THE DEATH AND OCCULT REBIRTH OF PAUL McCARTNEY. It was Thursday 18th April 1963 and the Beatles were to appear at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall for BBC radio along with other groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers and the singer Shane Fenton (later to become Alvin Stardust). The show was to be called Swinging Sound 63. Reviewing that concert for the magazine Radio Times was to be a stunning redhead called Jane Asher who was three weeks short of her 17th birthday. She was already famous having been a child actress who had played Alice in Through the Looking Glass and had featured on a pop panellist show called Juke Box Jury, her sister had been a regular actress on a radio show called Mrs Dale’s Diary. Her elder brother Peter was later to form one half of the singing duo Peter and Gordon whose McCartney creation A World Without Love was to reach number 1 in US Billboard charts in June 1964. Unimpressed with most of the acts at the Swinging Sound 63, when the Beatles arrived on stage at the Royal Albert Hall Jane remarked - “Now these I could scream for”. So she met the four of them back stage and all four flirted with her. She later accompanied Shane Fenton to the Chelsea flat of New Musical Express Journalist Chris Hutchins and the ‘Fab Four’ followed them. John, in his usual boorish manner, was making lewd suggestions to Jane when Paul came in and rescued her, so began an interesting romance that was to change the lives of all of the Beatles. Jane’s mother Margaret was an aristocrat and a member of the Eliot family whose family seat was Port Eliot - the Earl of St Germans. She was a cousin of the poet T S Eliot. Margaret Asher was a professional musician, an oboist who had taught George Martin, the Beatles EMI Parlophone record producer, at the Guildhall School of Music. Jane had inherited her spectacular red hair from her mother. Jane Asher's father was Dr Richard Asher. He was the senior physician responsible for the mental observation ward at the Central Middlesex Hospital. Doctor Asher wrote several articles for the prestigious Medical journal The Lancet. One was called: RESPECTABLE HYPNOSIS (1956) One of Dr Richard Asher's students was Oliver Sacks. Sacks wrote the book ‘Awakenings’ that became a movie starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams who played Sacks in the movie. Sacks also wrote the book: - MUSICOPHILIA: Tales of Music and the Brain. The Asher’s lived at 57 Wimpole Street, in Marylebone and Paul had moved in to live with his new girlfriend and her parents and siblings. This was the heart of the senior medical professions in the UK. Wimpole Street was part of the London Harley St medical complex. Perhaps more significantly for our story that we shall see later No17 Wimpole Mews (the next street to the east between Wimpole Street and the famous Harley Street) was at this time the home and practice of Steven Ward an English osteopath and artist who was one of the central figures in the 1963 Profumo affair which eventually brought down the UK Harold Macmillan Government. It is thought that Steven Ward, a bisexual, had recommended the Parlophone label to the Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Whilst at 57 Wimpole street Paul McCartney wrote many songs including I’m Looking Through You’ (written for Jane who had played Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass) and there he also wrote probably Paul’s most significant opus YESTERDAY. Now Paul McCartney has always maintained that the entire song Yesterday was in his head when he awoke and was concerned that he had unwittingly plagiarised the song. He even went to Alma Cogan, a famous singer at the time known as the girl with the giggle in her voice, and who was allegedly having an affair with John at the time, and asked her if she knew the song. Now just to recap here Paul was living with an accomplished musician who had taught Beatles producer George Martin all he knew and a man who had an experimental interest in hypnosis and a teacher of a man who would write: MUSICOPHILIA: Tales of Music and the Brain which has a chapter entitled Come Together. It all now becomes more significant in the John Lennon song on his Imagine album recorded after the Beatles had split – Entitled: HOW DO YOU SLEEP - It goes So Sgt Pepper took you by surprise You’d better see right through that mother’s eyes2 Those freaks was right when they said you was dead2 The one mistake you made was in your head You live with straights who tell you, you was king Jump when your momma tell you anything. The only thing you done was YESTERDAY And since you've gone you're just another day How do you sleep? How do you sleep at night? The suggestion here is that Paul McCartney may well have become a Manchurian Candidate (someone who is brainwashed) whilst at the Asher’s home. The Beatles eventually recorded She Loves You on the 1st July 19633 at Abbey Road 2.4 The George Martin says that Paul wrote Yesterday in the George V Hotel in Paris in January 1964 whilst they were writing ‘A Hard Days Night’. If true this means that the most covered record in history was left off of two Beatles albums. An unlikely scenario. 2 Paul’s mother had died of breast cancer when Paul was 11 and was possibly used as a hypnotic trigger. 3 The story is that they both wrote She Loves You in the Turks Hotel in Newcastle whilst doing a gig in the Majestic Ballroom on 26th June 1963. Paul says (repeated in Barry Miles’ book Many Years From Now,) that he got the inspiration from Forget Him by Bobby Rydell who, he said, was in the UK charts at the time. Forget Him was on an album in 63 and was never in the UK charts as a single until January 1964. The English Composer Tony Hatch wrote the song. A later version says they used the Rydell song Swinging School probably because it has Yeah Yeah Yeah in it. But is nothing like She Loves You. music score for She Loves You was undoubtedly written at 57 Wimpole Street. John and Paul admitted that they both wrote The Beatles’ first number one in America I Wanna Hold your Hand in the cellar at 57 Wimpole Street, and they also wrote some other of the Beatles greatest hits at the Asher’s home, perhaps with the help of Margaret Asher. If you think I have made a jump in logic here in the interests of brevity if I may let me introduce a statement from an interview made in the sixties, All we know is that she was a model: Anonymous said...”The police and authorities knew already in the early 60's that drugs would be a major problem in the near future. They were preparing for it, but it went wrong somewhere, they weren't able to stem the tide………. I used to model for Harley Street specialists training med-students at this time, starting in '58 as a 12 year-old. The police, led by top-cops Joe Simpson and Shirley Becke, used to supply Profs Emanuel Miller (father of Jonathon Miller) and Richard Asher with the drugs they wanted to study, and used me as a guinea-pig! There would be several off-duty coppers present to see the result and work out how to deal with an acid-head.” So the father of Paul’s girlfriend Dr Richard Asher was experimenting with ACID on patients under the watchful eye of the Metropolitan Police. Dr Richard Asher supposedly committed suicide in April 1969. He left no note. On the left is a young Jane Asher starring in Alice Through the Looking Glass which was produced by Jonathon Miller son of Emanuel Miller. It should be noted that in 1963 LSD was not illegal in either the US or the UK.1 Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (ACID) was first patented in 1947. It is a hallucinogenic drug that is derived originally from Ergot; a fungus found growing wild on rye and other grasses. It was first discovered in 1938 by a research chemist, Albert Hofmann, while working to produce new medicines. George Harrison recalls that John, Cynthia (John’s first wife), George and Pattie (George’s wife he met whilst filming Hard Day’s Night) had been at a dinner party of 4 She Loves You was the best selling single of all time in the UK until surpassed by Mull of Kintyre which still remains the UK's best-selling completely non-charity single that was only released once. 1 LSD was banned in California in 1966 and in the UK as late as 1973. Pattie’s dentist. He put LSD into their coffee and they all described their experience as mind expanding as they had left the dentist’s home and went to the Ad Lib Club. Paul did not use LSD (officially) at this point but was encouraged to do so by the others. George Harrison stated later that he was not aware that Paul had ever taken LSD until he admitted it to a journalist. John had told Paul that LSD was like Alice Adventures through the Looking Glass a book that they both were fond of. So they saw the world ‘Through a Looking Glass’.