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Banger Brian Epstein moments

(highlights from this post)

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OSCAR ISAAC for Brioni

Fall/Winter 2024

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“I think the image of Brian was that of a very soft, sensitive person, which was not the case. He was a very strong-willed person. I remember when John Lennon refused to do an interview during a tour because the people out there were fascists or something like that. Brian went nose to nose with him. He took his tie and said, ‘John, you’re soft,’ and stared him down. And you could see it, John backed away. Brian had full control and they respected his thinking. Brian, in a way, saw them like his children. He understood them. When one of them complained, he would say, ‘I know he loves me and I love him.’ He used to go on about their relative talents and things like that. He had great insights into their personalities. He once gave me a precis of the Beatles in Cleveland. George was always concerned about publishing and things like that. Paul was concerned about the Beatles’ image, the fan clubs, the opposite of a counterculture approach. John and Brian related perfectly because they saw eye to eye. Ringo was the least talented but was not uptight about it. Brian was the total manager of the Beatles. He kept a circle around the Beatles. Nobody got to the Beatles without having to go through Brian and he controlled every facet of their professional career. No press conference was run without Brian having it under his control. No statements were made, no deals were made without Brian being in complete control. It was a one-man operation.”

— Nat Weiss, c/o Debbie Geller, In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story. (2002)

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“Paul’s new album Driving Rain, out on Monday, is littered with references to Heather [Mills] and Linda. It includes the ballad From a Lover to a Friend, which features the poignant line “Let me love again.” Paul went on: “That song could be about my situation with Heather and perhaps subconsciously it is. I’m happy for it to mean that but I don’t mind what people think. “You can’t help when you fall in love — when it happens, it happens. When I first started with Linda, John Lennon, like a lot of people, said, ‘I’m surprised by your choice, are you sure?’ “And I said yes, ‘I’m surprised by yours too’ and we had a little laugh. But we both agreed you can’t tell who you fall for.””

— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Dominic Mohan for the Sun. (November, 2001)

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October(?), 1982: BBC reporter Mike McKay interviews Paul for the 20th anniversary of ‘Love Me Do’. 

PAUL: John and I started writing… uh, a couple of years before we ever got a record contract. And we actually used to sag off school, go to my house, and we started trying to write songs. And we got together a bunch of songs, and ‘Love Me Do’ was one of them. 

MCKAY: Was there ever a serious possibility that you would have reformed in the late 70s or 80s and play together?

PAUL: No. Uh, while those offers were going on, we would ring each other and say, “Have you heard about this offer?” “Well you’re not going to do it, are you?” And we’d say, “No way.” So between the four of us there was never any question that we were gonna do it, you know. We were just kind of watching the world going mad, really. And the reason was that this chemistry that I was talking about had been broken. We definitely said, right, I don’t like you, don’t want to work with you again, and the business and everything had come to a head, like a divorce. 

MCKAY: But at the end, the last few years, you were all on better terms, on a sort of similar terms—?

PAUL: We were on better terms, yes, but no so as we’d felt like we’d pick up the group thing again. Nobody wanted, really, to work with each other. There were moments when you thought, oh, it would be great, it really would be great. But uh, we generally thought that if we did it, it would be a let down. One thing we’ve always been conscious of with the Beatles was to go on and have a great career and leave ’em laughin’, kind of thing. And we thought we’d done that, you know. We didn’t really want to come back as kind of decrepit old rockers: [geriatric voice] “Hello, remember us? Hey she loves you, yeah yeah yeah…” You know and, “Oh dear, you know, they were good, honest, kids,” all the grown-ups would be saying. “They were good when we knew ’em.” It’s just… so we didn’t want to do it.

MCKAY: But other groups of the same period have survived and gone on, perhaps with some changes – The Who, The Rolling Stones…

PAUL: Yeah. [long pause; laughs] True. Um… but we broke up. [pause] Although I think it was a natural thing, I don’t think we could’ve. Think the thing was we were eighteen, kids, growing up, and we did sort of our ten years in the army thing, and then we had to go our separate ways. We had to look at life, instead of just this group. We had to find women, for one, uh, which we all sort of did. Um. And then we had to give time to that new life, you know, because with the Beatles it prohibited any other thing. You just had to go with the group and there wasn’t any time for anything else. 

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Q: Paul McCartney: An Innocent Man? (October, 1986)

(Note: I’ve posted so many quotes and audio clips from this interview in the past (#interviewer: chris salewicz), I may as well post the entire printed interview as well. Still remains one of my very favourite Paul interviews - candid, emotionally fraught, brimming with preoccupations, and all the more revealing for it.

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Paul McCartney curls up on the couch and relives the Beatles’ story for the first time since the death of John Lennon. “He was one great guy, but part of his greatness was that he wasn’t a saint.”

by Chris Salewicz

Paul McCartney is 44. He was 20 when his first composition appeared on record. Today he’s just returned from remixing a second single from his new LP Press To Play, his 27th solo or group studio album in 24 years.

He’s sitting on a sofa on the second floor of the building in Central London from which he directs his activities. Outside, on this sunny early afternoon, lie the neatly trimmed lawns of Soho Square; inside a forest of deco mahogany woodwork, a De Kooning on the wall and a chrome and neon-garlanded Wurlitzer jukebox of quite archetypal proportions and splendour. He’s wearing fawn moccasins, yellow socks, and a blue and white striped shirt and trousers and, despite the omnipresent grey hair, he looks in immensely good shape for someone who was still in the studio at three in the morning.

Part of McCartney’s agility as a communicator has been the paradoxical mastery of revealing nothing whatsoever of himself to journalists. This was particularly notable during the interviews he gave for Give My Regards To Broad Street, an almost unprecedented barrage of publicity in which it seemed that the more people he spoke to, the less he said. This was perhaps connected with a comprehension of the transparent unsubstantiality of the work. “Broad Street?” he says now. “You don’t stop things just because they’re not good; if you’ve done a bit of work, you put it out. I mean, if Picasso’s painted a thing…”

Today, however, on this Friday afternoon, Paul McCartney is immensely forthcoming. Possibly this is a reflection of the confidence he feels in his new LP, a work that stands almost on a par with Band On The Run, his finest solo record and one which, in many ways, seems to have a direct conduit to post-Sgt. Pepper Beatles albums.

The interview has a relaxed, conversational tone with no sense of formally structured questions and answers. In the cold light of print, his replies can occasionally take on a tone that seems almost petty in its self-justification, but such an emphasis is completely absent when he’s delivering these words to you in person.

The principle strength of the new LP is the quality of the songs, six of which McCartney co-wrote with Eric Stewart, the former 10cc singer and writer of such classics as ‘I’m Not In Love’, a song that is almost a parody of a McCartney love ballad.

The numbers were written, he says, in the manner in which he would work with John Lennon, sitting side-by-side, watching each other search for appropriate chords.

Keep reading

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Photos of Paul that maybe you hadn’t seen.

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An arctic fox leaps a river in Hornstrandir National Park, Iceland, 2011 - by Erlend Haarberg, Norwegian

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PAUL MCCARTNEY IS A WHORE send tweet

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the tiers of insanity

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HELLO?? PAUL WOAH.

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Do you like me?

Michael Lindsay Hogg (the man who directed both “Let it Be” and “Two of Us”) secretly recorded John, Paul, Yoko, Linda, and Ringo talking while they were filming “Let it Be”. It’s super fascinating. They discuss what they should do about George, since he was practically not in the group at that point. Then there’s this little tidbit, where John talks about how insecure he feels next to Paul, cause Paul always has it together:

JOHN: Because you–‘cause you seem to have got it all, you see. 

PAUL: Mm. JOHN: I know that, because of the way I am, like when we were in Mendips, like I said— “Do you like me?” Or whatever it is. I’ve always–uh, played that one. So.  PAUL: Yeah.  YOKO: Go back to George. What are we going to do about George?

I LOVE HOW YOKO TRIES TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT!

The rest is here: http://crosshair.livejournal.com/179622.html

It’s worth reading the whole thing, plus the comments. It’ll take an hour or two, but it’s fascinating!

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I'M JUST A JEALOUS GUY

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Lennon's jealousy has found himself showing aggression towards McCartney's various girlfriends over the years.

Peggy Lipton: John snarled at her when Paul brought her to dinner with the Beatles.

Jane Asher: John has clashed with on multiple occasions.

Linda McCartney: John, in 1971, publicly declared was not, in his opinion, “particularly attractive."

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In 1986, Paul recalls John asking him to not sleep with Yoko Ono.

PAUL: "I mean, he warned me off Yoko once. You know, “Look, this is my chick!” ’Cause he knew my reputation. I mean, we knew each other rather well. And um, I felt… I just said, “Yeah, no problem. But I did sort of feel he ought to have known I wouldn’t, but.. You know, he was going through “I’m just a jealous guy”. He was a paranoid guy. And he was into drugs. Heavy.”

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Robert Rosen, who read the diaries in 1981 after Dakota employee Fred Seaman stole them, was shocked to find that Lennon wrote about Paul "almost every day."

ROSEN: "Obviously I knew about the rivalry with McCartney, and the jealousy, but I think the extent of it... how often he thought about McCartney, and how jealous he was... I found that pretty shocking."

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PAUL: I understood what happened when he first met Yoko.  He had to clear the decks of his old emotions. He went through all his old affairs, confessed them all.  Me and Linda did that when we first met.  You prove how much you love someone by confessing all the old stuff. John’s method was to slag me off.” 

John slagged Paul off to.. prove his love to Yoko?

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In regards to Lennon’s early-70s defacement of Paul’s McCartney’s wedding photo,

PAUL: “Well, I mean, I think that starts to show the sort of pain he was going through. I think… […] If someone took your wedding photo and put ‘funeral’ on it [as he did on that manuscript], you’d tend to feel a bit sorry for the guy. You’d think, wait a minute.”

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I was dreaming of the past,

and my heart was beating fast.

I was feeling insecure,

you might not love me anymore.

PAUL: [John] wrote ‘I’m Just A Jealous Guy’ and he said that the song was about me.

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Succession (TV 2018) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Jeryd Mencken/Siobhan “Shiv” Roy Characters: Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, Jeryd Mencken Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misogyny, Vaginal Fingering Summary:

Political fixer Shiv Roy and promising congressman Jeryd Mencken have, once, occasion to meet.