afternoon,’ Laine recalled.
tHE lyrics and music in place, McCartney called upon the services of the Campbeltown Pipe Band, who he had heard playing in the town years earlier and were led by Wilson.
‘I rang Tony and said, “Hey listen, I’ve written a song and I’d like you to help me record it with the pipe band. He said, “OK, very good”.’
The recording took place just a few weeks later at McCartney’s studio in Kintyre. The band’s lead drummer, former miner Campbell Maloney, recalled the excitement when McCartney made the request. ‘We got back a tape of Paul singing to an acoustic guitar and telling us where he wanted the big breaks of pipes and drums,’ he said once.
‘It was quite a hard thing to do, the way it was arranged. The instructions were chalked on a blackboard in our band hall.
‘But as soon as we heard the recorded song, well, everybody just thought it was a winner. It was a privilege to have been there.’
McCartney says he was amazed when members of the pipe band turned up in full Highland dress for their recording.
‘They blew their bags up and started playing, and it was a fantastic sound. A very emotional sound. Loud, very loud.’
He was aware, however, that they needed to get their takes in the bag early.
‘I knew these guys like to drink so I said we won’t drink before the session because it would go horribly wrong. We’ll break out the drinks when we’ve got the take. So sure enough we got this great take, it’s the one you hear on the record, and we broke out the McEwan’s.’
As the evening progressed, McCartney and the band got ‘progressively more tiddly’, while Wilson, the man who had helped start it all, requested a dram or two.
‘It was a fantastic evening as you can imagine and everyone got very merry and happy with themselves but the thing was that for days afterwards they couldn’t find Tony,’ McCartney revealed in an interview last year.
‘He was eventually found wandering around the hills with his wee dram. He was just so excited. I don’t think he wanted to go home – even to the Mull of Kintyre.’
Wilson, who died in 1994, described the whole experience as ‘magic’. He said: ‘All the boys are proud to have played on the record. McCartney is a genius.’ The pipe band even had pride of place in the song’s video, striding across a Kintyre beach in full Highland regalia before members of the local community – including children and copious numbers of old ladies with headscarves – were filmed singing along to the tune around a bonfire.
Although McCartney wasn’t convinced the song would become a smash, the boys in the pipe band apparently were.
‘We were listening to the playback and the pipers are saying “That’s a Number One hit”,’ recalled McCartney.
‘I wasn’t so sure. I thought we were all just getting a little out of it because, as I say, this was in the middle of punk rock.’
Much to his amazement, when Mull of Kintyre was released on November 11 – exactly 40 years ago today – it raced to the top of the charts, staying there throughout Christmas 1977 and only relinquishing its hold to Jamaican reggae duo Althea & Donna in February the next year.
RECALLING his surprise at the single’s sales, McCartney said: ‘I remember one of my guys in my London office, phoning me and saying, “It’s selling 30,000 a day.”
‘I still wasn’t convinced and as a joke I said, “Don’t phone me back until it’s selling 100,000 a day.”
‘Sure enough, a week later, he’s on the phone again, saying “It’s selling 100,000 a day.” It was crazy and, to tell the truth, I was very surprised how big it became.
‘But then I remembered the actual session and all the wee Scottish lads saying, “That’s a number-one, that is.” And then I thought, they were right, you know, they could tell.’ The song eventually sold 2.5million in the UK and for many years was the biggest selling single of all time. It sold six million globally.
AND there was even a minor controversy when it was revealed that the 21 pipe band members were each paid the standard Musicians’ Union fee, prompting critics to accuse McCartney of stinginess. He promptly sent off a cheque for £200 to each player.
Yet in truth, the song did much not just for the fortunes of the Campbeltown Pipe Band, who were suddenly in great demand, but for the area as a whole. The world wanted to know about this remote corner of Scotland that had captured the former Beatle’s heart, and tourists began flocking to the peninsula in earnest, hopeful for a glimpse both of the Mull itself and of McCartney.
McCartney has vowed never to sell High Park, but since Linda’s death to breast cancer at 56 in 1998 he has rarely returned and is believed not to have visited for years. Yet the connection between the family and the area has remained.
At Linda’s memorial service in London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, a lone bagpiper played Mull of Kintyre for her one last time, and afterwards, McCartney took some of her ashes to scatter at High Park Farm.
In 2003, the Campbeltown Pipe Band were asked to play at Stella McCartney’s wedding on the Isle of Bute, with just one, curious request: don’t play Mull of Kintyre.
For McCartney it has remained a favourite and got pride of place on his recent post-Beatles album, Pure McCartney.
‘It was a love song really,’ he explained once. ‘About how I enjoyed being there and imagining I was travelling away and wanting to get back.’