3 Times Paul McCartney Attacked Photographers: ‘That Man is Mad’
In his decades of fame, Paul McCartney has encountered hundreds of photographers — he even married one. He didn’t always get along with the people taking his photo, though. On at least three occasions, McCartney got into a physical altercation with photographers.
1. Paul McCartney threw a bucket at a photographer who knocked on his door
In the 1960s, a conspiracy theory that McCartney had died and was replaced by a body double spread. Journalist Dorothy Bacon and photographer Terence Spencer decided to look into the rumors by knocking on McCartney’s front door on a Sunday morning. They found McCartney not only alive but enraged by their presence.
“He was absolutely red in the face with fury,” Spencer said, per the book Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin. “He had one look at me and hurled the slop bucket. The irony was that I definitely got a shot of that. And he missed me, but then he stepped forward and hit me across the shoulder. Now, I’d covered six wars and never been hit by anything or anyone until Paul McCartney punched me. So I told Dorothy, ‘I think we’ve run out of our hospitality,’ and we turned around and left.”
Spencer and Bacon fled the property and headed back toward town when they noticed McCartney following behind them in his car.
“I told Dorothy, ‘For God’s sake, be careful, because that man is mad,'” Spencer said.
Luckily, McCartney was following them to apologize. He offered to give an interview with Bacon as long as Spencer gave him the roll of film that captured him angrily flinging the slop bucket.
2. Paul McCartney punched a photographer who was on his first assignment
In 1982, McCartney appeared on the BBC Radio Four program Desert Island Discs. When he arrived at BBC Studios, Daily Star photographer Paul Massey, an 18-year-old on his first-ever assignment, approached to snap a picture. The Daily Star reported that as Massey walked up to McCartney, he “suddenly cannoned his fist and body at our shocked photographer.”
McCartney quickly apologized to the stunned photographer.
“I’m sorry,” McCartney said, per The Globe and Mail. “I blew my top, mate.”
McCartney brought Massey to his studio room to make up for it, where he explained that he thought punching Massey was the only way to get him to stop taking pictures.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “When I saw you standing there, I knew there was only one way to stop you taking pictures, and that was to lay into you.”
3. He got into a shoving match at a performance
In 2003, McCartney was near the Thames to see David Blaine. The magician was putting on a performance in which he lived without food in a plastic box suspended by a crane for 44 days. McCatney’s spokesperson Geoff Baker told a photographer to take a picture of the musician, but this did not go over well.
“No one knew he [McCartney] was there because it was dark, and for some reason — probably known only to my mental hospital — I decided to tell a photographer to come over,” Baker said, per The Sydney Morning Herald. “Paul didn’t want to be photographed and two of his mates said he didn’t want any photography. There was pushing and shoving, but there were certainly no punches thrown.”
McCartney was so angry with Baker for sending a photographer over that he fired him. It seems that most photographers should exercise a degree of caution when approaching the former Beatle.
