Free Paul McCartney by Philip Norman

the singer’s clothes from his back.
    Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, recorded in January 1956, was the first rock ‘n’ roll song truly reflecting the adolescent psyche in all its self-dramatisation and self-pity. Presley did not (and never would) follow Bill Haley’s example of meeting his British public, but film footage showed him to be the ultimate Teddy boy, with black backswept hair, brooding eyes, a top lip permanently curled as if in disdain for the entire adult world that hated, feared, mocked and execrated him. Over the next two years, he would enjoy a run of UK hits no other act would match until the following decade.
    Paul was an instant convert to Elvis, hereafter known by Christian name alone. ‘I first saw his picture in a magazine–I think it was an ad for “Heartbreak Hotel” and I thought, “Wow! He’s so good looking… he’s perfect. The Messiah has arrived.”’ When thoughts of his mother began gnawing at him, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Teddy Bear’, or especially ‘All Shook Up’ (with its glorious–and prophetic–mumble of ‘Mm-hm-hm hm yay-yay-yeah’) were infallible balm.
    He also loved Little Richard, the first black rock ‘n’ roller, who combined a demented shriek with outrageous camp that went completely over most British heads. Though Paul’s voice was the lightest alto, he found he could do spot-on imitations of both the Presley mumble and the Richard scream. The crowd now gathered round him in the Inny playground not to hear a radio but a rock show.
    Today, pop music is an unavoidable element of daily life, playing on perpetual loops in shops, offices, bars, restaurants and public spaces, buzzing in the earpieces of bus-and train-travellers, thumping out of cars, ringing around construction sites, whispering inside lifts and tinkling down telephone lines. But in rock ‘n’ roll’s early days in Britain, it received public airing only in the disreputable haunts of Teddy boys–espresso bars, bikers’ cafes, pinball arcades and fairgrounds.
    In America, it had received instant circulation via the country’s hundreds of commercial radio stations. But British radio was the monopoly of the traditionally stuffy, puritanical BBC which–with all those conventional bands and orchestras to protect–excluded it completely. Its sole mouthpiece was Radio Luxembourg, beamed from far away in mainland Europe, which operated a nightly English language service playing all the new American releases, somewhat blurred by intrusive French or Belgian voices and static.
    Like most families in that pre-transistor era, the McCartneys had only one radio, a bulky, valve-operated apparatus housed in a wooden cabinet and known as a ‘wireless’. Unfortunately, this was sited immovably in the sitting-room, where Jim McCartney liked to play his kind of music on the gramophone during Luxembourg’s evening transmission hours. An inveterate handyman, Jim kept a drawer full of electronic oddments he thought ‘might come in useful someday’. One evening, he came up to Paul’s and Mike’s rooms–they’d stopped sharing by then–and presented each of them with a set of black Bakelite headphones.
    ‘There were wires disappearing through the floorboards to the radio below, so that we’d be able to listen to Radio Luxembourg in our bedrooms,’ Mike McCartney remembers. ‘So Dad would have his Mantovani downstairs while upstairs we’d have Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry… and our kid [Paul] would be singing along or trying to write down the lyrics. I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for those Bakelite headphones, there wouldn’t have been any Beatles.’
    Though the music no longer destroyed cinemas, the press kept up an unremitting tirade against it, supported by opportunistic politicians, teachers, clergy and ‘real’ musicians of Jim’s generation. Its lyrics, mostly nonsensical enough to have been written by Lewis Carroll, were