The seven deadly sins of Paul McCartney
Of the four members of The Beatles, Paul McCartney might just be the hardest to pin down. A brilliant songwriter, bassist, and vocalist, he has had many exploits that paint a more multifaceted picture of his character than those of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
Much of this has to do with his range of successes outside of the Liverpool band and the fact that he is one of two survivors of their classic lineup. He has consistently delivered music for the longest time period, and this alone provides him with far more depth. Some anecdotes in his story have peeled back the familiar characterisation of him being the most pleasant and slightly bumbling of the Fab Four.
Of course, feeling too much anger toward the affable Sir Paul McCartney is hard. After all, what he has done for music and the wider cultural spectrum has been nothing short of seminal. Outside of music, these triumphs vary from spreading the gospel of vegetarianism to pledging his allegiance to various causes, including Live Aid. Using his status for the greater good has also undoubtedly solidified his legacy and saved him from fading into old age like many musicians of his generation.
However, as is the case for most rock stars, who are, before all else, human beings like the rest of us, McCartney has sides to him that are at odds with the image we all know. Able to be lightheartedly categorised into each of the seven deadly sins of the Bible, they demonstrate that McCartney is not the purely angelic cherub we deem him. Over the years, he has had fits of wrath like The Beatles’ resident hothead John Lennon and has also admitted that his music has sometimes been motivated by the green idol, thus fitting into the greed category.
Find the seven deadly sins of Paul McCartney below, and prepare to see the ‘Yesterday’ songwriter in a surprising new light.
The seven sins of Paul McCartney:
Wrath
Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s relationship could be tempestuous at the best of times. Towards the end of The Beatles, things reached a real impasse before exploding once they had split. After Lennon’s notorious 1970 chat with Rolling Stone, where he slammed The Beatles, McCartney hit back on his 1971 album, Ram. The track ‘Too Many People’, features subtle digs at his former bandmate and his wife, Yoko Ono, which compounded McCartney’s anger. This prompted an enraged response from Lennon in the form of ‘How Do You Sleep’.
Whilst McCartney’s song doesn’t explicitly name names, it does allude to Lennon and Ono, with the following line one of two jabs at The Beatles frontman: “That was your first mistake/ You took your lucky break and broke it in two.”
Lennon discussed his thoughts on McCartney’s vengeful song with Crawdaddy Magazine, where he said: “I heard Paul’s messages in Ram – yes there are dear reader! Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh! I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things. So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day’. A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad. What am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter’, sung – get it?”
In 1984, McCartney admitted his anger towards Lennon in a Playboy interview: “I was looking at my second solo album, Ram, the other day, and I remember there was one tiny little reference to John in the whole thing. He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit. In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices,’ I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two.'”
Lust
When I said to expect to see Paul McCartney in a surprising light, this is what I was hinting at. Whilst Paul McCartney had a significant hand in helping society move towards a more sexually progressive place, his admission that he watches, or has watched porn, is uncomfortable at best.
This came in 1990 when discussing Madonna. At the time, somebody cited him as a fan of the pop star, to which the then-49-year-old Macca replied, “Am I?”. He added: “I’m not really”. Avoiding insulting the singer, the former Beatles man revealed that her work just doesn’t do much for him. “I liked ‘Vogue’,” he admitted, “That’s a good video. She makes good videos. And ‘Justify My Love’ is pretty horny.”
If describing a video as “pretty horny” isn’t enough to make you spit your drink out, McCartney then questioned Madonna’s cultural place, claiming he’s seen better porn. He said with a shrug: “I think it’s alright, but I’ve seen better porn films. If you want porn, why not watch porn? I think it’s okay, y’know, it’s pretty good, but it’s only surprising because she’s a pop singer, really. If anybody else did it, it would be a fairly average porn movie”.
Sloth
It’s hard to regard Paul McCartney as lazy. Having written hundreds of songs, delivered a ream of records, and toured across six decades, the sin of sloth is a difficult category to fit Macca into. Therefore, the sloth qualifier concerns McCartney’s acceptance of the status quo and the allegation that he doesn’t have to try with some other prominent musicians because of his prominent position. The claim comes from Genesis man Phil Collins, who recounted a soul-destroying moment meeting McCartney at Buckingham Palace in 2002.
Collins told The Sunday Times in 2016: “I met him when I was working at the Buckingham Palace party back in 2002. McCartney came up with Heather Mills, and I had a first edition of The Beatles, by Hunter Davies, and I said, ‘Hey, Paul, do you mind signing this for me?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Heather, our little Phil’s a bit of a Beatles fan’. And I thought, ‘You fuck, you fuck’. Never forgot it.”
The Genesis figurehead continued: “He has this thing when he’s talking to you, where he makes you feel [like], ‘I know this must be hard for you because I’m a Beatle. I’m Paul McCartney, and it must be very hard for you to actually be holding a conversation with me.'”
Unsurprisingly, the heated account eventually made its way to McCartney, and in an interview not long after with Billboard, Collins claimed that the former Beatles man had been in touch but explained that he couldn’t really be bothered to make full amends. He said: “He’s been in touch about it because he was upset. I certainly didn’t get any flowers from him; I got more of a ‘let’s just get on with our lives.'”
He concluded: “And I’m sorry he’s upset that I kinda said something nasty about him — well, it wasn’t really nasty. If people don’t tell people that sometimes their attitude could be a bit better, then you’re not gonna get any better, y’know?”
Gluttony
In 1980, the writing was on the wall for Wings, and the final nail in the coffin proved to be McCartney’s arrest for drug possession when the band were set to tour Japan for an 11-city run. A demonstration of his unyielding appetite for the sweet leaf, this would hasten the end of the outfit many deem his finest.
Things did not go as planned when the band landed at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport in January 1980. Paul McCartney was taken to jail after customs officials found marijuana in his baggage. He was sent to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Centre, held for nine days, and interrogated while his lawyers figured out a way to get him released. The tour was cancelled, costing the band a lot of money.
The volume of dope found in McCartney’s possession could have resulted in a drug smuggling charge, which brought the possibility of a seven-year prison sentence. Japan’s laws on narcotics were so strict that McCartney later admitted he knew the risk of his actions when deciding to hide his narcotics. He recalled: “We were about to fly to Japan, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything to smoke over there … This stuff was too good to flush down the toilet, so I thought I’d take it with me.”
Looking back on what happened, he said: “When the fellow pulled it out of the suitcase, he looked more embarrassed than me. I think he just wanted to put it back in and forget the whole thing, you know, but there it was.” Luckily for McCartney, he got away pretty much scot-free, and after his nine days at the Narcotic Detention Centre, Wings were sent packing back to the UK. Unfortunately for all those involved, though, they could not escape their end which arrived the following year.
Some people never learn. Only four years later, in 1984, McCartney and his wife Linda were arrested for possessing marijuana when vacationing in Barbados. Luckily for them, they were both fined $100 and released, with this arrest having much less impact on popular culture than the one that sent Wings to the grave.
Pride
Every rockstar comes with a certain degree of hubris, which is certainly true for McCartney. Whilst he has a more glittering legacy than most, this hasn’t stopped him from writing a song about how he wants to be remembered when he kicks the bucket.
In 2007, McCartney released the track ‘The End of The End’ on the album Memory Almost Full, which lays out how he wishes to be eulogised. He took inspiration from his late Beatles bandmate George Harrison, who was jocular when he and Ringo Starr visited him before his death. “On the day that I die I’d like jokes to be told/ And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets/ That children have played on/ And laid on while listening to stories of old,” McCartney descants.
He continues in the second verse: “On the day that I die I’d like bells to be rung/ And songs that were sung to be hung out like blankets/ That lovers have played on/ And laid on while listening to songs that were sung.”
“I heard someone – I think it was James Taylor – say in a lyric, ‘the day I die,’ and it prompted me to think of my death as a subject,” McCartney revealed to World magazine in 2008. “So I got into that and found that I was interested in the Irish Wake idea, and jokes being told and stories of old, rather than the solemn, Anglican, doom-laden event. But it’s not a subject that anyone visits that much. It’s not too jolly, I suppose. It doesn’t make a great song to dance to.”
Envy
The Beatles and Bob Dylan are forever tied together through being two of the world’s most important musical acts, and that momentous August day in New York in 1964 that saw the Troubadour introduce the band to the wonders of marijuana, which changed the trajectory of their career and popular culture forever.
The group took a lot from Dylan on their stoned 1965 folk-rock album Rubber Soul, which he even angrily acknowledged in 1966’s ‘Fourth Time Around’. However, according to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, McCarney was always more jealous of his American peer than anything.
In Lennon Remembers, the extensive conversation between Lennon and Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner, Lennon started his account by praising Dylan, despite coming under fire for apparently ripping him off. “And I loved him because he wrote some beautiful stuff,” He said. “I used to love his so-called protest things. But I like the sound of him, I didn’t have to listen to his words. He used to come with his acetate and say, (imitates Dylan) ‘Listen to this, John.’ And ‘Did you hear the words?’ And I said, ‘That doesn’t matter, just the sound is what counts. The overall thing.”‘
“You didn’t have to hear what Bob Dylan’s saying,” he continued. “You just have to hear the way he says it, like medium is the message, all-whatever mix of-but Dylan was like that.”
He then delivered the damning claim that McCartney was always jealous of Dylan after Ono said, “But you respect him a lot”, to which he agreed. “I know Paul didn’t,” he then added. “I think Paul was jealous. Paul didn’t like any other artist. But that’s valid. Paul didn’t get hyped by me. I had too many father figures.”
Greed
Although The Beatles were dedicated to their craft, as their decision to stop touring in 1966 to focus on the studio confirms, when McCartney sat down for his first interview since Lennon’s death with BBC Nationwide’s Sue Lawley in 1982, he revealed that the quartet weren’t always focused on artistic enlightenment. “Money talks”, as they say.
When discussing the writing process of his album Tug of War, McCartney touched on the tremendous economic incentive behind The Beatles at the peak of their powers. He claimed that he and Lennon would write expensive possessions such as swimming pools into reality through their hits.
“I could’ve sort of just dried up, ‘coz there’s no incentive, ‘coz that was the early incentive, you know, if you’re honest about it,” he said. “For most people, it is just to be successful, to earn money. I mean, we used to talk about writing a swimming pool, it was one of those between John and I, just like: ‘You need a pool here, we better go and write it’, you know? ‘Ching ching ching’. We’d try and write hits for things he needed or whatever.”
McCartney attempted to caveat his point: “But, that’s not really the incentive, actually. I mean, I think if I didn’t get paid for it, I think I’d still do it.” Sure, Paul.
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