Stephers’ post from 2022, Confessions of an Engineered Nanoparticle,  is heating up again, so that gives me time to relax and do what I love doing, repeating myself. Again.  Stephers was upset with me when she left here, and we’ve not communicated since. I won’t speak for her other than to say that her writing, and that of her friend Alison McDowell, brought in many new readers, and also blew right by me. I was too dense-packed to grasp it all. I think it safe to say that the new readers, Stephers, Allison and me all have world views, and mine are not in harmony with theirs. But I made it clear to Stephers that she was free to continue writing here. She chose a different path, and I wish her success.

The video above, from 1963, is to me some of the most obvious evidence around that Paul McCartney was actually two people, a set of identical twins. The man singing above is “original” Paul, and his brother is Mike. Both were born in 1942 and are currently 81 years of age. Mike’s birthday was changed to 1/7/44, or “88”. I am surprised now how dominant Mike was in the early days, playing prominently in their movies.  But live performances were another matter, as Paul is a lefty, Mike a righty. After they quit live performances, they did videos, and for that placed Mike behind a piano, keyboard unseen. I think in the intervening years, Mike has mastered left handed bass and guitar, as he seemed comfortable on stage in past years.

The two, Mike and Paul, stepped in for each other up to and through the Wings days, and in the movie Give My Regards to Broadstreet. But their looks grew apart, and it became obvious they were not the same person. Paul was retired from view, and Mike, the better stage performer, became full-time Paul.

Below are early photos of the two. They are said to be the same person. They are not. That’s Mike (Macca) on the left, Paul on the right.

Even then I can look and see two different people. I did a face split on the two some years back, and am thankful I have saved all of this work, as I don’t want to do it again.

My goodness is that close! You can see why they were able to (almost) pull this off. Paul on the right has eyebrows that wrap over and down. Mike on the left  has eyebrows that don’t dip as far down. Look at the placement of the end of the brows, almost at pupil level for Paul on the right, and maybe an inch above the pupil for Mike on the left. Notice ear placement too. That’s  not as dependable as other features due to distortion that can be caused by head angles, but those angles look very much the same to me. Paul’s nose is pudgier and anyway, they don’t quite align. The two sets of lips are quite a bit higher for Paul, and his chin is just a tad longer.

I did  more work on this back then, so bear with me. John Haliday turned up in a YouTube video, supposedly the caretaker of the McCartney home in their youth. What I more suspect is that he was living there, possibly out of need, or maybe he inherited the place.  I grabbed his face from that video.

I would guess him to be mid-seventies at that time, but birth dates are murky business in Intel circles. The twins were born on June 18, 1942, as I see it (currently 81), and Mike’s birthday was altered to 1/7/44, or double eights. Below is a montage of the two compared to their closer-to-present day counterparts.

That’s Macca (Mike) in the top row and Paul in the lower row as Halliday, and in 1959. They both line up very well. There were/are two Paul’s.

I will stop with the photos now. I am more interested in several facets of their abilities and personalities.

Musical abilities: At the beginning of the Beatles, they toured performing maybe two dozen songs. It never varied. Even as they came out with new albums, they continued with the same songs in live performances, never adding newer songs to the mix. Mike Williams, the guy who is all Billy Shears all the time, thinks it is because they did not know how to play those newer songs. They had to stick to the few they knew.

Both Paul and Mike were very good singers. Paul famously did Till There Was You (up above) playing left-handed bass, and Yesterday on the Ed Sullivan Show, playing left-handed guitar. Mike was right-handed, and so in the early days they put him behind a piano (keys usually hidden), but I think over time he has learned to play guitar and bass left-handed. I have seen him perform LH, and he seemed quite comfortable. It’s entirely plausible. Mike has been a very good stage performer over time, while Paul, more a crooner, seems to need to be sitting to turn in an effective performance, eyes darting and head bobbing away. 

What gives me cause to wonder is that when one appeared in public, the other had to be closeted. That was done very well – at no time have two of them been seen in public save perhaps at a gathering for Dhani Harrison.

In case you don’t yet see it, that is Paul on the left, next to Dhani, and Mike on the right. They are dressed alike, and each sporting an identical hair piece. It can be no other way.

Composing abilities: For those who think Paul wrote the song Yesterday, I have to ask, which one wrote it? For a time early on both fake-dated Jane Asher, whose mother Margaret (nee Eliot) Asher was a music professor at the Guildhall School in London. “Paul” is said to have moved into the Asher household. I suspect there was a song-writing team, and that they met there and trained the Beatles. George Martin, Margaret’s star pupil, was surely there too.

Mike Williams has done a yeoman’s task on the group, and I only regret that he falls for (or is asked to fall for) the idea that original Paul died and was replaced by lookalike Billy Shears. That ‘s nonsense, as the death of Paul is but misdirection. It sends us away from the obvious question, are these twins?

But beyond that, Williams, musically known as Sage of Quay, does very fine work. In one of his videos (I think this one) he devotes a great deal of time and effort in reconstructing the time around the production of the album Rubber Soul. The Beatles are said to have written, arranged, and recorded all of the songs on that album in a very compressed time frame.  There was not nearly enough time, according to MW. He thinks that while the group was on extended holiday after a long concert tour, George Martin brought in professional musicians to lay down the instrumental tracks for the songs already written by an apparently new (and more advanced) composing team. The Beatles then laid down the vocal tracks. That’s not nothing, as they harmonized well, but they did not write,  arrange, or play the instruments behind the songs. (MW also traces the origins of the songs Yesterday and Hey Jude to Italian music. There are stunning similarities. His work, BS aside, is well worth a look.)

MW thinks that by the time of the White Album the group was indeed performing original material. Maybe so, but why risk it? They had a proven formula for success, and no one questioned it. (The Rooftop Concert was most likely lip synced. There would be no other reason to put them out of sight while performing.)

Bigger picture stuff: The Beatles were backed by some of the best musicians and composers of their generation. They did not just happen on the scene, and they were  neither organic or natural. They were recruited and trained in Hamburg, and screaming girls were hired to follow them. The problem in the early days was how to hide their lack of talent. The key to their public performances before live audiences was intense training and muscle memory. Later, when they stopped live performances, all bets were off. They did not write, arrange or play instruments for their albums. (I have long suspected that John Lennon, more an idealist and often honest about their playing abilities, wanted out and was granted early exit in 1980. He is still around, no doubt, but free of the utter hypocrisy he lived with for twenty years.) (Macca does not seem to mind it at all. He even put out a coffee table book of lyrics he supposedly wrote. He has no shame.)

The big picture for me is a sea change in our public behaviors, modes of dress, and hair. The Beatles brought all of this about, no accident as they had some very clever high-level intelligence behind them. I think they were timed to coordinate with the fake assassination of John F. Kennedy. That in mind, the screaming at their concerts, which eventually was learned behavior repeated, in addition to an outpouring of sexual tension, was also an outpouring of grief. Just like the Beatles, JFK had a carefully contrived public image so that when he was fake-killed a whole generation was stunned into a state of shock. The Beatles were easily inserted into that picture, and the major changes that followed, culminating with the Tate Massacre in 1969, gave us the changed world we now live in. No small part of it was introduction of drugs and drug use into mainstream culture. (Macca even went to far as to encourage kids to take LSD, claiming he had done so on four occasions. What else would the most widely known rock star on the planet be up to?)

The five men who became the Beatles had varying levels of talent, the least so Ringo. MW above in the link provided suggests that most of the drumming on the record albums was done by others, as Ringo just wasn’t that good. That makes perfect sense if the others were also not playing their own instruments. Anyway, it validates the old joke: What do you call a drummer who breaks up with his girlfriend? (Homeless.)

OK, I’ve written (and repeated myself) enough here. I did this because I enjoy doing it. OK?