Did the Real Paul McCartney Die in 1966?

On Saturday May 25th 2022, an 80-year-old man managed to get his way onto The Main Pyramid Stage of The Glastonbury Festival to face approximately 100,000 people patiently waiting for the headlining act to make their entrance. It sounds like the kind of incident that usually ends with the stage intruder getting dragged away by security. But it wasn’t gonna pan out like that, today. The man in question was Paul McCartney and he was the headlining act.

Held almost every year since 1970 on Worthy Farm, Pilton, in Somerset, The Glastonbury Festival is a contradictory beast today. The most famous and iconic annual festival in British culture still tries to evoke the hippy spirit of a countercultural free-for-all gathering, whilst simultaneously charging about £400 for a ticket and about £20 for a vegetarian hot dog. In 2022, the legendary Paul McCartney was one of around 3,000 acts performing over five glorious summer days. The former Beatle was rubbing shoulders on The Pyramid Stage with the likes of Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, and Diana Ross, whilst the many other stages scattered around the farm played host to lesser-known names including The Funkingham Palace Footmen, Lekkido – Lord of the Lobsters, and Beans on Toast.

But it was Paul McCartney who delivered the most memorable performance of Glastonbury 2022 by far. It’s fair to say that his voice had gone a bit and he was struggling to hit the high notes. But give the man a break. The 80-year-old rattled through a blistering 3-hour set which included contributions from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Dave Grohl.

Thanks to a bit of clever technical jiggery-pokery provided by director Peter Jackson, he was even given an opportunity to perform a virtual duet with his former bandmate, the late John Lennon. I’ll be impressed with myself at 80 years old if I can still reach out for the TV remote and open a bag of crisps without assistance.

There was just one niggling little doubt, though. Was this really the same Paul McCartney who co-founded The Beatles in 1960 – arguably the greatest band of all time who went on to change the world forever over the course of the following decade? Rumour has it that the original Paul McCartney came to an unfortunate sticky end in 1966, and his character has been played by a doppelganger ever since. And this wasn’t just on the same wavelength as some trivial short-lived internet gossip.

The ‘Paul is Dead’ Legend

The ‘Paul is Dead’ legend is now recognised as one of the biggest and most enduring conspiracy theories of all time which sparked major press headlines and TV news coverage in the US. The clues were all there to be found if you looked hard enough, and it didn’t help matters that McCartney himself appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth at the time. But could there possibly be any substance at all to such a seemingly outlandish theory? How did the rumour ever get off the ground and gather momentum so quickly?

Were The Beatles themselves involved in fanning the flames? And could it be possible that the whole thing was accidentally ignited by an entirely different but entirely genuine Beatles conspiracy to cover up a secret truth? Let’s see if we can work it out…

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

The way this story usually gets reported is that it all began with a telephone call to a DJ from Detroit during a live broadcast on the underground radio station WKNR-FM in 1969. That’s not true, as the real origins of the theory actually stretch back a little further in history. But the radio broadcast was certainly a significant event in the timeline of the growth of the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory, and as most people seem to think that this was the source of the whole thing, it makes a good jumping-in point for now before we hit the rewind button much later.

DJ Russ Gibb was hosting a radio broadcast on the 12th October 1969 when he took a mysterious call from a young guy who gave his name as Tom Zarski. Tom asked DJ Russ if he’d heard any of the rumours supposedly circulating around the United States that Paul McCartney had died a few years earlier and been replaced by a lookalike. DJ Russ was initially dismissive of such a preposterous notion, but Tom insisted that the remaining Beatles had planted several clues within the lyrics of the tracks on their most recent albums.

Of particular note during that initial broadcast was a clue hidden on a track from The Beatles’ eponymous album released the previous year, now widely known as ‘The White Album’. Clocking in at over eight minutes, ‘Revolution 9’ it’s not only the longest track ever to have been released by The Beatles, it’s also the weirdest – and that’s saying something when you take into account all the stuff about living under the sea in an Octopus’s garden in the shade. Tucked away near the end of the eclectic sprawling double-album, ‘Revolution 9’ is the track that most sensible listeners tend to skip.

Said to be inspired by the works of Yoko Ono – maybe that tells you enough - it’s an avant-garde sound collage of loops of speech and distortion and sound effects, pushed drearily along by the voice of the sound engineer who intones the words “Number nine, number nine,” over and over again for no discernible reason. The opinions of the critics back in the day ranged from “an anti-masterpiece” to “noisy, boring and meaningless”, to “a pretentious piece of old codswallop and a piece of idiot immaturity.” I notice that Paul McCartney elected not to bother playing it during his Glastonbury 2022 set.

But hidden amongst this self-indulgent eight-minute racket, caller Tom Zarski had noticed something odd. He urged DJ Russ to play the first few minutes of the track backwards, and the DJ eventually obliged after a little persuasion. Russ and his army of loyal listeners were all pretty taken aback by the results. The words “Number nine, number nine,” now sounded uncannily like the words “Turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man.”

DJ Russ Gibb recalls: “I should have brushed the kid off. When I spun it backwards, I freaked. And the whole thing just exploded. The phones were ringing off the hook.

People were calling with their own clues. It was non-stop. It was really a phenomenon. For a while, it seemed like it might really be true.”

Perhaps this could explain why the track was ever recorded and released in the first place. The whole purpose of ‘Revolution 9’ was to serve as a tip-off. It’s admittedly quite difficult to come up with any other rational reason for its existence.

But it was shortly after this broadcast that other radio stations began to jump on the ‘Paul is Dead’ bandwagon, and suddenly it seemed as if every student in every university campus in the US was pouring through the extensive back catalogue of The Beatles to try and pick up on other secret signs buried deep – or even not so deep – within the vinyl and the packaging. We’ll return to some of the highlights of that staggeringly long list of clues in just a moment, but first let’s just take a look at what exactly was supposed to have happened to poor old Paul. Well, poor young Paul, really. He would only have been 24 years old when tragedy struck.

Drive My Car

The theory goes that the original Paul McCartney met his fate at around 5am on the morning of Wednesday 9th November 1966. McCartney had spent the night in what would later become known as the Abbey Road recording studio, working on the upcoming ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album with fellow Beatles John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, alongside producer George Martin. Sadly, the session had ended in yet another bust-up for the increasingly argumentative fab four, and McCartney ended up storming out of the studio in a huff and hopping into his Aston Martin sports car.

One version of the tale makes out that he was entirely alone, but another version suggests that he generously stopped to pick up a stray young hitchhiker by the name of Rita. Whether a grumpy Paul was distracted by the ferocity of the argument with his bandmates, or he was distracted by the amorous attentions of Rita the hitchhiker who was taking the opportunity to try and cop off with one of the most famous men on the planet, the outcome was the same. He didn’t notice that the traffic lights had changed to red. McCartney ploughed straight through, and his sports car was hit by another vehicle, causing the Aston Martin to crash straight into a lamppost.

If Rita the hitchhiker was indeed present, then she was instantly killed by the impact. McCartney meanwhile was decapitated, and so surprisingly enough, there was not an awful lot that the medics could do when his head and the rest of his body were wheeled into the local hospital in London. Naturally, this left the shocked surviving members of The Beatles with a problem to mull over. They were just approaching the peak of their career and were on the verge of finishing ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ - a piece of work that was destined to become a defining moment in pop culture, and still widely regarded by people who know what they’re talking about as the greatest album ever released.

But what were they supposed to do now? Split up and abandon the album? Find a new replacement for Paul, preferably one whose head was still very much attached? I know that plenty of bands go through inevitable line-up changes, but it’s truly difficult to imagine a version of The Beatles without all four members.

I mean, I suppose at a push, you could replace Ringo with a nice sloppy Labrador and just about get away with it. And it’s worth remembering that the original 5-piece line-up of The Beatles featured two members – Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best – who weren’t destined to hang around long enough to reap the rewards. But even so, by 1966, the idea of The Beatles without either Lennon, McCartney, or Harrison seemed as absurd as the idea of fish and chips without a carton of curry sauce. Fixing a hole of this size would be inconceivable.

It was apparently John Lennon who first came up with the idea of keeping McCartney’s death a secret and replacing him with an imposter to keep up the pretence that he was still alive. It was an idea which Harrison and Ringo (sorry, we can’t just call him Starr, can we?) initially found repulsive and in very poor taste, but they were eventually persuaded to go along with the charade.

An alternative take on the tale suggests that it was actually the UK’s security service MI5 who insisted that the band find a lookalike replacement, over fears that news of Paul’s McCartney’s death could potentially lead to mass hysteria and trigger a wave of suicides amongst young fans. That would have been quite a thoughtful gesture on their part. When The Spice Girls split up in 2001, I could have done with the intervention of MI5 to spare me from the grief.

They could easily have rustled up a bunch of lookalikes to carry on as if nothing had happened. Although I reckon I would have spotted a fake Geri Halliwell.

But regardless of who came up with the fiendish plot, a secret funeral service was held for the real Paul McCartney whilst his replacement was eventually found in the form of a young guy who had grown up as an orphan and now found himself facing a pretty extensive identity crisis. Some say that he was from Edinburgh, whilst others say he hailed from Canada – either way he was going to have a hard time in nailing that Liverpudlian accent. His real full name was William Shears Campbell although he had liked to perform under the name of Billy Shears before assuming the identity of Paul McCartney. And he was apparently found after the record label launched a Paul McCartney lookalike competition, the results of which were never revealed.

Exactly how much he resembled McCartney is up for debate – whilst some versions of the saga suggest that he was already an almost perfect doppelganger, other versions suggest that Billy Shears underwent extensive plastic surgery before he was finally unveiled to a completely unsuspecting public. Of course, if all this is true – a bit of a stretch, I know – this changes pretty much everything we thought we knew about Paul McCartney. It would mean that whilst the original Paul McCartney was responsible for helping the band hit the dizzy heights of fame with a clutch of cheerful pop songs, it was actually a completely different person who contributed to the truly groundbreaking work from the band’s later years; a completely different person who went on to form Wings, marry Linda McCartney, and perform a seminal collaboration with The Frog Chorus; and a completely different 80-year-old person who was wowing the audience at Glastonbury 2022 with renditions from a discography stretching back about 50 years, the vast majority of which had nothing whatsoever to do with the original Paul. In a way, the replacement Paul McCartney has far more Paul McCartney about him than the real Paul McCartney.

Nowhere Man

If The Beatles were supposed to be keeping this a secret, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. When ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was finally released in 1967, they practically announced the arrival of the new member within the opening title track of the album. Check out the lyrics at the close of this opening song which segues into the next track.

“The singer’s gonna sing along/And he wants you all to sing along/So let me introduce to you/The one and only Billy Shears/And Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!” Just to drive the point home, the opening words of the next track are simply a celebratory repetition of the name “Billy Sheeeeears!”

However, this is a possible misunderstanding of the original premise of what is often considered to be the world’s first ‘concept’ album. McCartney had originally envisaged that The Beatles should take on the mantle of an entirely fictional Edwardian-era military band in order to free up their experimental creativity. That band was of course The Lonely Hearts Club Band, compered by Sgt Pepper, with each Beatle taking on the role of an alter-ego.

It’s a concept which had largely fizzled out by the time the album was released. We still don’t really know which Beatle was supposed to be Sgt Pepper, or in fact which Beatle was supposed to be playing which fictional character. Aside from Sgt Pepper himself, Billy Shears is the only member of the fictional band to get a namecheck anywhere on the record.

But if Billy Shears is any Beatle at all, it would make more sense for him to be Ringo Starr. As the title track segues into the next track with the introduction of Billy Shears, it’s Ringo’s voice we hear on lead vocals for ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’. Paul McCartney later stated that he just randomly came up with the name “Billy Shears” because it sounded like a nice atmospheric name which rhymed with “All These Years” and served as an introduction to the next song.

But then the lucky lookalike Billy Shears is bound to say something like that, isn’t he?

Another character connected to the tragedy pops up later on the album in the form of the track ‘Lovely Rita Meter Maid’. The jolly song appears on the surface to be about Paul falling for the charms of a meter maid – we tend to refer to them as traffic wardens in the UK – after she hands him a parking ticket. It’s a romantic concept which I’m sure plays out every day on the busy heart-shaped streets of Britain.

Paul ends up taking Rita out for dinner but then we hear the curious line: “Took her home and nearly made it.” Could it be that The Beatles are actually talking about the hitchhiker Rita who may or may not have contributed to the fact that Paul didn’t quite make it home that night? Maybe, although it could also be interpreted as Paul not quite managing to make out with Rita when he was invited into her house, as her two sisters were sitting on the sofa with them.

Slightly more eerie clues can be found in Sgt Pepper’s epic closing track ‘Day in The Life’ which features what sounds like a car crash and an explosion. It also kicks off with an opening verse about a man – possibly a politician – who meets an unfortunate end in a car accident. As the song delicately puts it: “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.”

Another reference to McCartney’s accident? John Lennon claimed the verse was inspired by the death of young Irish socialite Tara Browne - the heir to the Guinness fortune who tragically died at the age of just 21 in a car accident in 1966. But weirdly, co-writer McCartney can’t seem to make up his mind whether this is true or not.

He once claimed that he wasn’t thinking at all about Tara Browne when he was working on the song, and that he envisaged the verse to be about a politician who crashed his car after he “blew his mind out” on drugs. However, as recently as 2021, McCartney gave the contradictory account that he was friends with Tara Browne and that the verse was very much about him. What’s he trying to hide?

As Judge Judy might say, you don’t need to have a good memory when you tell the truth. She might also say “You’re so full of baloney!” and “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining!”

Maybe we’ll find further clues in the actual packaging of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ The front cover, for example. I must have seen this iconic image featuring a cast of colourful cut-out characters thousands of times, and yet I’ve never spent much time pondering over the fact that it could easily be interpreted as a funeral gathering.

You even get the name of the band displayed in a wreath at the bottom – possibly in tribute to either McCartney or the most famous incarnation of the actual band. Not only that, but there’s also a little wreath of yellow hyacinths on the ground which take the shape of a left-handed bass. McCartney played the bass, and he was the only left-handed member of The Beatles.

It’s been argued that the bass wreath may actually be a tribute to the band’s original Scottish bassist Stuart Sutcliffe who died from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21. But that doesn’t entirely make sense as Sutcliffe was right-handed. I suppose it could be some sort of in-joke relating to the fact that after Sutcliffe left the band, he gifted his right-handed bass to McCartney who had to play it upside down until he could afford to buy a left-handed one.

Maybe this was Stuart Sutcliffe’s bass turned upside down to represent the passing of the instrument from Sutcliffe to McCartney. Or maybe we’re looking way too deep into this.

If you think some of these cover clues are a bit batty, wait until you hear this one: The words ‘Lonely Hearts’ appear in big letters on the front of a bass drum, but if you take out a flat mirror and hold it perpendicular to the letters, they now appear to spell out “I ONE IX HE DIE” with a little diamond shape in the middle. This is apparently a reference to the date of McCartney’s death on 9th November – so the wording is basically saying “11/9 – He Die” with the diamond in the middle pointing directly at McCartney. This might have made a little more sense if it had adopted the British method of dating which sensibly puts the day before the month. But only a little more sense.

Elsewhere on the front cover, we can see a toy Aston Martin sports car which is an accurate recreation of the full-size version of the car in which McCartney blew his mind out, and a small statue of the Hindu god Shiva the Destroyer who seems to be pointing to the doomed Beatle. Flipping open the gorgeous gatefold sleeve reveals another image of The Beatles in which McCartney is wearing an arm patch which bears the abbreviation “OPD.” And we all know what “OPD” stands for. That’s right.

It’s clearly an abbreviation for ‘Officially Pronounced Dead.’ Although that’s not what the imposter Billy Shears would have you believe. He reckons that he picked up the arm patch in Canada and that it’s a police badge which stands for ‘Ontario Police Department.’ A likely tale, Billy.

Finally, if we turn to the back cover, we see yet another image of the band, but for some reason, whilst the surviving members of The Beatles are facing the camera as you might reasonably expect, McCartney has his back turned. It’s certainly an odd pose to strike for a group photo, but then The Beatles always had a reputation for embracing the unconventional. Some conspiracy theorists have suggested however that turning your back is a symbolic gesture associated with death in some countries, whilst others have suggested that this is a sign of Billy Shears attempting to conceal his real identity.

You’ll also find the lyrics to every song on the back cover which was a pretty unusual move back in the days when most listeners just hummed along with their own comically inaccurate words. But George Harrison seems to be pointing to one line in particular – this opening line from ‘She’s Leaving Home’: “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins.” This of course is the day and exact time at which McCartney supposedly crashed his car and lost his head.

And it seems The Beatles did have something of a fascination with Tuesdays and Wednesdays. In the later 1967 song ‘I Am The Walrus’ – a contender for the most nonsensical song ever recorded by the band which, as we’ll discover in a while, has its own role to play in this saga – Lennon sings about “Stupid bloody Tuesday” which could be a reference to the previous evening’s bust-up in the recording studio that led to McCartney storming out in a huff. And in the later 1968 track ‘Lady Madonna’, we hear the lyric: “Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.”

Could this be alluding to the press blackout which followed the secret demise of McCartney? Or just a general complaint about the sloppy work ethic of the local paperboys and papergirls?

Magical Mystery Tour

Let’s move onto what is probably my favourite collection of Beatles songs, even if it’s not really a proper album as such. ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ was originally released as a double EP in late 1967 and served as a soundtrack to the TV movie of the same name, before it was later padded out to album length with a handful of the band’s recent singles. But although it might sound a bit cobbled together, it’s still an incredible oddball collection of ’60s psychedelia which includes Lennon’s nostalgic reflections on his childhood years in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

Lennon apparently makes a surprising admission towards the very end of this track. It appears as if the words were never intended to make it to the final cut, they were just accidentally picked up by the microphone on Ringo’s drum kit which is where Lennon just happened to be loitering at the time. But if you listen very closely, you can just about hear Lennon saying something which sounds very similar to “I buried Paul.”

Well, that’s what some people reckon. It seems a very strange thing to just blurt out when you’re standing next to Ringo.

Others have suggested that what he’s actually saying is “I’m very bored.” It wouldn’t be entirely out of character for Lennon to make an unplanned lyrical contribution during the recording of a track. Less than three minutes into the track ‘Hey Jude’ you can just about hear Lennon muttering “Fucking hell!”

after realising that the volume in his headphones had been set too loud. That’s what we were led to believe for over 40 years, anyway. In 2021, McCartney claimed that the expletive actually came from his own mouth after he missed a piano chord.

But in this case, Lennon was saying neither “I buried Paul” nor “I’m very bored.” As we finally got to hear much more clearly in a remastered version of the track released in 1996, what he’s actually saying is “Cranberry sauce.” Why he would randomly say this might remain forever a mystery – perhaps Ringo was asking him what he wanted putting on his turkey sandwiches during the lunch break.

Bearing in mind that we’re talking about a man who wrote such lyrics as “Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye/Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess, Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down”, maybe we shouldn’t try to over-analyse everything that came out of Lennon’s mouth.

But what further clues were coming out of the packaging of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’? Well, the back cover features stills lifted from the accompanying TV movie which all depict The Beatles dressed up in white suits with red carnations – all except McCartney who gets a white suit but is wearing a black carnation more commonly associated with a funeral. McCartney later gave a rather mundane explanation for this when he revealed: “I was wearing a black flower because they ran out of red ones.”

Meanwhile, the front cover features the band’s name spelt out in giant stars. But if you turn the sleeve upside down and get out the same mirror you’ve hopefully kept from when you were mucking about with the Sgt Pepper cover, the reflection reveals what looks a bit like a telephone number. It was rumoured that the telephone number belonged to a local mortuary in London, although others have claimed that they phoned the number and heard a recorded message which simply stated: “You’re getting closer.”

I would have thought this would have been relatively easy to prove one way or the other during the height of the ‘Paul is Dead’ mania. It’s also a bit fishy that not everyone can even agree on what the digits of the telephone number are supposed to be. But even though this is most likely not true, I prefer the theory that the telephone number belonged to an unwitting industrial correspondent working for The Guardian newspaper, who spent the next few months fielding enquiries from concerned American fans over the true fate of McCartney.

The White Album

We can skip over the ‘Yellow Submarine’ album – partly because this soundtrack to the animated movie is surprisingly crap. The Beatles weren’t even remotely involved in the second half of the album made up of orchestral scores provided by producer George Martin, whilst even their own half is notably lacklustre. But there also just aren’t many clues lurking beneath this sea of green.

There aren’t that many clues in the band’s next significant release either, the aforementioned eponymous double album most commonly known as ‘The White Album,’ the packaging of which was of an unusually minimalist design. Well, it was largely just white. There’s the whole ‘Revolution 9’ rubbish of course which helped the theory to take off in the first place during that radio broadcast with the DJ Russ Gibb.

There’s also another bizarre lyric in Ringo’s song ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ which observes: “I’m sorry that I doubted you/I was so unfair/You were in a car crash/And you lost your hair.” Might this again be a reference to the bust-up in the recording studio, and the subsequent accident in which McCartney lost both his hair and his head?

There’s also another backwards lyrics theory in a similar vein to ‘Revolution 9’, based around another random contribution from Lennon. Towards the end of the track ‘I’m So Tired’ – a song notable for branding Sir Walter Raleigh “a stupid get” for introducing tobacco to Britain - Lennon can be heard mumbling words which on first listen may sound completely incomprehensible. The theory goes that if you play the track backwards – as you do – the words suddenly become a lot clearer: “Paul is dead, miss him, miss him.”

A more likely explanation is that Lennon’s mumbled words weren’t nonsensical at all – he’s actually just saying “Monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, how about another one?” And these words weren’t meant to be played backwards. I mean, why would you even decide to play a song backwards?

To be fair, The Beatles were pioneers of the technique known as ‘backmasking’ in which a chunk of sound is deliberately recorded backwards onto a track. In fact, they’re widely regarded to be the first band to use the technique in a pop song. But this was never designed to be a technique for planting subliminal messages – it was purely to create intriguing new sounds and textures.

This fear of subliminal messages on records had reached hysterical proportions by the 1980s, as several Christian groups became so convinced that heavy metal bands were hiding backwards Satanic messages in their songs that they’d taken to burning these records in the streets. Of course, a few musical pranksters did subsequently plant backwards messages in their songs from time to time, my favourite example of which is from the 1996 Weird Al Yankovic track ‘I Remember Larry’ which, when spun backwards, reveals the words: “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”

However, the vast majority of allegations of backmasking made against the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC were completely unfounded. Yet Judas Priest still found themselves facing a bizarre trial in 1990 in which they were accused of being responsible for the deaths of two young fans who committed suicide shortly after listening to a Judas Priest album and then becoming heavily intoxicated. The latter part may have something to do with the outcome.

It was alleged that the band had hidden the backwards messages “Let’s be dead,” and “Do It!” in their cover version of ‘Better by You, Better Than Me.’ As the band’s manager later noted, killing off your audience is not the smartest commercial trick in the book.

He said: “If we were going to do that, I’d be saying, ‘Buy seven copies,’ not telling a couple of screwed-up kids to kill themselves.” Although the case dragged on for a month, it was thankfully dismissed after the band were able to demonstrate in court that any supposed messages were just the coincidental result of distinctive guitar sounds and the way that singer Rob Halford exhaled between lyrics. They were also able to demonstrate that people will find supposed backwards lyrics in the most innocent of tracks if they try hard enough.

As guitarist Glenn Tipton put it: “It’s a fact that if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense.” And I think this is an important point to bear in mind when we’re discussing any of the supposed hidden meanings in these Beatles tracks. Whether we’re talking about backwards messages relating to dead men, or lyrics which reference meter maids and Wednesday mornings, it’s very easy to come across something which could be interpreted in a million different ways but then decide that it can only be interpreted in the way that fits what your brain wants you to hear.

Seriously, stop playing records backwards, it’s bad for the ears and for the head.

Abbey Road

Still, perhaps The Beatles saved their biggest clue of all for last with the release of the ‘Abbey Road’ album in 1969. There’s always been a bit of confusion as to what should be regarded as the final Beatles album. The last regular collection of new material to be released was in the form of the ‘Let It Be’ album which didn’t hit the shops until 1970, but this had been sitting on the shelf for a little while.

I lean towards the idea that ‘Abbey Road’ from 1969 is the real final album as even though it was released before ‘Let It Be’, it was actually the last collection of songs to be recorded by the band. And it’s on ‘Abbey Road’ that we find the final batch of clues.

I’m not going to harp on any further about suggestions in the lyrics, although apparently it’s been noted that if you play the track ‘Here Comes The Sun’ backwards at 78 rpm, you can hear George Harrison cheerfully singing “Woe is Paul.” After you’ve finished playing the track backwards at 78 rpm, maybe you can consider smearing the record in Marmite and popping it in the microwave to see if anything else of interest pops up. But no, this final batch of pointers can all be found on the cover, in which the four members of the band are famously navigating the pedestrian crossing on Abbey Road in single file.

Whilst this may on first glance just appear to be a photograph of four guys crossing the road, it’s often been remarked that each member of the band is meant to represent a character in a funeral procession. John Lennon, dressed all in white, is the holy figure. Ringo Starr, clad entirely in black, is meant to be the undertaker.

Scruffy old George Harrison in his denim jeans is clearly the gravedigger. And as for Paul McCartney…well, he’s the unfortunate corpse. The reasoning behind this is that Paul’s eyes are closed, he’s out of step with the others, and he’s walking barefoot across the pedestrian crossing – a possible reference to how corpses in some countries are buried without their shoes.

I might have been just a bit more convinced if they’d dressed McCartney up as a maggot-spewing zombie with various missing limbs. And maybe chopped off his head. But wait, there’s more lurking in this cover.

The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, a sign that the imposter Billy Shears may have had the same looks and the same voice, but he didn’t share the same dominant hand. And then there’s the registration plate. The cover depicts a Volkswagen Beetle bearing the registration “LMW 28 IF”.

The first three letters are said to be an abbreviation of either ‘Linda McCartney, Widow” or “Linda McCartney Weeps”, whilst the final digits are said to represent the age of the real McCartney IF he had still been alive for the Abbey Road photoshoot. Cynics point out that the real McCartney would actually have been 27 at the time, but they’re forgetting that in some far Eastern countries, the time spent in the womb counts towards the age of a person, and The Beatles had certainly spent plenty of time dabbling in eastern mysticism in recent years. All those doubting Thomases don’t seem so clever now, do they?

Well, just about all of these final theories can be debunked with reasonably straightforward explanations. It’s a bit of a stretch to assume that just because, say, Lennon decided to wear white on that day whilst Ringo decided to wear black, this means that the stroll across the pedestrian crossing is meant to represent a funeral procession. It’s debatable whether McCartney’s eyes are really closed at all, and whilst he may seem out of step with the others, there are several alternative shots in which he isn’t – the band just went with the best shot in which all four of them were mid-stride as they felt it looked the most effective.

It’s not that uncommon for a smoker to use their non-dominant hand to hold a cigarette – I often do this myself without thinking, although of course I never light the cigarette or anything as I’ve been warned that this can be quite dangerous. And the registration plate idea doesn’t really make sense regardless of whether we’re counting McCartney’s time in the womb or not. If we’re to believe that the real McCartney died on 9th November 1966 – Wednesday morning, at five o’clock as the day begins – then he wouldn’t even have met the young Linda Eastman yet.

So, Linda would actually have met and married Billy Shears, and could hardly be considered the weeping widow of a person she had never known. As for his bare feet, McCartney himself later explained why he wasn’t wearing shoes on that day: “People start looking at it and they say, ‘Why has he got no shoes on? He’s never done that before.’

OK, you’ve never seen me do it before, but, in actual fact, it’s just me with my shoes off. So what? Barefoot, nice warm day, I didn’t feel like wearing shoes.

Turns out to be some old Mafia sign of death or something.” It sometimes feels as if that wretched Billy Shears has an answer for everything.

Here, There and Everywhere

You might be thinking that not all of these clues are entirely compelling. A more cynical viewer might conclude that each and every one of them is clearly just absolute bollocks. But that didn’t stop the ‘Paul is Dead’ from going supernova in the US over the course of several weeks, even if it didn’t bother the UK or the rest of the world too much. We’re really not talking about something on the same sort of scale as the silly internet rumour that the real Avril Lavagne died in 2003 and has been played by a replacement clone ever since.

(Not true by the way, fact fans.) This was something else entirely. There was nothing else quite like it.

The theory was dominating the radio stations and newspapers, as top DJs flew out to London to conduct their own investigations. The story made it onto news reports from ABC and NBC whilst other television networks were putting together their own live discussions and TV specials. McCartney’s younger brother Mike found himself to be an unwitting participant in such a TV segment.

Mike McCartney – back then known as Mike McGear – also had musical bones, fronting a comedy music trio called The Scaffold throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The Scaffold might not have been quite as successful as The Beatles, but they did score a few novelty top ten hits and once even topped the charts with ‘Lily The Pink’ in 1968. During a tour of the US at the height of the ‘Paul is Dead’ mania, Mike had been invited to appear on an American TV show under the pretence that The Scaffold would be given the opportunity to perform their latest single.

Instead, poor old Mike was forced to sit in the same TV studio as a group of conspiracy theorists and listen to them bang on for ages about how his older brother was dead. A visibly annoyed Mike responded on the broadcast with: “I don’t want to really rip you to shreds because that would be stupid, but I find all of this very embarrassing. You have no factual backing up.

Nothing at all to base it on. It’s a fantastically contrived piece of press material. It’s terrifying how you get away with it.

It’s a hoax, it’s a con.” Mike seemed to lighten up towards the end of the segment when the host – still clearly unconvinced that Paul McCartney might still be alive – challenged Mike to remember the last time he saw his brother. Mike immediately came back with: “It was at his funeral, I think.”

His band still didn’t get to perform, though.

But there were a few other things going on in the background that didn’t really help to quash the rumours. For starters, the Beatles had completely given up touring in November 1966, coincidentally the very same month in which the original McCartney was killed. It was perhaps quite surprising for the biggest band in the world to suddenly announce that they were never going to tour ever again.

The official reasoning was that the screaming from the fans was drowning out the band’s performance to the point where it felt like being on tour eight days a week had become an utterly pointless exercise. And it was a decision that paved the way for astonishing new creativity in the albums to follow as The Beatles were longer restricted to writing and recording songs that could easily be replicated in a live performance. But could there have been another reason?

Perhaps Billy Shears wouldn’t have looked quite as convincing when wheeled out in the flesh for all to see, or perhaps he couldn’t even really play an instrument, at least not to the same standard as the original McCartney.

It was also a bit of a problem that Paul McCartney appeared to have gone devilishly quiet at the height of the ‘Paul is Dead’ mania. I mean, it might have helped considerably if he’d just appeared live on television, held his thumbs aloft, and announced to the world that he was alive and well. But he was nowhere to be found.

During this suspicious lack of public activity from the same man who had spent most of the last few years having a camera pointed at his face, the fans had instead resorted to comparing the most recent photographs of McCartney with earlier photographs. It was concluded by many that his jawline, ears, nose, and teeth looked so different in the intervening years that they couldn’t possibly belong to the same person. It’s certainly true that McCartney’s appearance had changed considerably since the early years of The Beatles, as had the appearances of the other three members.

They’d noticeably become a lot hairier, for a start. You only have to compare the cover of the early ‘Red’ compilation album with the recreated cover shot for the later ‘Blue’ compilation album to see how much they’d all changed in the space of about four years – although it’s interesting to see that McCartney has probably changed the least in-between these two shots.

Of course, people do tend to look a bit different over the course of the cruel passage of time, and I’m not convinced that McCartney’s profile had radically changed during the 1960s. One of his teeth does look quite different but this was only because he required surgery following a moped crash in 1965, a real accident in which he noticeably didn’t die. You can actually see his damaged teeth and scarred lip in the promotional videos for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’ which were recorded shortly after the accident.

Yet even McCartney conceded that he could see why some people felt they were looking at photographs of two different people. He later said: “Coincidentally, around about that time, I was playing down a lot of the old Beatle image and getting a bit more to what I felt was me, letting me beard grow and not being so hung up on keeping fresh and clean. I looked different, more laid back, and so I had people coming up saying ‘You’re not him!’

And I was beginning to think, ‘I am, you know, but I know what you mean. I don’t look like him.’” Despite all this suspicion, McCartney still seemed reluctant to pop his head over the parapet at the time and confirm that he was still alive.

So where was he hiding? Or what was he hiding?

After The Beatles had given up touring, all four members had chosen to spend a lot less time in the spotlight after being hauled through the publicity mill during a pretty exhaustive four years. But it’s true to say that a secret of sorts was indeed being whispered down the corridors of the Abbey Road recording studios: The most famous band in the world were very much on the brink of splitting up. They’d certainly had plenty of arguments in the past, and just about every member had briefly quit the band at some point only to be lured back the next day, but this time felt different.

Tensions had been rising higher than ever before in the recording studio, partly fuelled by John Lennon’s insistence that his partner Yoko Ono should sit in on all the sessions. This meant that every time Lennon had a musical disagreement with one of the others, Yoko would immediately leap to her partner’s defence as if she was a legitimate member of The Beatles with an equal say in what was going on. McCartney had also recently lost a significant argument with the other three over who should be the band’s business manager.

McCartney felt that his own father-in-law Lee Eastman was the right man for the job, and felt aggrieved when the other three voted for Allen Klein. All kinds of other shit was also going down behind the scenes, but the final nail was hammered into the coffin on 20th September 1969 when John Lennon solemnly announced during a private meeting that he was quitting The Beatles. He’d said this before, but now it seemed as if he was deadly serious.

Lennon felt that after over ten years working together, the band had achieved everything they possibly could as a collective, and it was time for them to go their separate ways and embark upon four exciting new solo careers. Well, three exciting new solo careers, and a voiceover job for ‘Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends’.

It would be a while until the big news was made public, but in the meantime, McCartney decided to get away from it all. He retreated to his remote Scottish farm near Campbeltown, and bolted down the hatches with new wife Linda, their two-month baby Mary, and 6-year-old Heather from Linda’s first marriage. However, whilst McCartney was lying low on the farm and enjoying a new life of blissful sheep-petting far away from the prying eyes of the media, the band’s press manager Derek Taylor was getting a bit edgy.

He was becoming inundated with calls from DJs and TV broadcasters and fans in the US who all wanted to know if McCartney was dead or alive. Derek Taylor’s patience was wearing thin, and he was keen for McCartney to provide an official statement confirming that his head was still very much attached to his neck. He called up McCartney on the private farm landline and explained that everyone’s work was being severely disrupted by the thousands of queries they were receiving about his health.

After hearing for the first time that he was supposed to be dead, McCartney’s initial response to Derek was “Oh, I don’t agree with that.” In fact, Derek made multiple calls to McCartney, practically begging him to do something, but the soon-to-be former Beatle was having none of it. He was busy on the farm and didn’t have time for any of this nonsense.

As far as he was concerned, it was better to just Let It Be.

The other Beatles didn’t have too much to say about the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory, either. George Harrison later stated: “The rumours are too stupid to bother denying,” which of course just served as ammunition for the conspiracy theorists who noted that Harrison refused to deny anything. Meanwhile, John Lennon gave a brief interview to a guy who worked for the very same WKNR-FM radio station that had first discussed the backwards lyrics theory on air. He seemed largely bemused by the whole thing.

He said: “What did we do, stuff him and shave him? How could we do it? I don’t understand what it’s all about.” John Lennon would take a slightly less jovial view on the matter in the years to follow.

I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party

Paul McCartney eventually bowed to the pressure being piled on him by the press manager Derek Taylor who by now was tearing his hair out in frustration. In late October 1969, McCartney gave a few brief statements to the BBC and the press which attempted to quash the rumours once and for all. Using the often misquoted line from writer Mark Twain – who once found himself reading his own obituary in the press – McCartney responded with: “Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

(The actual Mark Twain quote is “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” but let’s not split hairs, it’s close enough.) McCartney later expanded on this a little bit by saying “If the conclusion you reach is that I’m dead, then you’re wrong, because I’m alive and living in Scotland.” But these statements still weren’t cutting it with the conspiracy theorists.

After all, most press statements are unlikely to have really been written by the person to which they’re attributed. These words could just have been put together by Derek Taylor in a bid to cut down on the number of reporters and fans hounding him every day.

What we really needed to see was photographic evidence of Paul and Linda down on the farm, along with maybe a major in-depth interview. Or at least that’s the conclusion reached by ‘Life’ magazine when they despatched reporter Dorothy Bacon and photographer Terence Spencer to sneak onto the farm unannounced and do just that. This wasn’t going to be easy, though.

The only way of gaining access to the wildly remote McCartney farm was through a neighbouring farm belonging to a guy called Ian McDougall. But Farmer McDougall was very much on Team McCartney, and he had been asked to ward off any nosy reporters. Dorothy Bacon and Terence Spencer were to discover this for themselves when they arrived at McDougall’s farm and were gruffly told to piss right off.

The reporter and the photographer retreated in defeat to a local pub in Campbeltown where they overheard some of the locals arranging to meet up in church the following Sunday morning at 11 am. Figuring that Farmer McDougall might also be likely to join this holy throng, they returned to his farm the following morning to find that nobody was around, allowing them to tiptoe through to the McCartney farm. But now they had another problem to deal with.

When Paul McCartney first caught sight of the duo arriving on his property – with Terence Spencer already snapping away with his camera - he was far from happy as you might reasonably expect. In fact, he charged at Terence Spencer with flailing fists, and followed this up by throwing a bucket of kitchen slop all over the photographer. Taking the subtle hint, Dorothy Bacon and Terence Spencer made a hasty exit from the farm, but then McCartney had an unexpected change of heart, albeit one inspired by not entirely selfless reasons.

He realised that Terence Spencer now had photographs showing the Beatle attacking the photographer and throwing a bucket of kitchen slop all over him, which wasn’t exactly the kind of image that McCartney was attempting to cultivate. So he jumped into his Land Rover and caught up with the duo to strike a deal. McCartney would provide ‘Life’ magazine with a major cover story, a proper interview, and a whole collection of more appealing new photographs of life down on the farm, but only if Spencer surrendered the less appealing photographs involving fists and kitchen slop.

A deal was struck, and even though it may have been achieved by very dubious means, Spencer and Bacon had just secured a major scoop for ‘Life’ magazine. I bet Farmer McDougall was bloody livid, though.

The front cover of the November 9th issue of ‘Life’ magazine featured a scruffy and unshaven Paul McCartney who looked like he’d just been dragged out of bed, posing on the farm with wife Linda and children Heather and Mary, alongside the headline: “The Case of The Missing Beatle: Paul Is Still with Us!” The most fascinating thing about the accompanying story is that during the course of the interview, McCartney dropped a major bombshell which wasn’t followed up on at all by Bacon, Spencer, or ‘Life’ magazine. At one point, McCartney reveals: “The Beatles thing is over,” which served as shocking confirmation that the biggest band in the world were splitting up.

Yet, it was left to other publications to delve further into the breakup of The Beatles. ‘Life’ magazine just completely ignored this major news development because they were far too busy asking Paul McCartney if he was sure that he wasn’t dead. McCartney’s response to this was that he felt the rumours had only started because he hadn’t been in the press much recently, and he was seeking a quieter life with his new family.

He also quipped: “Do I look dead? I’m as fit as a fiddle. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.”

Following the publication of the article in ‘Life’ magazine, the rumours of McCartney’s death were finally laid to rest, in the mainstream media at least. But there were still plenty of people who were unwilling to let go of the idea. Even today, online forums are still furiously debating the size and shape of Paul McCartney’s ears.

One group of researchers are keeping themselves busy by conducting a Stylometric Analysis on just about every interview ever conducted by McCartney in a bid to determine whether his speech patterns changed following the death of the original and the arrival of the replacement Billy Shears. So far they’ve concluded that certain expressions and fillers used regularly in early McCartney interviews – such as “You know what I mean?” – seem to have dramatically fallen off the scale by the latter half of the 1960s. But this could just be a sign of growing confidence and maturity in McCartney’s language, innit?

Despite these pockets of people who still cling to the idea, I’m pretty sure that most rational observers are now of the firm opinion that Paul McCartney did not die in 1966, largely because there isn’t a scrap of compelling evidence to suggest that he did. But how on Earth could such a blatantly ridiculous hoax have ever taken flight in the first place? And could The Beatles just have been trolling us along?

Who Was the Walrus?

John Lennon appeared to get quite annoyed when he was still repeatedly getting asked about the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory over the next year or two, famously dismissing the whole thing as just “made-up bullshit.” There were probably a few good reasons why Lennon was feeling a bit grumpy in the immediate aftermath of the split of The Beatles. Lennon was the catalyst for the disbanding of the group, yet it was McCartney who had stolen his thunder by making the first public announcement of the split to ‘Life’ magazine.

Even though the magazine itself completely ignored this major revelation at the time, this still led to a long-held belief that it was McCartney’s decision to split up The Beatles. The four former members of the band were now hoping to shift media attention to their upcoming solo albums, but every time Lennon agreed to a press interview in which he hoped to promote his new work, he just kept getting asked about why his ex-bandmate wasn’t wearing any shoes on the ‘Abbey Road’ cover. Lennon also wearily dismissed the idea of any coded messages within the lyrics, as he grumbled: “I don’t know what Beatles records sound like backwards; I never play them backwards.”

That’s not entirely accurate, as we already know The Beatles had been one of the first groups to experiment with backmasking, a move which was apparently inspired by the time Lennon came home drunk from a party and accidentally played a Beatles track backwards.

But what about the idea of deliberately planting coded messages within lyrics played in the right direction? All four members of the band have always consistently denied doing any such thing, but there is a set of connected lyrics – scattered across two songs which are separated by a year – which even some of the more cynical listeners have concluded must surely be a direct reference to the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory. And it’s a story which begins with a walrus.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to even try and make any sense from the lyrics to the 1967 classic ‘I Am The Walrus’, a song notable for its insightful chorus: “I am the egg man/They are the egg men/I am the Walrus! /Goo goo g’joob.” Apparently written by Lennon during several LSD trips, the song was partially inspired by the Lewis Carrol poem ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’ although Lennon later lamented that he hadn’t realised the Walrus was the villain of the piece.

He later noted: “I thought, Oh shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said ‘I am the Carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?”

The purposefully nonsense lyrics about sitting on cornflakes and ‘Elementary penguins singing Hare Krishna’ were believed to be Lennon’s attempt to utterly confound the kind of people who were trying to find deep meanings buried within Beatles songs. He was just taking the piss. But the Walrus may be important, and one question still remained: Who was the Walrus?

Conspiracy theorists have observed that the walrus is considered to be a symbol of death in certain countries, and so could it be that Paul McCartney was meant to be the Walrus, and the whole song was pointing to his recent death? Well, you wouldn’t really think so. John Lennon wrote the song, it’s John Lennon who proudly sings “I Am The Walrus!”, and it’s even John Lennon dressed up as a walrus on the cover of the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ soundtrack on which the song is listed.

However, if you glance at the sleeve notes, it seems as if the rarely-used full title for the track is “I Am The Walrus (‘Oh No You’re Not!’ Said Little Nicola”). So what did this Little Nicola know about the Walrus that nobody else did?

Well, it was Lennon himself who appeared to give a direct answer for once a year later on the Beatles track ‘Glass Onion’. This song includes the intriguing verse: “I told you about the walrus and me, man/You know that we’re as close as can be, man/Well, here’s another clue for you all/The Walrus was Paul.”

Now some might say this is actually quite interesting. Not only does Lennon confirm that the animal associated with death represented Paul McCartney, he’s also serving up an explicit ‘clue’ which can’t just be put down to fans misinterpreting vague lyrics. He comes right out and says it: “Here’s another clue for you all/The Walrus was Paul.”

Even some of the harder-to-convince fans have pondered over whether this could count as the only genuine explicit reference to the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory to be found in Beatles lyrics. And this had led to speculation that The Beatles may have not only been playfully fanning the flames of the hoax, but may even have been entirely responsible for it in the first place. Could all this have just been a clever marketing ploy to generate press coverage and shift more Beatles records?

There are several points to consider here which suggest that this was probably not the case. To begin with, the track ‘Glass Onion’ was a strangely self-referential track which included nods to a whole raft of earlier Beatles songs including ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ ‘The Fool on The Hill’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’. In a similar vein to ‘I Am The Walrus’, the track is another attempt by Lennon to bewilder the fans who were seeking the answers to the meaning of life within Beatles songs.

But this wasn’t necessarily anything to do with the ‘Paul is Dead’ hoax. Fans had been searching for any kind of hidden clues and messages long before then. As Lennon himself later revealed: “I threw the line in—‘the Walrus was Paul’—just to confuse everybody a bit more.

It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul’. I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledygook about Sgt Pepper—play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.”

It’s also worth noting that ‘Glass Onion’ was recorded and released before the ‘Paul is Dead’ mania took hold in the US.

Oh, and one more thing. To the best of my knowledge, the walrus is not considered to be a symbol of death associated with any country. Whilst some fans insisted that ‘Walrus’ is the Greek word for ‘Corpse’, or that the animal is the Viking symbol of death or that it represents death in Scandinavian countries, it all just seems to be complete poppycock – on about the same level as the lyrics to a John Lennon song after he’s taken too many disco biscuits. I mean, what kind of a country would associate death with a walrus, anyway?

You might go for a raven or a black cat or a spider or something. But nobody’s going for the walrus.

John Lennon did make an indisputable reference to the hoax a few years later in 1971 on his solo track “How Do You Sleep?” which comes across as a pretty vitriolic attack against his former bandmate McCartney. Relations between the two ex-Beatles certainly seemed to have deteriorated a little since the split.

Throughout this track, Lennon ponders over how McCartney sleeps at night, suggests that he only ever wrote one good song, compares the rest of his stuff to bland muzak, and predicts that his pretty face won’t get him much further now. Perhaps it was decent of McCartney to rise above it rather than respond with a track called “At Least I Look Like I Take a Bath Now and Then.” Having said that, Lennon’s track was itself a supposed retaliation to what he perceived to be earlier personal digs at himself and Yoko on McCartney’s solo stuff.

But here’s one of the more intriguing lyrics near the beginning of Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ track: “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead/The one mistake you made was in your head.” Putting aside Lennon’s dodgy grammar for now, this is a clear reference to the ‘Paul is Dead’ hoax, but it’s interesting to note that Lennon condemns all the fans who subscribed to the theory as ‘freaks’.

Admittedly, it sounds as if he was in a foul mood when he was composing the song. But even so, it just doesn’t seem likely that the band themselves were involved in creating or fuelling the hoax. Between the four of them, The Beatles just seemed to find the whole thing either amusing, baffling, inconsequential, or mildly irritating.

And it’s really not like they ever needed to cook up a fiendish ploy to flog more records. They were The Beatles.

Whether the band planted hidden meanings of any other kind within their songs is up for debate. Plenty of other artists do it. I only recently discovered that the deeply enchanting 1982 hit ‘Land of Make Believe’ by frothy UK pop band Bucks Fizz is actually a heavily veiled attack on the policies of then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her government.

It’s never quite sounded the same since. But even if The Beatles were deliberately planting cryptic puzzles for listeners to solve, they would have been unlikely to admit it after the ‘Charles Manson Family’ murders of 1971. Nine murders were committed by the cult between 1969 and 1971, and their white supremacist leader Charles Manson claimed to have been influenced by lyrics on, wait for it, ‘The White Album’.

Manson felt that The Beatles were the four angels mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and that the band were speaking directly to him in coded lyrics which served as a warning of an impending race war. It’s easy to see why The Beatles may have been keen to distance themselves from the topic of potential hidden meanings in their lyrics at any point after this. But it’s still a pretty safe bet that the actual members of the band had nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘Paul is Dead’ hoax.

So then where exactly did the hoax originate? And could it have had something to do with the band’s management possibly attempting to cover up a very real and very dodgy incident involving Paul McCartney’s car?

The Long and Winding Road

Well over two years before the Detroit DJ Russ Gibb first started playing Beatles records backwards live on air in response to a mysterious caller, we can see the real roots of this story take shape in February 1967. ‘The Beatles Book Monthly’ was a relatively modest publication delivered exclusively to members of The Official Beatles Fan Club, and the 43rd edition included a short and largely unremarkable news story which noted the following: “Stories about The Beatles are always flying about Fleet Street. 7th January was very icy, with dangerous conditions on the M1 motorway linking London with the Midlands. Towards the end of the day, a rumour swept London that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on the M1. But of course there was absolutely no truth in it at all as The Beatles Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been home all day with his black Mini Cooper safely locked up in the garage.”

That’s all well and good, but it may not have been entirely true. In fact, it may have been a bit of a porky. According to the 2012 book ‘The Man Who Killed Paul McCartney’ by award-winning rock writer Jim Yoakum, Paul McCartney’s black Mini Cooper was certainly not locked up safely in his garage.

It had been completely wrecked in a genuine accident on the M1 motorway on the 7th of January 1967, just as the supposed ‘rumours’ had suggested. However, McCartney himself hadn’t been behind the wheel. It had all apparently started with a small gathering at Paul’s St John’s Woods home, a gathering which included no less than three members of The Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the late Brian Jones – along with trendy antiques dealer Robert Fraser, and his loyal Moroccan personal assistant Mohammed Chtaibi who tended to cop for all the shitty jobs – such as, say, moving any potential stashes of drugs around from party to party.

At some point, it was decided to move this particular party along to Mick Jagger’s place in Hertfordshire before it then moved on again to Keith Richards’s swanky mansion in Sussex. Even though there were now plenty of cars on McCartney’s drive, most of the party animals decided it would be a laugh if they all tried to squeeze in together in Mick Jagger’s Mini Cooper. All except Mohammed Chtaibi, of course.

He gets asked if he wouldn’t mind following them in McCartney’s black Mini Cooper. Not just any old black Mini Cooper, mind. He’s getting handed the keys to a car which is instantly recognizable as Paul McCartney’s, complete with oversized tyres, interior armchairs, a wet bar, and most likely a pair of fluffy vegetarian sausages hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Mohammed definitely was carrying a massive stash of drugs with him, as this has never been proven, and we only have respected author Jim Yoakum’s word that any of this ever really happened. But if there was such a massive stash of drugs floating around the place, it would clearly be problematic if it were found in a car containing three members of The Rolling Stones and a Beatle. Probably better to just leave it all with the Moroccan personal assistant.

That’s not likely to attract too many headlines.

If this was indeed the plan, then it went a bit pear-shaped when Mohammed Chtaibi lost sight of Mick Jagger’s Mini Cooper that he was supposed to be following, and then lost control of Paul McCartney’s Mini Cooper which he ended up smashing into a pylon. The car was written off, and Mohammed spent time in hospital with severe injuries. Some sources have alleged that Mohammed heroically dragged himself from the wreckage and dumped the drugs before returning to the wreckage and waiting for the emergency services to arrive.

And this still wasn’t enough to appease McCartney who just seemed quite annoyed that his beloved car had been wrecked. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, a crowd of people stood and stared for a while, as whispers began to swirl that this distinctively pimped-up vehicle belonged to Paul McCartney – and coincidentally, Mohammed Chtaibi even looked a little bit like him, too. The Beatles press office may have felt concerned that someone who looked a bit like McCartney had smashed up McCartney’s car whilst possibly or possibly not carrying a massive stash of illegal drugs.

So they fed the fan club publication with fake news which attempted to bury the whole story by suggesting that McCartney had been home all day, most likely sipping tea and munching on frosted buns whilst his car was locked up safely in the garage, and most definitely not wrapped around a pylon.

All went largely quiet until 17th September 1969 when 19-year-old student Tim Harper wrote a little piece for ‘The Times-Delphic’, a campus newspaper printed for Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Under the headline “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” the short article began: “Lately on campus, there has been much conjecturing on the present state of Beatle Paul McCartney.

An amazing series of photos and lyrics on the group’s albums point to a distinct possibility that McCartney may indeed be insane, freaked out or even dead.” Tim Harper admitted to never even owning a Beatles record himself, so he clearly wasn’t much of a fan. He later reckoned that he’d largely just been talking about it to one student in particular who later claimed that he’d heard the rumour from some anonymous local musician.

Harper was just writing a conjectural piece which was supposed to entertain his fellow students, and nothing more. But it was within this small campus newspaper that we first see in print the theories relating to the backwards lyrics on the ‘Revolution 9’ track, McCartney walking barefoot across the Abbey Road pedestrian crossing, and the supposed telephone number hiding in a reflection of the cover of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. It was also this small article which inspired Tom Zarski – possibly a student at the same university - to phone up Detroit DJ Russ Gibb and encourage him to play ‘Revolution 9’ backwards on air.

And just two days later, it was this radio broadcast which encouraged a guy called Fred LaBour to write an article for The Michigan Daily paper, which is where things got really wild.

Fred LaBour is better known these days – apparently – as the Grammy-Award-winning frontman for comedy western group Riders In The Sky, in which he performs under the stage name of Too Slim. But back in 1969, Too Slim was more interested in putting together words for The Michigan Daily, and after enjoying the infamous radio broadcast with DJ Russ Gibb, he decided to write a satirical review of the recent Beatles album ‘Abbey Road’ alongside the dramatic headline “McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought To Light!” The keyword here is ‘satirical.’

Fred LaBour was just arsing around, and this is kind of obvious when you read the whole article which concludes with the words “The Beatles are building a mighty church, and when you emerge from it, you will be laughing, for Paul is the Sun of God.” Whilst borrowing some of the ideas from the earlier Drake University student newspaper, Fred LaBour also makes up a lot of his own theories. The story of what may have happened with Mohammed Chtaibi’s car accident hadn’t been revealed yet, so LaBour was quite possibly inspired by the ‘rumours’ of McCartney’s car crash printed in the official fan club magazine when he came up with the idea of The Beatle getting killed in his Aston Martin.

LaBour respectfully observed that “The top of his head was sheared off. He was deader than a doornail.” It was also LaBour’s wacky imagination that first dreamed up the theories relating to the walrus being a symbol associated with death, the OPD armband, and most significantly of all, the idea that McCartney was replaced by a Scottish orphan called Billy Shears Campbell who was of course entirely fictional.

This edition of The Michigan Daily sparked major media attention and TV news coverage after the paper sold out several print runs. But it was always meant to be satire. Very shortly afterwards, Fred LaBour repeatedly tried to make it clear that he’d just made up everything about the car crash and Billy Shears, but not everyone was listening.

In fact, LaBour was invited to appear on a US TV special just a couple of weeks later in which celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey investigated the ‘evidence’ of the theory whilst cross-examining so-called experts and witnesses. Just before the cameras started rolling, a confused Fred LaBour tried to tell the lawyer that the whole thing was just meant to be a joke, but F.

Lee Bailey responded with: “Well, we have an hour of television to fill; you’re going to have to go along with this.” This seemed to be the attitude adopted by US TV networks and newspapers over the next few weeks, as students continued to rifle through their collections of Beatles records to find out what happened when you played ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ backwards whilst draping a dish towel over your head and snorting a bucket of popping candy.

The Fundamental Absurdity

Of course, the whole theory was fundamentally preposterous on about 64 different levels. Here’s the thing about The Beatles and why I would go along with the opinion that they were easily the greatest band in the world, quite some distance above Kajagoogoo in second place: They were staggeringly prolific, releasing an incredible catalogue of world-changing material during the decade they were together, a far cry from the bigger bands of today who tend to take several years vacation in-between albums to rest their achy heads. And then there’s what I like to call The George Harrison Factor.

George Harrison is one of the greatest songwriters of all time and is very probably my favourite Beatle. But it’s quite astonishing to think that one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived spent a decade fighting hard to get just one or two of his own songs included on an album, because he just happened to be in the same band as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles were no ordinary band, and Paul McCartney was no ordinary musician.

The idea that you could just replace McCartney with somebody who looked almost exactly like him (apart from the ears, obviously), talked like him, sang like him, and shared exactly the same monumental musical and songwriting talents as the original, is clearly absurd. It’s almost as ridiculous as saying that you could just replace Justin Bieber with a ham and pickle sandwich, and nobody would ever notice.

And how would so many people in the know have realistically been able to cover-up the death of a Beatle? Would the police, medics, family members, friends, business acquaintances, and hundreds of others all have quite happily agreed to participate in the scandal and remain tight-lipped for fifty years on the grounds that the truth might have affected the sales of the next Beatles album? Maybe MI5 threatened them all into silence, but I’m pretty sure that MI5 had more important things to deal with than deviously replacing a dead member of a pop band with the winner of a Paul McCartney lookalike competition, just in case some of the fans got upset.

Even if the surviving members of The Beatles had somehow helped to pull off this frankly impossible deception, why would they then decide to leave such a long list of clues peppered throughout their subsequent albums? Proponents of the theory have always suggested that it’s because they felt a bit guilty afterwards, but in that case, you surely reach a decision about whether to come clean or not. I mean, how would that conversation even pan out?

GEORGE HARRISON: “I’m wracked with guilt over our nefarious and unprincipled deception. I suggest that we furnish our fans with the complete truth forthwith.”

JOHN LENNON: “Nah, I’ve got a better idea! Let’s make it so that if you play one of our songs backwards at 78rpm, you hear vague words which can be interpreted in a million different ways! Peace and love!”

GEORGE HARRISON: “Er…ok then, let’s do that if you prefer.”

RINGO STARR: “Somebody’s put mustard on this bacon sandwich. What am I supposed to do with that?

There’s also the small matter that on the day Paul McCartney was supposed to have been killed in a car crash after storming out of the Abbey Road studio – 9th November 1966 – the Beatle was known to be out of the country, enjoying a holiday in Kenya with his then partner Jane Asher. And then there’s the much bigger matter that many of the finer details first emerged from a satirical article written by Fred LaBour who freely admits to just making the whole thing up for a laugh. A satirical article which may have been inspired by a chain of events including a news story in the Beatles fan club magazine which potentially covered up a real incident involving McCartney’s car, a piece in a campus student newspaper written for entertainment value with zero credible sources, and a radio broadcast in which the DJ got a bit over-excited when he started playing records backwards.

A satirical article which was taken way too seriously at the time by segments of the US youth who had grown suspicious of pretty much everything during the ongoing controversial Vietnam war, alongside the conspiracy rumours emerging around the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. This was a perfectly disenchanted anddistrustful environment in which even the craziest of conspiracy theories could still gather steam, as some Beatles fans became determined to twist and bend innocent imagery and lyrical flourishes into a shape that would fit their own helter skelter narrative. And it was a theory which was allowed to escalate even further when McCartney effectively went incommunicado to quietly reflect on the genuine secret that The Beatles were no more.

Golden Slumber As I watched an 80-year-old genius play a triumphant set at Glastonbury 2022, I got the impression that he’s not too bothered anymore about being falsely reported dead in the 1960s. He later admitted that it did bother him for a while, and he even began to feel a bit paranoid when every fan who ever greeted him was clearly checking out the size of his ears and the shape of his jawline. He now puts it all down to fans taking far too many drugs and searching for answers in the wrong places.

But it’s clear that he made his piped peace with the theory a very long time ago. During his 1993 world tour, he released an accompanying live album cheekily entitled ‘Paul is Live’ which featured a recreation of the original ‘Abbey Road’ cover, now starring an older McCartney getting dragged across the very same pedestrian crossing by his sheepdog. In this new version, McCartney is wearing shoes, he’s changed his step by putting his left foot forward, and he’s replaced the cigarette with the dog leash which he’s holding in his dominant left hand.

The registration plate of the original Volkswagen Beetle has also been updated to read “51 IS”, a reference to McCartney’s living status and age at the time in 1993, although I don’t think he’s counting his time in the womb. It’s a relief that McCartney is still making the effort to keep reassuring us all that he never died and that he’s still very much alive today. But of course the problem here is that the guy is most likely not immortal, and you may be watching this video after the sadly inevitable has taken place.

In which case, I’d like to pay tribute to yesterday’s amazing catalogue of material that we were fortunate enough to enjoy from Paul McCartney and Billy Shears. Turn us on, dead men. Key Takeaways Paul McCartney performed at Glastonbury Festival in 2022, addressing rumors of his death from the 1960s.,The ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory gained traction in the US, fueled by clues in Beatles’ lyrics and album covers.,McCartney’s alleged death was supposedly covered up by the Beatles and MI5 to avoid fan hysteria.,The theory was largely debunked by McCartney’s public appearances and statements, including a Life magazine interview.,The hoax likely originated from a satirical article and was amplified by the distrustful environment of the 1960s.

Frequently Asked Questions What is the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory? The ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory suggests that the original Paul McCartney of The Beatles died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike named William Shears Campbell, who was later known as Billy Shears. What event sparked the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory?

The theory gained significant attention after a radio broadcast on WKNR-FM in Detroit on October 12, 1969, where DJ Russ Gibb played the Beatles’ track ‘Revolution 9’ backwards, revealing what sounded like the words ‘Turn me on, dead man.’ What are some of the clues cited in the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory? Clues include the backwards lyrics in ‘Revolution 9,’ the album cover of ‘Sgt.

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ featuring a funeral-like gathering, and the ‘Abbey Road’ cover where McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the other Beatles. What was the alleged cause of Paul McCartney’s death according to the conspiracy theory? According to the theory, Paul McCartney died in a car crash on November 9, 1966, after storming out of the Abbey Road studio following an argument with his bandmates.

Who was supposed to have replaced Paul McCartney? The theory suggests that Paul McCartney was replaced by a Scottish orphan named William Shears Campbell, who later became known as Billy Shears. How did The Beatles respond to the ‘Paul is Dead’ rumors?

The Beatles generally dismissed the rumors as absurd. Paul McCartney himself addressed the rumors in a 1969 interview with ‘Life’ magazine, stating that he was alive and living in Scotland. What role did the media play in the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory?

The media, particularly in the US, played a significant role in spreading the theory. Articles and TV specials were dedicated to investigating the rumors, which helped to fuel the conspiracy. What was the significance of the ‘Abbey Road’ album cover in the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory?

The ‘Abbey Road’ cover was interpreted as a funeral procession, with John Lennon as the holy figure, Ringo Starr as the undertaker, George Harrison as the gravedigger, and Paul McCartney as the corpse. How did Paul McCartney’s appearance change during the 1960s? Paul McCartney’s appearance changed significantly during the 1960s, growing a beard and adopting a more laid-back look, which some fans interpreted as evidence of a replacement.

What was the impact of the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory on The Beatles’ career? The theory had a significant impact on The Beatles’ career, generating extensive media coverage and speculation. It also coincided with the band’s decision to stop touring and focus on studio work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory?

The ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory suggests that the original Paul McCartney of The Beatles died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike named William Shears Campbell, who was later known as Billy Shears.

What event sparked the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory?

The theory gained significant attention after a radio broadcast on WKNR-FM in Detroit on October 12, 1969, where DJ Russ Gibb played the Beatles’ track ‘Revolution 9’ backwards, revealing what sounded like the words ‘Turn me on, dead man.‘

What are some of the clues cited in the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory?

Clues include the backwards lyrics in ‘Revolution 9,’ the album cover of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ featuring a funeral-like gathering, and the ‘Abbey Road’ cover where McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the other Beatles.

What was the alleged cause of Paul McCartney’s death according to the conspiracy theory?

According to the theory, Paul McCartney died in a car crash on November 9, 1966, after storming out of the Abbey Road studio following an argument with his bandmates.

Who was supposed to have replaced Paul McCartney?

The theory suggests that Paul McCartney was replaced by a Scottish orphan named William Shears Campbell, who later became known as Billy Shears.

How did The Beatles respond to the ‘Paul is Dead’ rumors?

The Beatles generally dismissed the rumors as absurd. Paul McCartney himself addressed the rumors in a 1969 interview with ‘Life’ magazine, stating that he was alive and living in Scotland.

What role did the media play in the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory?

The media, particularly in the US, played a significant role in spreading the theory. Articles and TV specials were dedicated to investigating the rumors, which helped to fuel the conspiracy.

What was the significance of the ‘Abbey Road’ album cover in the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory?

The ‘Abbey Road’ cover was interpreted as a funeral procession, with John Lennon as the holy figure, Ringo Starr as the undertaker, George Harrison as the gravedigger, and Paul McCartney as the corpse.

How did Paul McCartney’s appearance change during the 1960s?

Paul McCartney’s appearance changed significantly during the 1960s, growing a beard and adopting a more laid-back look, which some fans interpreted as evidence of a replacement.

What was the impact of the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory on The Beatles’ career?

The theory had a significant impact on The Beatles’ career, generating extensive media coverage and speculation. It also coincided with the band’s decision to stop touring and focus on studio work.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Did the Real Paul McCartney Die in 1966?
• Hero image source by Raboe001 / openverse, by-sa.