John Walsh'sTales of the City

I clapped eyes on Sir Paul McCartney ­ the living, breathing, true-life Macca ­ last week at the Hay festival, and have been puzzling about the great man ever since. He swung into the small town to read from his poetry collection Blackbird Singing and, er, to go away again. No personal signings in the book tent, no meet-the-people stuff, no music, no announcements. He seemed a little nervous at what was only his second poetry recital, and made a big fuss of how the audience should recognise when a poem was actually over. Unlike rock'n'roll numbers, which generally conclude with a well-signposted final chord and a cataclysmic, "sunburst finish" roll and crash of drums, poems generally end in a muted, anticlimactic, sign-off image. Most poets leave a few seconds of silence for the final lines to hang in the air before saying, "The next poem is called...". McCartney, evidently unsettled by a lack of applause at the end of anything he does, settled for a curious, spread-hands gesture after every poem to indicate that his current effusion had reached its end.

You'd never have known if he hadn't, because his otherwise charming little verses about growing up in Liverpool, about eccentric adults, kindly-disposed teachers, buses and fairs, are fatally devoid of energy or drama or interest in words. His poetry had already received a couple of savage drubbings on these feature pages, so I won't start reviewing it here. What bothered me was what he did to his own songs. For reasons beyond me, McCartney decided to recite some of his most famous lyrics, and do so in a downbeat, conversational manner that robbed them of all life. He took "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" from Abbey Road, a song with a wholly irresistible, oompah bounce to it ("Joan was quizzical, studying pataphysical science in the Home") and made it sound as exciting as the weather report from Dogger and Finisterre. He took "Eleanor Rigby", a song so devastatingly simple, so bleakly moving and reduced it to a small puddle of inconsequence. "All the lonely people ­ where'd they come from?" he asked, the way a man in a bar might say "Fancy a ciggie?"

I was disappointed. I've heard great song lyrics ruthlessly exposed as non-poetry before, but generally it's been done by someone who hates pop music, not by one of its greatest exponents. But then there's something disappointingly slight about Sir Paul in general. He took the stage in front of 1,300 people, looking insanely boyish ­ his face a kind of conflation of the features of both Ant and Dec, the juvenile cheerleaders of Saturday morning kids' TV ­ and his whole demeanour was of a clever schoolboy convinced that everything he touches is brilliant. He confessed himself baffled by the refusal of the press to take his paintings or poetry seriously, as though he thought praise was his natural due. Asked about the biggest influences on his current creativity, he decided they were, oh, you know, everything really. And he read a poem about the death of John Lennon, and the man who killed him, Mark Chapman. On the day he heard about the death, said McCartney, he kept repeating one phrase about Chapman to himself ­ how the killer must be "the jerk of all jerks". Does that sound an appropriate response? This man killed your best friend, one of the gods of rock 'n' roll and the superstar of a whole counterculture. What do you think of him? He's a jerk. That Lee Harvey Oswald, what a prat. General Pinochet, goodness what a pillock. Pol Pot, what a clot. Being an inept poet isn't what one minds about McCartney. Being a lukewarm human, on the other hand, is.

WHILE WE'RE talking musicians, I see there's a lot of yelling about Becky Taylor, the new singing phenomenon. She's a 12-year-old from Surrey who's been signed up by EMI after the head of the Classics section was so impressed by her demo tape that he called her in to stand in his office and sing in person. I went along a couple of weeks ago to a preview launch in Piccadilly of her first CD, A Dream Come True, and I must say I stood and marvelled at the girl. She's so slight that, when she approached the microphone, I felt she might be blown over by the exhalation of a hundred Marlboro Lights from the assembled hacks. But she has a real belter of a voice. Either she or EMI have decided that the ideal showcase for Ms Taylor should be show tunes from old musicals, so the first noise we heard her utter was "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady. It was a fantastic, note-perfect performance but I was a little alarmed to hear the sweet Ms Taylor eeee-nunn-ceee-ayting her words like some super-formal fan of Kate Adie. To see her mouth stretching to a weird rictus on the words "awwlllllll ny-eeeet" is to worry that she may not be having quite the blissful time you'd hope a pre-pubertal lass from Oxshott would have.

But you can either stand there worrying about whether she's been over-trained in voice lessons while still not in her teens, or you can just listen to her singing. I did the latter and discovered that she's got a secret, wholly unexpected upper register which is amazingly powerful and, though emanating from the penthouse suite of a Piccadilly hotel, is capable of rattling the crockery in my south London home with its penetrating vibrato. It's a gorgeous instrument. But once she's been discovered, launched, praised and reviewed, what will become of the poor girl? At the preview it was considered bad form to mention 15-year-old Charlotte Church out loud, because (according to an EMI suit) her voice is all but ruined for the future by straining it on demanding classical pieces. Ms Taylor won't have that problem. Her big problem is finding people outside her grandparents' generation who are prepared to listen to a reincarnated Julie Andrews, and pay good money to have that well-bred, charm-school voice going round their heads again. I can already hear the lovely Becky intoning the lines "Feed the birds, tuppence abehg", to (I'm afraid) the scorn of most of her peers.

BUT IT gives me the chance to tell a Broadway story I heard from Sheridan Morley the other day, as he toted his hugely enjoyable biography of John Gielgud around the country. The story concerns the legendarily long first run of My Fair Lady in New York, and the night Julie Andrews peeped through the curtains and discovered an empty seat in the nineteenth row of the stalls. She summoned Rex Harrison and told him. After two years of "House Full" notices, was this the beginning of the end? Would the theatre be half-empty in a month's time? An usher was directed to speak to the old lady sitting next to the empty space. Could she throw any light on why it was empty? "Oh yes," she said. "My husband and I booked seats for the show months back ­ but the wait was so long that he unfortunately died in the interim and couldn't get to see it." "But how sad, madam," said the usher, "Isn't there a member of your family or a friend who could have gone in his place?" "No, honey," said the old lady. "They're all at the funeral."

RESEARCHERS AT a sound laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, have discovered how it was that Fred Astaire always managed to dance in perfect harmony with the beat, even while twirling leggy redheads across the stage or flickering his taps up and down those grand staircases. How did he stay with the rhythm so well, even as it changed, mid-song? The answer, it seems, it that we've all got an internal metronome inside us which responds to changes in tempo. Even tiny slowings-down and speedings-up, that wouldn't be noticeable to the human ear, are detected by this unknown force. The laboratory got eight people to tap a silent piano in time with the tones they could hear in their head; and when the tones speeded up infinitesimally, the tappers tapped faster, even though they couldn't possibly have noticed the difference.

Weird stuff, eh? A long time ago, Descartes talked about consciousness living a shadowy, half-understood life, inside a robotic physical structure that operated semi-mechanically, walking, sleeping, eating and excreting away. It was called the Ghost in the Machine. Now we know a bit more about this peculiar figure inside all of us. It's a strict time-keeper, a stickler for punctuality, a stopwatch-waving bully and it's dressed in a tuxedo and stripey trousers and could perform "Flying Down to Rio" without breaking sweat. Honestly. The human condition just gets more complicated.