When Winter Comes / Mull of Kintyre

Pushkin.

When we first got Mary and we're in a meeting with my accountant. He said, now you've got to invest in stuff, and I said, don't worry about it, just putting the back leave it.

So no, no, no, you can't do that.

For some reason, I believed in and what I advised to do is to buy something like he said, there's this little farm, let's come up in Scotland. I ended up taking advice and bought it a bit approachingly.

That you lot beatle. Paul McCartney has bought a hill farm on the remote Mull of Kintyre in the west of Scotland. Farmer Brown said, last night I recognized mister McCartney immediate. We showed them through the farmhouse and they said they were delighted with it.

But it was it's falling apart, you know, there was nothing great about it. So I kind of left it and didn't really bother But then when I met Londo, she just said, you know, you're not fucking up in Scotland.

I said, yeah, but I'm not sure you'll like it. She loved, Wow, we could fix it up.

I'm Paul will do. And I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our.

Era, and will you look at me? I'm going on to it.

I'm actually a performer.

That is, sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.

Actually, I'm a songwriter, my god, we'll let that.

Crept up on me.

This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, when winter comes and mull of Kintar.

Well, winter comes, Aloiscus, We'll wanta two.

Twesday.

In just a couple of years ago, after we'd already been having our conversations for some time, Paul McCartney was preparing for a reissue of his nineteen ninety seven album Flaming Pie. His archivists had sent him some options for bonus extras, songs which would have been recorded at the time of the original album but had yet to be released.

But they just sent me some tracks for consideration as bonus extras, And I'm listening to this one.

I think, gosh, I mean it's good. I am actually thinking of releasing it. It's very sort of hippie, almost relates to living.

On the farm.

When summer's gone, We're gonna fly away.

When winter Camas was recorded in nineteen ninety two with George Martin at the mixing desk. It's a sweet, simple song HARKing back to the time McCartney spent living on his farm in Scotland. Nestled in the heart of the Kntire Peninsula just thirty miles from the coast of Ireland is High Park Farm, the one hundred and eighty three acre property McCartney purchased in nineteen sixty six.

I was greeted by our ext door neighbor, Ian mcdrugal, whose very old doll course carry spoke with gallac and was very old farmer in.

A really total stereotype.

He admitted to me as he walked over the grounds that he had no knowledge of farming, although he wanted to keep it as a farm. I told him that it would be all right if he put a reliable man in, and he seemed to agree. He has seemed a very sensible sort of chap he.

Said, you'll be the new layered.

What.

I could never understand him, but I've worked out the system of having on to the last word in a sentence. He said, I go, hie the sheep, find hi the clipping I write.

When McCartney bought the property, the old wooden farmhouse was falling apart, the fences crumbling.

I will fight it out. This has stopped this place. I really didn't like it.

He had no idea that years later it would become a cherished setting for his life with Linda Eastman, or such a whale of inspiration for his songwriting.

Sweet like.

Gay.

We're only really up there because of Linda's love of it. When we went up so.

She said, oh, this is frying fantastic.

I love it. So she made me love it through her eyes.

I went, oh, well that is a fine mountain.

Gosh, he's covered in the heap. That's very beautiful, you know. And so we brought up the kids.

There in the early nineteen seventies. With the help of Linda, McCartney came to see the lush, rolling highlands as romantic and the dilapidated farm property as full of potential. After all, the thing beyond repair in his life at the time was not the Barns, but the Beatles, who were mired in business disputes back down in London.

I was getting called into meetings in London in our office in sabil Row. Well, you would have to sit there and listen to an accountant or the manager and talk about this boring or that even more boring. And it was nothing that we did. It's nothing that we liked. We liked playing music, we like making music like and this was suddenly a deadly period where actually actually think about money and stuff that we'd not't really given much thought to. So I was going under kind of a bit

Great away from the dreary business meetings and the crumbling band. Paul, Linda, their two children, and their English sheep dog Martha started living a more simple pastoral life. On the farm. They were inspired to eat more vegetarian food. Paul patched up the fences and planted trees which could grow even in the harshest of Scottish winters.

It allowed me to be a man.

If a picture needed hanging, I'm your boy. If somebody needed doing on the farm, I'll do it. And so it was very nice. It was quite a difficult period because it was to do with the Beatles break up and everything, but it allowed me to see another side of myself because I'd grown up in Liverpool, not very much the handyman. I'd gone on the road with the Beatles around the world and round again, and now here I was just on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

It was sensational.

In contrast to their busy life in London. The Highlands permitted the McCartneys to live at a slower piece.

There wasn't a bath, for instance, in this little farmhouse, but there was a big steel tub that they cleaned the milking equipment in bloody cold in the winter, and we'd run in and we'd jump in this bath, which was not easy to get in, but we were young, in virile and we'd jump in this path and have this fantastic for a Japanese style bath. So those are the kind of things we're doing that I'd never done ever in my life, and it was liberating. So I would fix fences, I would dig a drain. I would

Fix the fence by the acre plot.

Two young foxes have been nosing around the lambs and the chigains. You'll safe until it's done. I musty a drain by the carrot patch.

The whole crop spiles if it gets too down.

And where will we be with an empty store when winter comes.

I think a lot of young people dream about that today.

Still I sense a lot of people want that freedom. Escaping the rat race.

Escaping the rat race entailed a great deal of manual labor, but the McCartneys began to relish the simplicity of their life on the farm.

I would get tradesmen from the village who would put the roof on, and then then I'd painted. I talked to them about how you paint the roof, it's all you needed. So get the system. But we listened to tighten up records. The two so it was reggae and freedom and you know, Linda cooking, planting a little vege garden. I was just it's pretty amazing. It was fus and it was just what the boy was wanting.

Instead of wrangling crowds of Beatles fans, McCartney found himself wrangling sheep with the help of a shepherd, Duncan Kern, who would look after the property when the family was away.

I said, and I learned to share the sheep with hand clippers.

No one, that's hard. It is quite hard.

I did about fourteen to twenty in a day, and Duncan would do like a hundred.

You know.

Just getting a sheep on its back is cool. And that ended up as a cover of ram. But that was real cheering time. And we did crazy things like Linda took a portrait of every one of our flock, so.

We have this, let's make it into something one day. It's it's huge. It's just all these different sheep. But we were doing stuff like that, you know, because because we wanted to. It's genuine, you know, this is how we were living.

When Winter Comes chronicles the mundane chores of farm life, fixing the fence, digging a drain. These little actions express attention and care, both for the speaker's family and for the natural world at large.

So this is it's someone like me upon a farm somewhere, and he's looking after things. So I must fix a fence by the acre plot. Two young foxes have been nosing around the lambs, and the chickens won't feel safe until it's done.

I must dig a drain by the carrot patch.

Whole crop spoils if it gets too damp, and where will we be with an empty store and winter comes?

So these are things I'd learned. You've got to put a fence up or the fox.

Will have your chickens, and you've got to dig a drain because patch gets too wet, nothing will grow there.

So this was me remembering.

That when summer we're gonna fly away and find the sun when winter comes.

I really like this song.

I don't want to diminish it by saying it's a series of thumbnail sketches.

That's right.

I think you're right. I mean I don't think it diminishes it at all.

I think.

It's memories of actual, actual things.

And each one makes up a nice little scene.

Fixing the fence for boxes that are a next one, digging the trench a little planting trees.

I must find the time to plant some trees in the.

Meadow where the river flows, in time to come down, make good shade for some poor song.

In a matter where the river flows in time to come, they'll make good shade for some poor soul. That was a sort of rather wistful image that I liked.

I'd never planted trees before.

In fact, after that time, was remembering that time and talking to my roady, my long time roady, and I sort of said about a tree. You know, I said, well, you know, you could buy a tree, and.

What he said, you can buy trees.

And the concept of buying a tree was fabulous, just to see his his mine be blown by the idea because he thought, no, trees are just trees.

And they just grow.

And by this time in my life, when I'm writing this song, I knew that these little one foot things I'd planted in Scotland, and I planted them very badly. I just lifted a sod, stuck them underneath it, and plunked the sod back down. By now they were bloody thirty foot giants. I fell into the trap that most people fall into. If you're going to buy a plant a tree, it's got to be a good six foot. But then you start talking to our boialists and you start talking to three people and they will say it's

Do you still have the house in Scotland? Oh you still have it?

I do? Yeah?

Of gin.

In from Percy Bys.

These as.

Of gins.

As McCary was renovating his Scottish property throughout the nineteen seventies, he was also renovating his songwriting, with Linda by his side, working with their band Wings. He often drew inspiration from the Highlands, as in Mull of Kintire, a surprise hit on the peak of the punk era. Mull of Cantarre was one of the UK's best selling singles of all time.

I was in Scotland a lot and it just suddenly occurred to me that there were no new Scottish songs.

There were lots of great old.

Songs the bagpipe fance played, but there was nothing new. So I thought, that's an opportunity to see if I fancy it or if I can, and then it'd began a nice because the new Scottish song would have been written by assassinak.

I thought that that would be fun.

So long story short, I had the local pipe major come up with his pipes to the house, to the house, which was a very little house, and he played and it was so loud that we I said, let's go out into the garden, which again was a very little garden, and we just sort of he played, and I got some ideas. I got what cords would work with what he was playing, what key was in because they can't

Oh it's a number one, you know.

And the big memory for me that was so cool was talking about a sophistication and this love of not non sophistication was if you were in an orchestral session, the musicians will.

Count one, two three for two to three three to the counting the bars, but the Scottish pipeline doesn't. It goes one, two, three, four, five, six, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twenty three twenty four twenty.

As I mentioned, Mull of Kintarn was released during the punk era, when a rising Scottish melody might have seemed an unlikely hit, a significant departure from the convention of the day. On the other hand, what is more punk than departing from convention.

There's this little story where Lindr and I were in traffic in London, in the West End somewhere, and there was a big gang of punks who look very aggressive, you know, the look was a grossure. And they comes sort of stomping through in the sort of bobber boots and they come with the car and we're kind of crouching a little bit, trying to not get noticed, thinking Jesus, what they're going to do. You know, they're going to think we're the enemy kind of thing. And then they

He goes, I got that monarching jars fucking right.

Through these songs. High Park took on a sort of mythic quality in the public imagination, but for the most part, the farm itself remained for the McCartney's alone, allowing them to get away from public life. Did people follow you there?

Cell remote? Nobody could get there. A couple of people did, and people would just shot out of the blue.

They probably came to Campbelltown and asked and someone would tell them up that road.

But it was really hard.

It wasn't just easy to go that road, of that road and of that track and then over that track.

It was very remote. And then the photographer from Life.

Magazine found us, and I think I threw a boocket of water on him, and then he said he was going to use that photo, so fuck. So I sort of followed him out in my landlord and said, look, we'll do a pose for So we did a posal.

They got all the cover of Life. I think yes.

But we loved it because we were totally making it up, and you think about it.

We had a young baby. There were doctors in.

The town, so we were ten minutes from a doctor, but as far as we were concerned, we could be completely cut off if we wanted, and it was pretty cool.

When Winter Comes.

Focuss we want.

To Paul McCartney reworked When Winter Comes in twenty twenty, twenty eight years after it was originally recorded. It was a time when most of the were world was cut off from public life in a very different way at the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic, when his archivists brought him the song as a possible bonus extra for

Album, to stains.

Whensum's Gone.

We're gonna fly away.

And find the Sun when winds are Gone, And find the Sun.

When winds are gone, When Winter Comes from McCartney three, released in twenty twenty and mull Offkin Tyre released in nineteen seventy eight. In the next episode.

Under Milk would by Dylan Thomas.

Senter Paul Listening to the radio taught young McCartney the art of creating sound images. Geez Penny Lean next time on McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.