Being Paul McCartney’s younger brother can’t be easy. Imagine gathering around that Christmas Day dining table and hearing, “Well, it’s been a good year for Paul; it looks like he has actually really changed the shape of global cultural history this time out and may genuinely be bigger than Jesus, so well done there…” Needless to say, life’s not a competition, but that’s a legacy that proves hard to size up to.
However, Peter McCartney, known professionally as Mike McGear, had one glorious moment in the sun when he joyously usurped his brother’s constant torrent of one-upmanship with, well, with essentially a sort of prog-rock adult nursery rhyme. As a member of the comedy group The Scaffold, McGear inexplicably enjoyed enormous success in 1968 with the track ‘Lily the Pink’, proving melody runs in the blood.
The song took the top spot in the UK singles chart for a whopping four weeks over Christmas and celebrated a similar feat in Australia and Ireland, where it was also number one. In the rest of Europe, people also cared for it, ensuring that it even outsold some of The Beatles’ less commercially successful singles. Moreover, the melody is still chanted today on football terraces all over the continent.
This left young Mike delighted; he’d eclipsed his brother only one Christmas after the bastard had beaten him with Sgt. Pepper. In fact, it still delights him to this day. As he told Far Out: “As a northern working class lad, actually getting to the hallowed spot of number one in the charts and Top of the Pops in 1968 with ‘Lily the Pink’ was unbelievable, but outselling the best group in the world with one of the members happening to be your elder brother was even better!”
The younger brother, who published Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, which he says showcases “what actually happened in the 1960s”, then modestly continued: “But I didn’t rub it in, as luckily, the Beatles went on to have one or two (hundred) number ones after me and Scaffold… by the way, whatever happened to them?” Well, they called it a day in 1977, having rubbed shoulders with the pre-fame session musicians of Elton John, Jack Bruce and Graham Nash.
As for the track that bettered The Beatles, it’s based on the old folk song ‘The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham’, but transposed over the terrace-chanted melody is a whimsical psalm about a miraculous super-drug invented by the esteemed Lily the Pink, one that cures a weak appetite by inducing morbid obesity and remedies freckles by causing a sex change. It is perhaps too much of a stretch to say that the song pronounces some sort of Big Pharma satire based on the simple joviality of its production, but there is some form of prescience in the mix all the same.
At the time when The Beatles first made it big, McGear had been working as an apprentice hairdresser. As tales from his big brother reached home, he must have been dazzled by the bright lights and sought to grasp his own slice of the pie. Naturally, he thought the best way to do so was to join a local comedy-poetry-music group, which, as we all know, is the instant fast-track vehicle to stardom.
Aside from the smashing Christmas number one of ‘Lily the Pink’, McGear also scored a number of other hits with The Scaffold, including ‘Thank U Very Much’ and ‘Gin Gan Goolie’. The Scaffold merged into Grimm after they added several other comedic poets to their line-up, but tensions mounted, as is so often the case in volatile singing comedic poetry troupes, as a few too many cooks began to stir the hilarious broth, and McGear quit the band. Thereafter, he released a few solo singles, collaborated with Wings and eventually embarked on a photography career. Now, the true renaissance man of the McCartney family is also writing books.
The reason the star opted for a pseudonym was because he didn’t want people to think he was clinging to his brother’s creative coattails, which naturally they would’ve, considering the similar introspective and profoundly poignant style that they were both propagating. Interestingly, the word ‘Gear’ was a Liverpudlian equivalent of ‘Fab’ at the time; thus, the moniker he chose was in some way a nod to his brethren. Only time will tell which of the McCartney family members wins the artistic battle in the history books, but my money’s on Mike and his fantastic tale of a man who uses his sticky-out ears to fly. It’s the song McCartney wishes he had written, and Scaffold are the band The Beatles could’ve been.
