Paul McCartney meets Linda Eastman

On this evening The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein hosted a dinner party to mark the completion of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Afterwards Paul McCartney went to the Bag O’Nails nightclub to see Georgie Fame performing. At the club McCartney had his first encounter with his future wife, Linda Eastman.

The Bag O’Nails was situated in the basement of 9 Kingly Street in Soho, London. The Beatles were regular visitors, particularly in 1967 and 1968, and McCartney had his own private table there.

The night I met Linda I was in the Bag O’Nails watching Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames play a great set. Speedy was banging away. She was there with the Animals, who she knew from photographing them in New York. They were sitting a couple of alcoves down, near the stage. The band had finished and they got up to either leave or go for a drink or a pee or something, and she passed our table. I was near the edge and stood up just as she was passing, blocking her exit. And so I said, ‘Oh, sorry. Hi. How are you? How’re you doing?’ I introduced myself, and said, ‘We’re going on to another club after this, would you like to join us?’

That was my big pulling line! Well, I’d never used it before, of course, but it worked this time! It was a fairly slim chance but it worked. She said, ‘Yes, okay, we’ll go on. How shall we do it?’ I forget how we did it. ‘You come in our car’ or whatever, and we all went on, the people I was with and the Animals, we went on to the Speakeasy.

The Speakeasy was a club on Margaret Street, where they heard Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale for the first time.

We flirted a bit, and then it was time for me to go back with them and Paul said, ‘Well, we’re going to another club. You want to come?’ I remember everybody at the table heard A Whiter Shade Of Pale that night for the first time and we all thought, Who is that? Stevie Winwood? We all said Stevie. The minute that record came out, you just knew you loved it. That’s when we actually met. Then we went back to his house. We were in the Mini with I think Lulu and Dudley Edwards, who painted Paul’s piano; Paul was giving him a lift home. I was impressed to see his Magrittes.

The pair met again four days later, on 19 May 1967, when Eastman attended the press party for Sgt Pepper at Brian Epstein’s house at 24 Chapel Street, London.