The Sunday Times - Culture

The Sunday Times      August 27, 2006

Rock: Henry McCullough
From Wings to having to busk back home in Ireland, Henry McCullough fell far. But he’s up again, finds Stephen Price
Coleraine is not the kind of place one readily associates with music, let alone rock’n’roll legends. A sleepy, medium-size town near the mouth of the river Bann, its best-known cultural asset is the Riverside theatre. Yet, living just beyond the suburbs is a figure whose remarkable story mirrors the development of popular music throughout the 1960s and 1970s, encompassing, among others, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull and Andrew Lloyd Webber. For Henry McCullough has played guitar with them all.

Hens and peacocks strut around his cottage garden as he plucks a blues riff from an old Gibson ES. Quiet and dry-humoured, McCullough recalls how a journey that saw him riff with Hendrix, perform at Woodstock, and tell a superstar ex-Beatle that his guitar parts were rubbish, began in 1960, in a concrete shelter overlooking the harbour of his native Portstewart. “All my friends bought guitars because of the whole skiffle craze,” says McCullough. “But I couldn’t afford one, so if I borrowed an acoustic, I played in this shelter, because I liked the reverb it gave me. If the guitar was electric, I plugged it into the wireless and played Eddie Cochran. The skiffle thing passed, but I kept on playing, because there was a hunger in me for the music.”

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His mother worked in a dance-hall cloakroom, so the teenage McCullough turned up every weekend just to be near the guitars. “I even went to gospel meetings if I heard they had guitars.” The showband scene was taking off, and at 16 he was auditioned by the Skyrockets, from Enniskillen. “I didn’t even know what a minor chord was, but next thing I knew I was away around Ireland in a Morris van,” he says.

His apprenticeship began in earnest. “Every Sunday, the tape recorder was put on beside the radio, and you spent the week learning the Top 20. We played everything — pop, dance songs, old-time waltzes. Sometimes you could be on stage for six hours, so you needed a big repertoire.”

He owned 27 mohair suits, “but the charts were full of the Stones, the Beatles, the Animals and Manfred Mann, and I so badly wanted to be in a beat group. Eventually, I got a call from a Belfast outfit called the People, and the suits were sold.” After a spell in Dublin, his new band got their break when they played the ultra-hip Middle Earth club in London, supporting Procol Harum and Soft Machine. Chas Chandler, the Animals’ bassist-turned-manager, was in the audience, and he added the People to a package tour that included his other new signing, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Pink Floyd.

“Jimi was a quiet man, very shy. But when he went on, he became a different guy altogether. And you had to stand back and watch because he was so good.”

But it wasn’t all glamour. “Five of us lived in a van, which had a hole in the roof, so at night we parked under a railway arch in Camden Town,” says McCullough. “Before gigs, we changed in the toilets in Trafalgar Square. We went to religious gatherings for free sandwiches and tea, and picked f** butts off the ground in Victoria station. But when you’re young, everything is great.”

He was also getting wise to the tricks of the music industry. “Chandler changed our name to Eire Apparent, which I hated. He tried to make us wear fancy hats and boots, and I told him I’d left the showband scene to get away from bloody uniforms. Everything he tried to make us do, he eventually did with Slade — all those funny clothes and silly pop.”

McCullough abandoned Eire Apparent and returned to Dublin to join Sweeney’s Men, progenitors of the folk-rock sound that paved the way for Horslips. “I wanted to play everything — rock, blues, folk, country — and not get bogged down in one style,” says McCullough.

An invitation to join Joe Cocker’s Grease Band followed. The Woodstock festival in 1969, retrospectively hailed as the defining moment of that era, is rarely shown on television without the obligatory clip of a passionately wasted Cocker singing With a Little Help from My Friends. Standing directly behind him, guitar in hand, is McCullough. “Woodstock didn’t seem all that special at the time,” he says. “It was just this big, muddy field.”

And was Cocker as strung-out as he looked? “He was worse. As well as the drink, there was a lot of cannabis about, and LSD, which I found enlightening. I just felt honoured to be part of such a hardcore rock’n’roll outfit.”

Cocker quit the Grease Band afterwards, but the group was in demand for session work, which is how McCullough found himself recording the album soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970.

“Rice and Lloyd Webber offered us £500 each, or a percentage of the profits. None of us thought that a record with that title would sell, so we all took the £500.”

Denny Laine, the former guitarist from the Moody Blues, introduced McCullough to Paul McCartney, and they jammed for three days. “Then Paul asked me would I like to be in a band with him and I said, ‘F***, aye!’” Following the disintegration of the Beatles — a subject that was never broached — McCartney toured the embryonic Wings around England unannounced.

“First stop was Leicester University. I went into the students’ union and said, ‘Can Paul McCartney and his new band play here?’ I had to bring the students out to the van to prove I wasn’t joking. By evening, the place was packed. We got paid in 50p pieces. Then we toured Europe in an open-top bus. When that was over, McCartney said, ‘Who wants to go to Morocco in my Learjet?’ So off I went, with 40 quid in my pocket.”

McCartney’s reputation for parsimony is, it seems, entirely justified. “Everyone in the band was paid £70 a week,” says McCullough. “Paul said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do a record, do a tour, then we’ll sit down and work out what’s what.’ But we never did. A great businessman — he’s been down to his last £800m for years.”

That, and McCartney’s musical control-freakery, caused McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell to quit just before Wings flew to Lagos to record Band on the Run. “I loved Paul, and Linda, dearly. But half the band was leaving and he never asked why.”

McCullough’s guitar solo on the 1973 Wings single My Love is widely regarded as one of the best of that genre, yet he had had to face down McCartney in front of the producer, George Martin, and a 50-piece orchestra to be allowed to play it his way.

“Wings was 100% McCartney’s band. When I talked to George Harrison, we found we had an awful lot in common.”

McCullough alternated between England and America, recording and touring with Ronnie Lane, Marianne Faithfull, Roy Harper, Donovan and the experimental outfit Spooky Tooth. But as the 1970s drew to a close, tastes started to change.

“I always went with the flow, but the river dried up a bit,” he says. Worse, his spoken contribution to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, where he says “I was very drunk at the time”, turned out to be prescient, when, after returning to Ireland in 1984, he nearly severed three fingers with a kitchen knife. His surgeons thought he might never play again, and he couldn’t hold a plectrum for three years afterwards. Penniless, and living on a council estate after two decades of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, this was to be the long comedown.

“I went down to my mother’s grave in Portstewart and said a prayer, and told her I really needed help. I stopped drinking and, for five days, I thought I was going to hell.”

Slowly the music came back — through busking. “The open air strengthened my hand and strengthened me. Being back on my own doorstep, busking in the street, did me the world of good.” He began recording his own material, which reflects his huge range of influences and experiences.

Now McCullough finds himself courted by a new generation — he has a project coming up with youthful blues act the Deans — and tours regularly. “I’ve lasted the course. And since I got sober, I’m playing better than ever.”

He still gets Christmas cards from McCartney, and feels sorry for his current predicament. “It’s as big a knock as Linda passing away. I wish I could stick my hand out and say, ‘Listen, why don’t we do what we used to — go to a pub unannounced and play Blackbird?’ I think he needs that.”

Henry McCullough’s current album, Unfinished Business, is available through http://www.henrymccullough.com

He's right about saying him & Paul should play together again in a pub, but a reunion of the original Wings would be great, especially since a Beatles reunion will never happen.  

Quoted from Wayne L.

He's right about saying him & Paul should play together again in a pub, but a reunion of the original Wings would be great, especially since a Beatles reunion will never happen.  

It won't, but I'm still hoping Paul and Ringo will get together someday to play a Beatles set. It would be close enough for me.

Quoted from Wayne L.

He's right about saying him & Paul should play together again in a pub, but a reunion of the original Wings would be great, especially since a Beatles reunion will never happen.  

That can never happen because Linda is gone and she was a part of Wings

Quoted from Joost

It won't, but I'm still hoping Paul and Ringo will get together someday to play a Beatles set. It would be close enough for me.

Paul & Ringo playing together isn't a reunion anyway(if it happens), just two former members of the Beatles, since you see them most of the time.  

No, of course it wouldn't be a reunion, but right now it's the closest possible thing to a reunion... At least on this earth...   But no matter how you'd call it, it would still be pretty damn cool to see them together on stage playing Beatles songs.