Paul McCartney once sent a critic his daughter's poop
Sir Paul McCartney got his revenge on a critic by sending him a revolting gift in the mail.
Sir Paul McCartney allegedly once sent his daughter Stella's poop to a music critic who slated his Wings concert.
The music legend's post-Beatles band - which included his then-wife Linda McCartney, who died in 1998 - gave the reviewer the VIP treatment, inviting them backstage and on their tour bus, and despite not attending the actual gig, the unnamed journalist "slagged the whole thing", as recalled by drummer Denny Seiwell.
In the newly released tome, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, he recounted: “So, okay, we take [the critic] along to the sound check. We let him backstage.
“We let him on the bus. We let him see how we live and all that. He didn’t stay for the concert. He flew home.”
He continued: “And he slagged it. Everything about it. The way we lived. The way we travelled. The way we sounded, the way we da-dada-dada.”
Seiwell praised the pair for the "perfect response" to the negative article.
He wrote: “Stella was a baby at the time.
“So Paul and Linda took one of those little plastic soap dishes from the hotel we were in, and they got one of Stella’s turds, put it in the soap dish, wrapped it up, and sent it to him.
“You heard that from me. I don’t care if they want it to be known or not.
“I thought it was the perfect response to a crude British pressman.”
McCartney's two solo albums before forming Wings – 1970's McCartney and 1971 follow-up RAM – had both been savaged by the critics, and the star admits in the book that he contemplated quitting music before starting Wings.
The 83-year-old musician penned: "I did get depressed.
"I seriously considered packing it all in."
McCartney struggled to settle on a name for the Mull of Kintyre band at first until experiencing a moment of inspiration during the traumatic birth of his and Linda's daughter Stella in 1971.
He explained: "Because of the emergency, the vision of an angel with big wings came into my mind.
"I thought: 'Wings, that'd be good', with no 'The', to avoid The Beatles."
Wings – which also featured Denny Laine alongside Paul and Linda - "dissolved" in 1981, but McCartney felt that the Jet group had proved that he could be successful away from The Beatles.
He wrote: "I tried to prove we could do something successful after The Beatles and we pulled it off... we achieved the impossible."
McCartney also recalls in the book how he felt "dead" when The Beatles split.
Addressing the long-running 'Paul is dead' conspiracy theory that exploded in popularity in 1969, he said: "The strangest rumour started floating around just as The Beatles were breaking up, that I was dead. We had heard the rumour long before but, suddenly, in that autumn of 1969 stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all of its own, so that millions of people around the world believed I was actually gone."
He continued: "Now that over half a century has passed since those truly crazy times, I'm beginning to think that the rumours were more accurate than one might have thought at the time.
"In so many ways, I was dead, a 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows that were sapping my energy, in need of a complete life makeover."
