Love and Let Die by John Higgs

Author:John Higgs [Higgs, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399600187
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 2022-09-15T23:00:00+00:00

1973: CHRISTOPHER LEE (1922–2015)

On 28 October 1973 the actor Christopher Lee joined a strange and unlikely group of entertainers outside a sixteenth-century Tudor mansion in Hounslow, west London, for a night shoot. Here Lee and several others posed with Paul and Linda McCartney as they shot the cover of the Wings album Band on the Run.

Just over a week later, filming began on the Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, in which Lee starred as the title character, the triple-nippled upper-class assassin Scaramanga. Lee played an evil mirror of Bond – an English killer every bit as suave and charming as 007, but who is deemed a villain because he kills for money instead of Queen and country. The character was named after a pupil at Eton that Ian Fleming had particularly disliked.

Alongside Lee on the cover were the three members of Wings – Paul, Linda and Denny Laine – plus the boxer John Conteh, the talk-show host Michael Parkinson, the actor James Coburn, and the singer Kenny Lynch, who shared the bill with the Beatles on a number of their early theatre shows and was the first person to cover a Lennon–McCartney song. To contemporary eyes, the cover image now seems far darker than it did in the 1970s, because the final member of the cast was the celebrity chef, Liberal Member of Parliament and – if multiple credible posthumous allegations are to be believed – serial child abuser Clement Freud.

It seemed then, as it does now, to be an unlikely group of 1970s celebrities. Whatever the logic Paul used when he chose those particular people, it was noticeably different from that which selected the collection of heroes and icons on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper. He clearly wasn’t using this image to appeal to youth culture or to bring him cultural hipness. If he was hoping to bypass the critics and appeal directly to a mainstream, slightly older record-buying audience, then the choice of faces on the cover proved to be very successful. This was the album that put McCartney back on track towards the extraordinary commercial success he achieved in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Dressed in black suits, the group posed as escaping prisoners caught in the glare of a security spotlight. The shoot required darkness, so McCartney threw a party for his models beforehand, to kill the time until night had fallen. Only the photographer Clive Arrowsmith remained sober. As he later recalled, ‘I was the only one there who wasn’t wasted, I was too scared. This was my first really big job.’

Perhaps because of McCartney’s then-toxic critical reputation, it was a while before people recognised the record’s quality. The album took eight months to reach number one in the UK, during which time Lee completed his portrayal of his iconic Bond villain. The film took him around the world, with shoots in England, Bangkok, Thailand and the then remote island of Ko Khao Phing Kan. This has since become a popular tourist attraction and is now called James Bond Island.

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