Happy birthday, Sir Paul!

To mark Sir Paul McCartney's 70th birthday on Monday we thought we'd share this extract from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth covering his return to the south coast with Wings in 1973 and Howie Casey's memories of what happened next.

After releasing his solo album McCartney in 1970 and the following year’s Ram with Linda, Paul and his wife recruited former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Danny Seiwell to form Wings. Wild Life, their first album, flopped but the follow up, Red Rose Speedway – and the commission to write the title song for the new James Bond film, Live and Let Die – re-established them.
With the line up augmented by guitarist Henry McCullough, the ensuing tour brought McCartney back to Bournemouth to play the Winter Gardens on 15 May 1973. He was the first – and, until 2011 when Ringo played the BIC, only – former Beatle to perform in the town. The tour was a success and did much to restore McCartney’s critical standing, giving him the foundation for Wings’ defining moment, Band On The Run, released that December.

The album also put Paul back in touch with one of his earliest musical associates, sax maestro Howie Casey, who had been working with T-Rex and others alongside producer Tony Visconti.
A year later Howie – who now lives in Bournemouth with his singer wife Sheila, who had toured with The Beatles in 1963 with her sister Jeanette in the McKinley Sisters – got a call from McCartney’s office offering him a place in the touring band.
“I’d been on tour with Marc Bolan when they asked if I’d be interested in doing a tour with Wings,” he says. “Then I played on Wings At The Speed Of Sound and the triple live album Wings Over America; as well as Back To the Egg. I did the last UK tour and the final night of the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea.
“In between times Jeanette, Sheila and I had all been working for Paice, Ashton & Lord, a great band who never quite got the recognition they deserved. Then I got the call that Wings were going to tour Japan so we all made our way out there which was how I came to be in Tokyo when Paul got busted at the airport.
“We stayed out there while we waited to see what would happen. It was all paid so it was a little holiday like,” says Howie. “But then of course he got home and decided to put the whole thing on ice – his son James hadn’t long been born and he’s talked since about it being time to take a step back, so that was that.”

Howie and Sheila worked with Paul McCartney and George Harrison on Ringo Starr’s 1981 album Stop And Smell The Roses and have maintained loose links with McCartney ever since.

- The full Wings set list at the Winter Gardens was: Soily, Big Barn Bed, When The Night, Wild Life, Seaside Woman, Little Woman Love, C Moon, Live And Let Die, Maybe I’m Amazed, My Love, Go Now, Say You Don’t Mind, The Mess, Long Tall Sally

- Extract from the Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth which can be ordered at the official website.

- Photos of Paul and Linda onstage at the Winter Gardens 15 May 1973 © Bavarian Beatles Store, Ziegelfeld 1a, 85419 Mauern, Germany, www.bavarian-beatles-store.de

The Word

In case there was any doubt which of the UK's glossy music-related entertainment mags to buy this month, it has to be The Word. Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and their crew of peerless scribes have not only noticed Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth they have gone all nostalgic for their boyhood holidays at Sandbanks, where the famous ferry photo they've used was taken, and Studland, where John, Julian and Mimi may well have been visiting to make sand castles the day this great photo was taken.

Anyway, you can find more about The Word and download an excellent podcast at the magazine's website.

The full story behind this amazing photo is told in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth which can be ordered here, along with art prints of a selection of the 200 rare and previously unpublished images featured in the book.

Aunt Mimi at Sandbanks

Those lovely folks over at the mine of Merseybeat information that is Liverpool Beat have kindly agreed to host an article about John Lennon's aunt Mimi and how she came to live by the sea.
Ever keen to oblige we've supplied an extract from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth.
Read it here.
The photo was taken at Harbour's Edge, the home John bought for Mimi at Sandbanks, by press photographer Tom Hanley on assignment for the Daily Sketch at John's insistence in 1971 around the time he left for New York with Yoko.
Tom, who had been a confidant of The Beatles since finding himself holed up in a hotel room with them in Paris in 1964, visited Mimi with reporter Mike Hennessey.
"We spent the best part of a day with Mimi and found her to be very nice, very generous old lady, not at all how she has been portrayed since," remembers Tom.
The full story of Tom's day by the sea with Mimi is told in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth, which can be ordered from the official website.
More of Tom's photos of The Beatles and others can be seen at tommyhanley.com.

Beatles - hair, there and everywhere

Of all the people, stories, events and landmarks that connect The Beatles to Bournemouth, among the most unlikely is this humble barber chair, which occupies a corner at Mister M’s Barber Shop in Old Christchurch Road.
The chair came from Horne Brothers’ barber shop on the corner of Paradise Street and Lord Street in Liverpool which was one of the locations featured in Dezo Hoffman’s photo session with the boys on 23 March 1963, the day Ringo finally traded in his Tony Curtis DA for a grease-free mop top like the others had brought back with them under the influence of the Hamburg art crowd they befriended in Germany.

Brian Epstein was a regular at Horne Brothers and the barber pictured is Jim Cannon who turned down the offer to be The Beatles’ personal barber on tour. 
He opted out of the limelight and remained at Horne Bothers where he continued to cut The Beatles’ hair when they were in town.
Horne Brothers has long since gone, but three of the chairs - made in Chicago in 1923 – turned up in a salon supplies company in Liverpool. 
One had been renovated, but the other two were bought and restored before being auctioned in 2009. 
Mister M, who cuts a mean head of hair himself, it has to be said, can be visited at his website here. 
- The mop top was almost certainly first styled for John and Paul in Paris in September 1961 by Jurgen Vollmer, their photography student friend from Hamburg.

Beatles about

There's plenty of activity going on over at The Beatles Social Network. Basically, it's like Facebook but only for Beatles fans. Pretty simple, eh?
Set up by Liddypool author Dave Bedford, it's free to join and a splendid time is guaranteed for all... or something like that. Invite friends, post photos, comments, video clips and music; trade Beatles stories, read articles and generally immerse yourself in all things Beatles.
As ever with these things, it's what you make it. 
See you over there!

The Byrds and The Beatles

Of all the stories connecting The Beatles and Bournemouth, one of the most intriguing is the enduring legend of The Byrds and the Beatles.

The story goes that the crowd screams heard on The Byrds’ 1967 single, So You Want To Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Star were lifted from a TV camera crew’s ambient recording of a Beatles audience at the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth on 16 November 1963.

Of course it’s known that the three American TV networks – CBS, ABC and NBC – all had crews at the Winter Gardens show and that CBS broadcast the first footage of The Beatles on US television in a CBS Morning News report on 22 November. CBS owned Columbia Records – home to The Byrds – so the connection is clear.

But the waters are muddied by none other than The Beatles’ arch publicist Derek Taylor who flew the nest at the end of their first American tour in 1964. Having started his own PR company in California, The Byrds were among his first clients and he was instrumental in positioning the group as the folk-flavoured American incarnation of The Beatles.

Never one to let the truth get in the way of an entertaining tale, Taylor would doubtless appreciate the confusion that has arisen since reliable sources such as  David Fricke’s liner notes to the 1996 CD reissue of The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday album and Johnny Rogan’s widely admired Byrds’ biography Timeless Flight Revisited both insist the screaming crowd was recorded by Taylor at Roger McGuinn’s request at a Byrds concert on 15 August 1965 at the Gaumont, Bournemouth.

In the course of researching Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth I spoke to two people who saw The Byrds at the Gaumont that August and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise that can be heard on So You Want To Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Star. 

The other acts on the bill – Donovan, Elkie Brooks, Them, Kenny Lynch, Johnny B Great & the Quotations and Charles Dickens – were not known for eliciting ecstatic responses from their mid-60s audiences either.

And if further evidence were needed, session musician and songwriter Graham Dee who wrote, recorded and toured with Elkie Brooks, Them and the Quotations, as well as countless other acts including the Walker Brothers, recalls the band as an, at best, unreliable proposition on stage.

“I remember one show with The Byrds, I can’t remember who I was playing with, it might have been the Walkers, and the crowd was getting so restless while The Byrds  

tuned up on stage the management hauled them off and sent us back on in case there was a riot,” he told me.

But whether or not So You Want To Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Star includes the screams of young Bournemouthians we’ll probably never know.

: Poster and programme from the Donovan/ Byrds show at the Finsbury Park Astoria the night before they played Bournemouth.

: Copies of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth are available from www.beatlesandbournemouth.com as are art prints of several of the rare and previously unpublished photos from the book.

: The author's review of Roger McGuinn's show at Lighthouse Poole can be read here.

Bournemouth in The Ballad of John & Yoko

The Beatles' 17th and final UK number one, The Ballad of John & Yoko is a narrative account of John and Yoko's marriage on 20 March 1969 - the culmination of a series of events that began on the way to visit Aunt Mimi at Sandbanks.
The episode is covered in this extract from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth...

On 12 March Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman in London and just two days later, John (who had divorced Cynthia the previous August) announced he was to marry Yoko Ono. On a visit to Aunt Mimi at Sandbanks John sent his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to Southampton to find out if he and Yoko could marry at sea. Having been told that would not be possible they chartered a private jet to take them to Paris, but were unable to arrange a wedding at short notice so opted to “get married in Gibraltar near Spain”, as related in The Beatles’ final number one single, The Ballad Of John and Yoko.

The song also represented something like the spirit of The Beatles of old. Although mainly written by John, it was finished by Lennon and McCartney at Paul’s home on 14 April and recorded the same evening with the two playing all the instruments as George was on holiday and Ringo was away filming The Magic Christian. Buoyed by this new spirit The Beatles regrouped, went back to basics and made Abbey Road. It was released on 26 September, returning the group to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

For a finely detailed account of the song's genesis, recording and release - as well as a raw version of the finished track without overdubs - take a look at the redoubtable Beatles Rarity website post.

Signed copies of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth and limited edition prints of previously unpublished photos from the book can be ordered here.