All Macca’s yesterdays
Beatle makes emotional return to childhood home ... and streets that inspired biggest hits
WHEN Paul McCartney was a teenage boy dreaming of greatness he would sit on the loo in his father’s council house on a Liverpool estate, playing his guitar and singing.
With that slight bathroom echo of lino and tiles, the room had the best acoustics in the house and from an early age he realised that if you were going to be a star, you had to have that touch of echo.
This was revealed by the man himself during his first return to his teenage home since the 1960s, filmed for an edition of James Corden’s Late Late Show.
It’s an honest, unabashed reflection. Paul McCartney knows better than anyone how his childhood helped make him the most famous singer-songwriter in the world.
number 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, was a small but solid home for the aspirant young family Jim and Mary McCartney were rearing in the early Fifties.
In a post-war era of great optimism they’d been thrilled to get this house, a step forward compounded when Paul and his younger brother Michael both passed the scholarship to go to the city-centre grammar, Liverpool Institute High School for Boys.
Ambition, hard work and respectability were the cornerstones of that family. ‘God loves a trier,’ Jim McCartney would say.
Music was always there, too, and a piano, bought on the never-never from a shop owned by the father of Brian Epstein, the man who would one day become the Beatles’ manager, had pride of place in the little sitting room.
Jim McCartney, having played in a jazz band before his marriage, was keen to encourage his elder son to follow in his footsteps. Paul was sent for piano lessons but gave up when he grew bored playing scales. He still professes not to be able to read music.
ATRUMPET as a birthday present was the next inducement. But that was quickly returned to the shop and exchanged for a guitar, when Paul realised that he couldn’t play trumpet and sing at the same time. And he liked singing – to the extent that he was in the St Barnabas’ Church Choir.
When Mary McCartney died from breast cancer, Jim was left to bring up his sons as a single father.
Paul was 14. no-one who loses a mother in childhood comes away unscathed and he has always felt that grief led him to spend more and more time playing his guitar.
Years later when the Beatles were falling out among themselves he had a dream about her in which she told him that things were going to be all right. That, as he tells Corden, led him to write Let It Be.
He didn’t know it, but the building blocks of his future were taking shape all around him when, by astonishing serendipity, a year later he met John Lennon.
not only did the two live only a mile or so from each other, soon they would become neighbours in education, John attending Liverpool College of Art, which just happened to be next door to Paul’s school. Soon they were both missing classes in the afternoons to practise playing their guitars and writing songs together.
Jim McCartney certainly had his reservations. ‘That John Lennon… he’ll lead you into trouble,’ he once told his son, but Paul and John shared an obsession with rockand-roll music.
Eating toast and drinking tea in that little house in Forthlin Road, they finessed all the Beatles’ early hits from Love Me Do to She Loves You. During his visit, walking into a small room next to the kitchen, Paul, 76, tells Corden: ‘Over here is where me and John would often come to rehearse, to write. This was mainly our room here. My dad would be in there [the living room] watching telly or doing something and we’d be in here. We’d just written She Loves You, which was to be a big Beatles hit.’
He says his father commented, ‘Why does it have to be “She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah”? Why can’t it be “She loves you, yes, yes, yes”?’
When fame fully arrived for the Beatles in 1963, Paul moved out of Forthlin Road, but Liverpool travelled with him in his eyes and in his ears, most memorably resurfacing in the song Penny Lane – about a once famous Liverpool tram terminus.
There is the ‘shelter in the middle of the roundabout’ where a pretty nurse was ‘selling poppies from a tray’, while further on was the barber whose shop window showed photographs of ‘every head he’s had the pleasure to know’.
There were more. When I’m Sixty-Four was an old tune Paul wrote when he was still living at home and playing in the Cavern Club, given new lyrics and fame in 1967 when his father reached that age.
Eleanor Rigby, the story of a spinster and a lonely priest, is permeated with a sense of Liverpool Catholicism that he and John would have both observed.
To some extent we are all held captive by our childhoods.
Paul McCartney made sure he, and we, never escaped his, by putting so many of those memories into song.