Heather and Paul - The rules of engagement...

...or You Never Give Me Your Money

The rules are:

You do not mess with a Beatle and get out alive.
The Beatle vigilantes will get you even if the law won’t – as John's hapless killer Mark Chapman will tell you. When that Parole that keeps getting knocked back finally comes through, he won’t be free to dance off into the sunset, Shawshank Redemption style. He’ll be picked off by some some Mojo-reading sniper of a similar vintage, who owns one of five remaining complete sets of fibreglass Beatles miniatures (with optional Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe). Deep down Mark Chapman knows that Prison is his Friend if he wants to stay alive – but he probably doesn’t any more. I’ll wager the weight of being one of the only males to have seriously messed with a Beatle (Brian Epstein aside) has been too much to bear.

If you’re a woman, you don’t mess with a Beatle, even if you're actually really nice to him.*
Our Heather obviously hasn’t been boning up on her history of Beatle women. The facts are, even those women who forged and sustained lasting, loving relationships with the Beatles were either shunned, treated with suspicion or, at best, ignored by the (largely male after 1965) Beatle fanbase until sheer endurance gained them a tacit acceptance.

Exhibit A: Yoko Ono
Yoko and John fucken loved each other. The overwhelming weight of evidence that I have ever sighted attests to this. In 14 years they spent more time together than some married couples manage in 40. If we look at her in cold blood and now that the dust has settled, Yoko never really did anything to stir serious rancour amongst Beatle fans except to 1) be Japanese and 2) “break up the Beatles”. But she was still despised for a long time, and probably still is by some idiots out there.

Exhibit B: Saint Linda Mccartney
Let’s not forget that Yoko’s blonde counterpart Linda was, if we travel back down the years, at one point accused of exactly the same things as Yoko (of course, she fared better not being Japanese). Perhaps finding real love and not having random groupie muses and teenage brides (sorry Cyn, I actually liked you) as pegs on which to hang the meaningless sentiment of their lyrics (as a counterpoint to the brilliance of their music) simply made the Beatles dull – cf. John’s later, immensely tedious ‘Yoko and Sean are the only things I can sing about’ lexicon – but you can hardly accuse Yoko (or Linda) of breaking up the Beatles. Nevertheless, angry male fans (and a few jilted girls) did.

Exhibit C: Jane Asher, Cyn, Maureen, Patti Boyd et al
Used as props in some films, then largely ignored, shunned, envied, ignored and shunned. By the Beatle fanbase, if not the boys themselves.

Anyway, people got used to Yoko's squawky attempts at angular early 80s synth pop and role as professional widow as surely as they had grown accustomed to Linda and her daggy Wings offsider schtick, and vigourous vegetarianism. Heather's stint, on the other hand, has lasted a nanosecond compared to Yoko's and Linda's. Nobody knows her and she clearly knows nothing about what she’s got herself into. Like how to handle a national treasure. Before all these sensational claims she made the famously self-deluded complaint that the Last Living Beatle with any Talent “got more attention than her”. Poor Heather simply couldn’t figure it out. He is in the only field of endeavour where, in my books at least, it is acceptable to be hideously wealthy. Let me qualify that. Pink is not in Macca’s ‘field of endeavour’. Peter Andre is not even in the park over the road. The reason I don’t begrudge Macca his millions and squillions where I’d slap Rupert Murdoch for his is that Macca has made music that people are fiercely, violently protective of, and he’s got to people in a way that is deeply personal but also unifyingly powerful. And his influence reverberates through the generations. Music fans don’t forget that in a hurry, and they don’t love someone who tries to destroy that….even if she might be telling the truth**. And that's why we love and forgive all music's other ratbags, regardless of what they might have done to someone we don't know.

The talentless Heather would do well to remember that when she gets her lonely, bitter billion out of someone who’s made more people happy than she ever will.



*While I obviously don't subscribe to of the misogynistic stupidity of past Beatle fans described here, I don’t give a fuck if I sound like the ultimate Beatles dork. I am unashamedly so. My other listening credentials round me out for any of you “too hip to like the Beatles” suckers.

**Next Post – why I don’t think she is telling the truth, and she’s making a mockery of real domestic violence situations… and if she is, and I’m horribly wrong, well, a billion ought to just about make up for having me slander her. Paul isn't a ratbag. As one English blogger put it 'it's time to take out the trash, Paul!'

Ruminating on all the discussions on a Greer theme on the interweb of late, my wise, dear, ridiculously gorgeous Chris, one of the few men who you could really call a feminist, said to me yesterday (of the expectations some women have of men and their confusion of this with true equality):

"Why would you want to be treated like a princess? They die in car accidents."

I have discussed this at length with friends of mine. We want to be treated like equal, intelligent human beings. Not princesses.

I'm sick of looking at my last post. It's too curmudgeonly for this beautiful spring day.

Instead I'm going to plot out my immediate future.

Tonight I'm going to finish writing a song that popped into my head yesterday, writing itself as it went. Unfortunately I went to one of those amazing back cracking Chinese masseurs halfway through the song's evolution and promptly fell asleep. When I awoke the song was gone. I felt like I'd hurled it like a precious diamond ring into a swamp. That night I watched Idol with Chris and Shaun and that rinsed away any trace of original song material from my tired, cranky brain. This morning I sauntered into work with the tune magically playing in my head on repeat! I will set it down tonight.

I am going to write a screenplay for my darling dollface to direct in his inimitable style.

I am going to write a diary about why I'm happy as a lark even though life has been very difficult of late.

I am going to plan my epic adventure to NZ with Chris in December.

At the very least, I'm going to start thinking about doing some of these things in the next few sunny weeks.