how Paul McCartney's solo travels after the end of the Beatles' final tour inspired the title track and gave Sgt. Pepper its famous "alter ego" concept
Macca "So I had a couple of pairs of glasses made with clear lenses, which just made me look a bit different. I put a long blue overcoat on and slicked my hair back with Vaseline and just wandered around and of course nobody recognized me at all. It was good, it was quite liberating for me." "I was a lonely little poet on the road with my car," he later recalled.
"I'm just looking for something I enjoy doing," he told the Sunday Times that September. "There's no hurry. I have the time and the money." For a while he followed his songwriting partner into the cinematic realm by seeking offers to compose a soundtrack. He was ultimately hired to provide music for a dramatic comedy, The Family Way, though the work did little to inspire his creativity.
His status as the sole London-based Beatle made him a familiar face at gallery openings, theatrical events, experimental music seminars and avant-garde freak-outs, but the barrage of external stimuli caused him to turn inward. As a youth in Liverpool he relished his solitary moments, sitting on a park bench or the top deck of a bus, playing the detached observer while scribbling in his notebook. He was far too famous to ever indulge in such simple pleasures again, but perhaps a solo road trip – with some extra precautions – would clear his head.
On November 6th, McCartney drove his new dark-green Aston Martin DB6 to Lydd Airport in Kent, where it was loaded into the bay of a Silver City Airways superfreighter. McCartney himself relaxed in the 20-seat passenger area for the duration of the plane-ferry's brief flight to Le Touquet, France.
After clearing customs, he disguised his world-famous face with a false mustache specially made by Wig Creations, who had worked with the Beatles on the set of A Hard Day's Night. "They measure you and match the color of your hair, so it was like a genuine moustache with real glue," he told biographer Barry Miles in Many Years From Now.
McCartney shed the weighty cloak of superstardom and assumed the identity of an anonymous everyman. "I was a lonely little poet on the road with my car," he later recalled.
, much of his vacation was painfully ordinarily. "I'd cruise, find a hotel and park. ... I'd walk around the town and then in the evening go down to dinner, sit on my own at the table, at the height of all this Beatle thing, to balance the high-key pressure. Having a holiday and also not be recognized. And re-taste anonymity."
"We were fed up with being the Beatles," he said. "We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want any more." They yearned to be accepted as artists, but most saw them as the same cuddly act they'd known for all these years.
