A RECENT afternoon, in the kitchen of a quaint 17th-century mill-house overlooking the English Channel, there was a feeling of eventfulness. The room was in rigorous disarray. Newspapers spilled across a red leather banquette, bowls of snacks littered the Formica table; a stack of tea canisters teetered on the counter.
Only the calendar, tacked to a shelf over the sink, suggested order. Its squares were filled in with those mundane engagements that mirror everyday family life - aside from one that had been conspicuously circled. The date was March 11th, and printed in neat, boxy letters was the reminder "Buck Palace".
The odds were long that Paul McCartney would blow his appointment with the Queen. The promise of knighthood to the former pesky Beatle (the band's first appearance before Her Majesty at the 1963 Royal Variety Show produced John Lennon's now-legendary appeal: "Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewellery") is a delicious paradox. It was the Beatles, after all, who were anointed gurus of upheaval at a time when the collapse of the empire was lashed to the decline of a generation's morals.
Of all the Beatles, McCartney, 54, whose new album, Flaming Pie, is now on the shelves, has handled the consequences of megastardom with levelheadedness and cunning. He is a tireless self-promoter, one whose out- spokenness and well-timed endeavours have positioned him as the keeper of the Beatles' flame.
Beyond that, a solo recording career, orchestral projects, political causes and a music publishing company that owns one of the most important popular-song catalogues sustain McCartney at the forefront of his profession. (His net worth is estimated at 5600 million.)
For all his shrewdness in managing his career, though, McCartney appears moved by the title. When an occasion to try it on arises, his face flushes with boyish excitement and a bit of embarrassment. Etiquette demands that he addressed as Sir Paul, but an attempt to follow protocol draws an awkward reaction from him.
"No, you don't; no, you don't," he says, wagging a scornful finger. Then, swallowing a bashful grin, he reconsiders. "You can if you want - but you don't have to.
Sir Paul, To some, it's as preposterous as putting Elvis Presley on a postage stamp. Now, more than 30 years after uttering the mantralike yeah- yeah-yeah, Paul McCartney has metamorphosed into a Knight of the British Empire. It all comes at a time of intense personal reflection - about his family, his talent, his country and, not the least of his concerns, the renaissance of the Beatles.
"The stuff still stands up," he says. "Lyrics still stand up; music still stands up."
The stuff in question is the Beatles' catalogue, which evolved over only seven years and remains a fixture in popular culture, as the success of the Anthology retrospective showed last year. McCartney, eager to promote his new album, has invited a visitor into his private office and refuge - a cheerful, wood-panelled room in a garret above the mill, with a view of sheep grazing in a meadow. But in a matter of moments he invokes the Beatles, over and over again.
"It's difficult not to believe in the Beatles, especially when you're one of them," he says. "Now, I'm so proud of what we did." It took him years, McCartney says, to come to terms with the past. There were too many business entanglements, too many egos bruised in the untangling.
The title of McCartney's new album, Flaming Pie, may yet revive some ill will, especially in Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon. The title sprang from a joke Lennon used to explain the origin of the band's name. "It came in a vision. A man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto me, 'From this day forth you are the Beatles - with an a'."
"Anyone who hears the words 'flaming pie' or 'unto me' knows it's a joke," McCartney says. "There are still a lot of things we have to fudge because of compromise; if we don't all agree on a story, somebody has to give in. And Yoko kind of insisted that John had to have full credit for the name. She believed he had a vision. And it's left us with sort of a bad taste in our mouths. So when I was looking for a rhyme for 'cry' and 'sky', I thought, 'pie' - 'flaming pie'. Wow!"
Of all his accomplishments, McCartney points to his family as his proudest. His 28-year marriage remains one of the sturdiest in a profession littered by broken relationships. If Linda McCartney, a photographer, has been maligned for her lack of musical ability, she receives too little credit for rearing four children who, by all accounts, are unspoiled and levelheaded.
Heather McCartney, 35, who is Linda's child from a previous marriage, is a potter; Stella, 26, has recently taken over the French fashion house Chloe, replacing Karl Lagerfeld; Mary, 28, works for her parents, and James, 20, a guitarist, makes his debut on his father's new album.
"I always said I wasn't going to push my kids into show business," McCartney says. "They all went through state schools, they've not known a lot of rich kids, and we encouraged them to be academic.
"See, we lived very basically, for all the fame, trying to keep some normality. Initially, we had a little place in Scotland - two bedrooms, four kids. Then we came here and lived in a great little two-bedroom house. We just liked the idea of the kids being on top of us, watching TV around the fire. So we're lucky. They are really good kids; they've got big hearts.
McCartney has decided to shift courses now to concentrate on pursuits outside rock. Now, he says, he is stopping - not taking a break from live performances, but stopping.
"Last time I went on the road, it made me think: it's about time I get a life here," he says. "You know, you're sitting in a Holiday Inn in St Louis and you think, "I've got a terrific house, and the 'garden would be lovely this time of year.' Enough's enough."
And yet to retire from the stage would seem out of character. As the Beatles were heading for a breakup, he was the only one who got road fever and begged his bandmates to perform again. (The Beatles had last toured in 1966:) And for years afterward, with his post-Beatles band Wings, he craved a live audience.
"I like to play," he says, "but now I don't feel like it. At all. I'm just enjoying being at home a lot, being productive in other ways."
The place where he seems to feel secure enough to shed his Beatle armour is in the recording studio. The Beatles cut most of their albums at EMI Studios on Abbey Road, in London, but as McCartney sought refuge away from the spotlight, he built his own 48-track studio by adding onto the mill. It is here he recorded many of his solo efforts, as well as the six albums with Wings. And it is here that he becomes Paul McCartney, the musician's musician.
The transformation is apparent the moment he pushes through the door. Inside the studio he becomes childlike, almost giddy, as he bounces from instrument to instrument. "This is memory lane," he announces, parking momentarily in front of the original mellotron used on Strawberry Fields Forever, then proceeding to the harmonium he played on We Can Work It Out.
MCCARTNEY has long been recognised as the musical force behind the great Beatles' records, an innovator and virtuoso on a wide range of instruments. The essence of his craft is in the mechanics - detailed melody lines, inventive counter-points, dramatic, linear phrasing. He fits them perfectly into a groove that inspires those geometric, lushly drawn arrangements of songs that continue to captivate.
Twenty-seven years after the Beatles broke up, he used the same formula to produce the 14 songs on Flaming Pie. He says he came up with the material spontaneously over several days without intending it to become an album. Because of the Anthology project, he says: I was told by the record company they wouldn't need me to put out anything for the next couple years. But the album just came; it just kind of flowed."
One might expect him to rely on his trademark pop-song foundations: the structured upbeat melodies, the verbal flair. Instead, be resurrected a game that he and Lennon had played in which they wrote songs within an allotted two-hour deadline.
IN other cases, he abandoned structure altogether in favour of loose, bluesy jam sessions with Ringo Starr and Steve Miller, the guitarist and singer whose own band produced a string of hits in the 1970s and 1980s.
Miller says the album marks a progression for McCartney in studio technique, but he admits he was disappointed by some of the material that ended up on it. "I was hoping we'd get away from the pop field," he says. "He's so good at it, but I was listening to his classical work and was surprised how well developed it was. They're beautifully written songs and reveal a mature Paul McCartney at his very best." Miller says he implored McCartney to take the pop songs off the album but that McCartney resisted. He had no interest in reinventing himself.
"It's a shame when Paul McCartney just indulges himself like that," says Timothy White, editor of Billboard. "He's an innately gifted guy who doesn't challenge himself; he's always been lazy. And it gets tricky when you let someone with his potential do any blessed thing he wants."
A few McCartney projects in the works do veer from the well-trod road, however. One is a campaign to endow a Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in the building where he and George Harrison attended school as boys. And his symphony, Standing Stone, will have its premier at Carnegie Hall on November 19th.
Then, of course, there is this knighthood business. As he sees it, he now has a platform of sorts from which to express his opposition to European integration, a prospect that distresses him mightily.
Citing the recent breakup of Apple, his ill-fated enterprise with the Beatles, McCartney says, "I've just got my freedom, and now my country wants to throw in with these people."
He says a common European governing body, currency, passport etc would threaten Britain's cultural identity. "We'll then have a common flag, so the Union Jack means nothing," he says, "and one common anthem." He slumps against his seat cushion. "Actually, that was what got me - the anthem."