How Pretending to Be Paul McCartney Helped Me Write My Book

While writing Hit Factories, my book about British cities and pop music, I ran face-first into a dilemma that I initially had no idea how to solve. One of my chapters was going to be about Liverpool. This inevitably raised the question of how to write about the Fab Four. On the one hand: everyone else had written about The Beatles, so why shouldn’t I? But on the other hand: how could I find something interesting to say about the band that hadn’t already been said a thousand times before?

One option might be to avoid The Beatles altogether, leaving a Yellow Submarine-shaped hole in the Merseyside chapter. Another might be to minimize the space devoted to the band: mention them but assume the reader has enough knowledge to fill in the gaps.

My solution was to pretend to be Paul McCartney.

This is the way it happened. I took a short walk between the McCartney home and John Lennon’s aunt’s house, during which I was McCartney—or felt as though I was. Although I had planned the walk, I hadn’t anticipated impersonating the Beatle. But as I ambled from his family’s redbrick terraced house in south Liverpool in the direction of Lennon’s much larger semi-detached, I began to wonder if McCartney had walked this way to meet his bandmate, and if I was seeing what he had seen.

Something about the time and place suggested this course of action. I’m not much of a spiritual person, but it was a cold, damp December afternoon and twilight was setting in. It was an hour at which belief, or perhaps delusion, could easily settle on a desperate writer of nonfiction seeking an original angle. So, I thought, why not? On a practical level I desperately needed something to believe in for the next half hour or so, something that would form the kernel of a chapter for my book. I decided to embrace the madness to see where it took me.

I decided that McCartney must have followed the most direct route across a golf course to Lennon’s house, a muddy right-of-way that ran along a boundary wall. Mist lit with the muted pink of the watery setting sun hung low over the golf course. There was an unnatural hue to the light that lent the afternoon at least some of its ghostly quality. Through the mist, the smallest sounds seemed amplified. I could clearly hear the clink of golf balls being struck on the other side of the fairway. As I dragged my increasingly sodden feet along the muddy path, I arrived at a gap in the hedgerow beyond which four lanes of traffic roared. This was Menlove Avenue, the suburban dual carriageway on which stood Mendips, the house in which the young Lennon had lived with his aunt and uncle. (It was also on Menlove Avenue that Lennon’s mother Julia was knocked down by a car and killed.)

Both the McCartney house and the Lennon house are now owned by the National Trust and open to the public for several months each year. But they weren’t accessible in midwinter, and so my attention was concentrated more on the journey than on either house. Although Lennon had probably walked this way, I decided that it was McCartney’s footsteps I was following, and that’s when I briefly deluded myself into thinking I could see through his eyes. It remained for me to work out why I had done so, and what that choice said about me and the book I was writing.

*

“What is creative about nonfiction?” John McPhee asks in his 2017 book on writing craft, Draft No. 4. After my trip to Liverpool I thought about McPhee’s question quite a bit. I was applying for jobs teaching creative writing and suddenly had to consider the opaque and mysterious notion of “creativity.” I had come to writing nonfiction through academia and journalism, and I brought empirical methods from both. But the notion of creativity seemed to me like a ghost in the machine. “Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have,” McPhee writes. I wasn’t sure if that helped me much, but I kept it in mind.

What did I have? This time I hadn’t assembled material in the way I had done in the past. I was more inclined to improvise. With my first book I had approached writing about my home city of Dublin with a reporter’s notebook in hand and a desire to document what I found. But I had also attempted to push that book somewhere beyond reportage toward a subjective, playful narrative that enabled me to digress, to drag the kind of journalistic writing I had previously done towards the essayistic. I wrote a chapter about James Joyce in which I visited every one of his 20 houses in a single day. Emulating the Situationist dérive on a Dublin bus, I used a 90-minute ticket to take as many journeys as I could in that constrained time frame, not knowing where in the city I might end up.

Given this tendency towards the subjective in my work, maybe it was only a matter of time before I found myself pretending to be a member of the Beatles. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either a warped effort at biographical empathy, at channelling something mystical and bigger than myself—or a roll of the dice when other options seemed exhausted. I was trying to make the most of what I had.

After an unsuccessful academic interview in early 2018, I returned to my writing desk and considered again my Liverpool walk. I had recently read Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04. At the beginning of the book, the narrator celebrates signing a lucrative publishing deal by eating a meal with his literary agent, one that includes baby octopus. Afterwards he stands on the High Line in Manhattan and feels inhabited by the consciousness of the cephalopod: “I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me.”

Reading this passage made me think once more about the strange, fleeting feeling of being McCartney on that walk between the Beatles’ houses. It made me take it both seriously and not seriously, like Lerner’s octopus-channelling narrator.

Why McCartney and not Lennon? Familiarity, perhaps. I was a small child in the 80s, and by then John was dead and Paul was making promotional videos that were sometimes screened on the children’s shows I watched on television. I was dimly aware of The Beatles as historic figures, but acutely aware of McCartney as a contemporary pop artist. But the 80s McCartney was one of many McCartneys—something I’ll explain a little more in a moment—and my own McCartney impersonation became the starting point for my attempt to make sense of this multiplicity of McCartneys. It was my attempt at a cover version.

I recalled the opening scenes of A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film which fixed an image of a sardonic, madcap Beatles in people’s minds. Departing from a railway terminal that was meant to represent Liverpool Lime Street—actually London’s Marylebone station—The Beatles run from screaming fans. Paul disguises himself with a pointy fake beard and casually hides his face behind a newspaper before joining the other Beatles on the train.

I wondered if McCartney’s love of disguise, his well-documented enjoyment of pseudonyms (Paul Ramon, Percy Thrillington), wasn’t just an escape from the weight of expectation that came with being a Beatle, but also an acknowledgement of the fictitious nature of his pop persona. “I kind of like hiding behind a pseudonym,” he told an interviewer in 2011 while promoting Rushes, an ambient side-project released under the name The Fireman. “It frees you up a bit. Instead of going in and standing in front of the mic and going ‘this is a Paul McCartney vocal’ you go in and go ‘I’m not him, I’m just some guy in a fictitious band.’ It just makes you think anything’s possible.”

When I was a child, my mother worked for a while as a DJ on a community radio station that was based in a single-story cottage a couple of minutes from my primary school. She had a plastic bag filled with loose seven-inch singles that included some of the hits of the day—I remember The Pretenders’ “Don’t Get Me Wrong”—but my interest was mainly in the two Beatles singles, one of which was “Help!” On the flip side of that single was “I’m Down,” a basic rock and roll tune with distinctly old-school, leering sexual politics (“We’re all alone and there’s nobody else/But you still moan ‘keep your hands to yourself!’”) whose vocals were howled by McCartney. This version of McCartney sounded much different to the bell-like clarity of his singing on “Blackbird,” which I had heard on a cassette of Beatles ballads we had bought for my dad.

The Beatles’ early years as a cover band in sleazy Hamburg clubs is a key moment in their mythology. It’s where the band sharpened up by playing for hours at a time, building up an arsenal of musical approaches on which they would subsequently draw. On the compilation Live at The BBC, released in 1994, you can hear still-intact elements of the Hamburg Beatles: how adept the band was at mimicking songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Ray Charles, but also how protean McCartney’s vocals were, adapting to each song with throat-shredding ferocity or wide-eyed sweetness as required. Nevertheless, his Little Richard shriek wasn’t quite identical to the original. He could sound like the artists he copied while simultaneously remaining himself, whoever that was.

As it turned out, writing about The Beatles wasn’t the roadblock I thought it might be. In fact, pretending—for a short walk, for a few pages—to be Paul McCartney was the point at which I began to understand the task I had taken on a little better. One of the assumptions you encounter when you write about music and place is that the former is some inevitable emanation of the latter, that there’s something in the water. But pop music could be an escape from place as well as an embrace of it, and sometimes Paul McCartney isn’t Paul McCartney at all.