Paul McCartney Read Online Free Page A

Toxteth, past the magnificent iron gateway to Sefton Park, along Smithdown Road, where Paul’s mother did her nurse’s training. A turning left leads to Queen’s Drive and the former family home of Brian Epstein which, disgracefully, no one has ever thought worth preserving for the nation.
    ‘Right, guys,’ our driver says, ‘we’re just coming up to a place you’ll all recognise. I’m sorry there’s no tape of Penny Lane to go with it.’
    Who cares? The song rings out of collective memory louder and clearer than the purest stereo. Penny Lane is in our ears and in our eyes, even if its ‘blue suburban skies’ this morning tend more towards dish-mop grey.
    It is arguably Paul’s masterpiece, twinned with a John masterpiece, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, on the greatest-value pop single ever released. And Penny Lane the place competes with the site of the old Strawberry Field Salvation Army home as Liverpool’s most-visited Beatle shrine. Over the decades, its street-sign has been stolen so many times that the local authority took to simply painting the name on buildings. Latterly, a supposedly thief-proof sign has proved little more successful than the old type.
    It has always seemed the sweetest of song-titles, evoking an innocent 1950s world when Britain used big copper penny coins that often dated back to Queen Victoria’s reign, confectioners sold penny chocolate bars or ‘chews’ and women did not pee but ‘spent a penny’, the cost of using a public toilet. In reality, the name commemorates James Penny, an eighteenth-century Liverpool slave-trader. Nor is the song really about Penny Lane, but Smithdown Place, where the lane (which, anyway, has more associations with John than Paul) widens into a shopping ‘parade’ and a terminus for several bus-routes.
    Every topographical feature listed in the lyric is still here, for each of us instantly triggering a mental soundtrack of nostalgic piano, old-fashioned brass or the tripping notes of a piccolo trumpet solo. There’s still a barber, ‘showing photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to know’, even if hairstyles have moved on from ‘Tony Curtises’ and ‘ducks’ arses’ and the shop’s name is no longer Bioletti, as during Paul’s childhood, but Tony Slavin. There’s a branch of Lloyds TSB, where the banker might well not own ‘a mac’ (raincoat, that is, not laptop) and nowadays is perhaps even more likely to be laughed at behind his back.
    Here is the traffic island behind whose shelter ‘a pretty nurse’ could well be ‘selling poppies from a tray’ (and every one of us knows whom she represented). To the left, along Mather Avenue, there’s still a firestation where even now some dragoon-helmeted officer might be watching the time in an hourglass as he polishes his ‘clean machine… in his pocket… a portrait of the Queen’.
    Paul’s and John’s childhood homes lie less than a mile apart but in separate suburbs whose social differences remain very noticeable. Allerton, on this side at least, consists predominantly of working-class council estates whereas Woolton is a well-heeled enclave of industrialists, professionals and academics from Liverpool University. When John first met Paul in 1957, that distinction was multiplied a thousandfold.
    On the blue minibus, after our McCartney prologue, we have reverted to the traditional pecking-order. First stop is ‘Mendips’, the semi-detached villa with faux Tudor flourishes where John, that supposed ‘working-class hero’, spent an irreproachably middle-class and rather pampered boyhood in the care of his forceful Aunt Mimi.
    Not for almost two hours do we leave Woolton’s leafy boulevards, drive down Mather Avenue and pull up outside 20 Forthlin Road. Another, identical, minibus is waiting to collect an earlier tour group who are just emerging through the minuscule front garden. The intoxicated buzz of their conversation includes French, Spanish and Russian, or