Trivia

Some trivia about Paul McCartney . . .

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The Beatles had droopy moustaches because McCartney had a swollen lip and chipped tooth as a result of a moped accident:

I had an accident when I came off a moped in Wirral, near Liverpool. I had a very good friend who lived in London called Tara Browne, a Guinness heir - a nice Irish guy, very sensitive bloke. I'd see him from time to time, and enjoyed being around him. He came up to visit me in Liverpool once when I was there seeing my dad and brother. I had a couple of mopeds on hire, so we hit upon the bright idea of going to my cousin Bett's house.

We were riding along on the mopeds. I was showing Tara the scenery. He was behind me, and it was an incredible full moon; it really was huge. I said something about the moon and he said 'yeah', and I suddenly had a freeze-frame image of myself at that angle to the ground when it's too late to pull back up again: I was still looking at the moon and then I looked at the ground, and it seemed to take a few minutes to think, 'Ah, too bad - I'm going to smack that pavement with my face!' Bang! 

There I was, chipped tooth and all. it came through my lip and split it. But I got up and we went along to my cousin's house. When I said, 'Don't worry, Bett, but I've had a bit of an accident,' she thought I was joking. She creased up laughing at first, but then she went 'Holy...!' I'd really given my face a good old smack; it looked like I'd been in the ring with Tyson for a few rounds. So she rang a friend of hers who was a doctor. 

He came round on the spot, took a needle out and, after great difficulty threading it, put it in the first half of the wound. He was shaking a bit, but got it all the way through, and then he said, ''Oh, the thread's just come out - I'll have to do it again!' No anaesthetic. I was standing there while he rethreaded it and pulled it through again.
In fact that was why I started to grow a moustache. It was pretty embarrassing, because around that time you knew your pictures would get winged off to teeny-boppery magazines like 16, and it was pretty difficult to have a new picture taken with a big fat lip. So I started to grow a moustache - a sort of Sancho Panza - mainly to cover where my lip had been sewn. 

It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we'd all tend to do it. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea, that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache! And it all fell in with the Sgt Pepper thing, because he had a droopy moustache. 

Paul McCartney

Anthology

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Tara Browne, McCartney's friend mentioned above, was the Guinness heir whose death later inspired John Lennon to write the opening lines of A Day In The Life.

Browne was the son of a member of the House of Lords, who sat in the House from 1927 to 1999.

On 18 December 1966, Browne was driving with his girlfriend in his Lotus Elan at a speed estimated at 170kph. It is not known whether he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He failed to see a traffic light and proceeded, colliding with a parked lorry. He died of his injuries.

Lennon saw the coroner’s finding in the paper and wrote about it in a  verse of A Day in the Life:

I read the news today, oh boy 

About a lucky man who made the grade 

And though the news was rather sad 

Well I just had to laugh 

I saw the photograph. 

He blew his mind out in a car 

He didn't notice that the lights had changed 

A crowd of people stood and stared 

They'd seen his face before 

Nobody was really sure 

If he was from the House of Lords. 

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Sir Paul McCartney was granted a coat of arms on his 59th birthday in 2001. It depicts a guitar held by a Liver bird, a reference to his musical career and his Liverpool roots. The left-facing helmet has an open visor, as is customary for knights. The shield, featuring two black curved emblems, is divided in two. The resulting four shapes, resembling beetles' backs, symbolise McCartney and his fellow Beatles John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The two black circles above are representative of records and compact discs, with guitar strings passing over them.

The motto Ecce Cor Meum is Latin for Behold My Heart. It is also the title of an oratorio released by McCartney in 2006. In a religious context, the “Behold my heart” refers to the sacred heart of Jesus, the oratorio being a classical work in English and Latin he wrote for the new chapel at Oxford University.

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