Tragedy of the teenage genius Linda and Paul took under their Wings
He supported The Who at 13, had a number one hit at 15 and joined Macca’s band at 21 ... before succumbing to a life of rock star excess aged 26
IN the late summer of 1977, the mercurial guitarist of Wings was going stir-crazy on Paul McCartney’s Mull of Kintyre farm. Jimmy McCulloch was just 24 and, from the outside looking in, was surely among the most blessed rock musicians on the planet.
A protégé of The Shadows’ Hank Marvin before he reached his teens, he was, by 13, being feted by The Who’s Pete Townshend and, by 15, had played on a number one single.
Not bad going for a schoolboy from that most unlikely of rock star breeding grounds – the new town of Cumbernauld in Lanarkshire.
By 1977, he was recording his third studio album in a converted barn on the McCartney farm with Wings and had a world tour with the band under his belt.
Looking back, many would contend the Scottish wunderkind was the finest musician in the band besides the former Beatle himself.
But McCulloch had warned McCartney he was subject to mood swings. He was hired in 1974 anyway.
Three years on, in the wilds of the Kintyre peninsula, his mood was darkening by the day. While McCartney and his heavily pregnant first wife Linda installed themselves in the relative luxury of the main farmhouse, the rest of the band were dispersed around the estate in lodgings which fell below expectations.
Low Ranachan Cottage, for example, was described by one band member’s wife as ‘a couple of old chairs and some ragged pee-stained mattresses’.
McCulloch was equally unimpressed. Holed up for days on end, thoroughly bored, in quarters he referred to as ‘the bunker’ he decided one night to break into the storeroom where eggs from Linda’s hens sat meticulously arranged. Grabbing an armful, he threw them against the living room wall in protest.
When Linda found out she burst into tears and her husband ordered him to leave. McCulloch’s departure from the band was confirmed within days.
Two years later, at the age of 26, he would be found dead.
FouR decades on, the extraordinary story of the Scottish guitar wizard who blazed his precocious trail through rock music in the 1960s and 1970s may long since have faded from public consciousness, even in his homeland.
But, this month, a poignant reminder of his genius surfaced in the most unexpected of places – a daytime TV show dedicated to restoring old artefacts of sentimental value to their owners.
It was an appearance by car saleswoman Margaret Chambers from Houston, Renfrewshire, on The Repair Shop which stirred those memories. She walked onto the show carrying two discoloured platinum discs in water-damaged frames and asked the show’s experts if they could do anything.
They were passed to her by her cousin Jimmy when she was a child, she said, and had been in her attic for longer than she could remember.
She had come across them again during a lockdown clear-out and been transported back to her late 70s childhood when there was a rock star in the family.
She remembered: ‘He was a nice, quiet, unassuming guy.
‘He didn’t wear flashy clothes and wasn’t flash or in everybody’s face. He’d tell me when he was on Top of the Pops he’d wave to me.’
She admits now that she had little interest in Wings memorabilia back then.
‘At the time I liked David Bowie. I used to ask him why he couldn’t be in Bowie’s band. He told me he had the choice but went with Paul because he was the biggest star on the planet then.
‘He offered me a signed guitar by Paul, and I said no. Now I think, “What an idiot”.’
ultimately, he gave her two platinum discs – one for the band’s Wings over America live album and the other for their 1976 studio album Wings at the Speed of Sound.
She added: ‘He gave his mum
Lillian a gold and a platinum disc as well. I put them on my wall. But I was a wee girl at the time and the discs had no street cred.’
For his part, McCulloch was troubled by Wings’ lack of street cred, too. A virtuoso, he struggled to reconcile himself with the fact he was sharing a stage with Linda, a relative novice on keyboards whose place in the band owed solely to her marriage.
He was also well aware that, at the time he was touring the world with a 1960s legend, most rockers of his own vintage were forming punk bands and trashing ‘establishment’ musicians such as McCartney.
Thus he found himself in a kind of no-man’s land: too young and brash to fully engage with Wings’ adultoriented soft rock – and too talented, and proud of it, to feel any real kinship with punks, few of whom were much more skilled at their instruments than Linda.
In his biography of Paul McCartney, the author Philip Norman says McCulloch was ‘deeply unsettled by the punk explosion which labelled him a “dinosaur” at the age of 24’.
Indeed, says Norman, finding himself in the same Manchester pub as the Sex Pistols one night, ‘Jimmy shouted at the Pistols that they were crap, and, in the altercation that followed, physically
attacked one of them, whose name he took pride in not knowing’.
It was far from the first fisticuffs of his Wings tenure. Though just 5ft 4in and stick-thin, McCulloch found himself in a boozy brawl with teen heartthrob David Cassidy in a Paris hotel bar in February 1976 and wound up breaking his finger as the band were due to set out on their American tour.
The shows had to be put back a month until McCulloch could play again. At the time, says Norman, the media were told he had slipped on a wet marble floor while getting out of his hotel bath.
Then there was the time McCulloch and drummer Geoff Britton almost came to blows in the studio after the former made a typically acidic remark about
Linda’s musicianship, which reduced her to tears.
Another time, in response to a minor criticism about his own playing, the Scot picked up an empty bottle and hurled it through the studio control room window.
Well, he had warned McCartney that he could be tempestuous.
It was as a primary school pupil growing up in Cumbernauld that McCulloch first picked up a guitar and, almost immediately, discovered he was a natural.
By the age of 11, he had crossed Shadows’ lead guitarist Hank Marvin’s radar and was picking up tips from him. That was also the age at which he formed his first band, The Jaygars, with his older brother Jack on drums.
They morphed into One in a
Million, a psychedelic rock group which released two singles in 1967 and supported The Who when they toured Scotland. McCulloch was still only 13.
The real breakthrough came when his family relocated to London that year.
For a time, the boy guitarist was one of the most exciting musicians in the capital’s underground scene and, with the patronage of figures such as Pete Townshend, he could not have been better placed to make his mark.
It was through Townshend that he found a berth with a new band, Thunderclap Newman, whose records The Who guitarist planned to produce and moonlight on as bassist.
So it was that, at the age of just 15 in 1969, McCulloch and fellow band members recorded Something in the Air, which streaked up the charts that July, knocking the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women off the top spot. It took the Beatles’ Ballad of John and Yoko to dislodge it three weeks later.
Ever restless, McCulloch did not hang around long. By 1971 he was playing guitar on tour for John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, forming a new band, Bent Frame, and guesting on albums for a string of stars, including Harry Nilsson.
The following year brought yet another new direction. He joined blues rock band Stone the Crows, whose guitarist Lee Harvey had been electrocuted on stage.
That only lasted a year before the group disbanded in 1973.
By then Wings were beginning to look like a revolving door for musicians. A string of them came and went in the band’s early years, some complaining bitterly about McCartney’s controlling influence, meagre wages and being treated as session musicians.
But in 1974, as he began recruiting again, McCartney appeared ready to learn from experience and give prospective new members room to shine in the band. When McCulloch joined up, he was even given a lead vocal on one of the tracks on Venus and Mars, the first album he recorded with Wings.
BuT his volatility was never far from the surface. There were explosive rows with drummer Britton and a stream of barbed comments at Linda. Only the brilliance of his playing, increasingly in evidence in the band’s world tour of 1976, kept him in the fold.
understandably his cousin Margaret, who was 17 years his junior, saw little of this side of him.
She recalled: ‘When he came up from London he’d go to my Nana’s in Drumry in Clydebank in the high flats. He liked a drink and he liked a bath, but Nana would never let him have a bath at hers because she wouldn’t put the immerser on. It was a time before combi boilers and instant hot water.
‘So he’d come to ours for a bath. It’s funny to think he’d had a No1 and was in Wings – but his gran wouldn’t allow him a bath.’
By the summer of 1976, once McCulloch’s broken finger had mended, he was playing to the largest audiences of his life. With 67,000 in the crowd, their show in Seattle broke the attendance record for an indoor event.
Yet still the guitarist could be inexplicably moody. Norman describes one show where McCulloch refused to go back on stage as the audience roared for an encore. ‘Instead of acting the big star boss, Paul simply grabbed him and bundled him back on stage where, with typical contrariness, he played his best all evening.’
ultimately, however, the smashed eggs against the living room wall a year later in the Mull of Kintyre proved the breaking point.
A terse statement was issued by McCartney days later. ‘Jimmy’s been playing great guitar recently and it’s a pity he’s leaving,’ he said. ‘But problems have been building up for some time now. We’re happy to carry on without him.’
Reflecting much later on McCulloch’s years in Wings, McCartney said: ‘Being my first band after The Beatles, Wings was always going to be a tough cookie. I don’t think any band would have felt quite up to it. Once or twice, you know, we had a few arguments and stuff, like, “I don’t like the way you do that”, and… ooh, friction!
‘Jimmy McCulloch was a great guy, a great little player, but such an erratic personality, if you want to put it nicely. Whenever we did have an argument, it was amplified because they were all so insecure.
‘Inevitably, there were quite a few line-ups.’
He added: ‘For some reason, we turned into aggressive, crazy people during Wings.’
For his part McCulloch announced he was leaving to join a new line-up of The Small Faces. It proved typically short-lived. He said on leaving Wings that he had learned a lot with the band and ‘had some good times’.
His parting shot was: ‘Although Linda doesn’t know much about music, she’s a nice chick.’
Weeks after his departure, Wings issued a single, a gentle paean to the peninsula where McCulloch had been bored out of his skull.
It was called Mull of Kintyre and became the first single to sell more than two million copies.
The young rocker’s feelings about the place were clearly not shared by the songwriter.
His brother Jack found him lifeless in his flat in Maida Vale, London, in September 1979. It is thought he had been dead for two days after suffering heart failure brought on by morphine and alcohol poisoning. He was just 26.
Who knows how many more platinum discs there might have been for this unfeasibly talented guitar slinger if his self-destructive streak had remained in check?