“Turn me on dead man”, “miss him, miss him, miss him” are just some of the cryptic clues that, anyone smart enough to listen to songs backwards knows reveal that Paul McCartney died on the 9th November 1966. After an argument with his bandmates, Paul left a recording session for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and drove off in his Austin-Healey, which he subsequently crashed. McCartney was then replaced by the winner of a Paul McCartney look-alike contest. The look-alike was named William Shears Campbell or “Billy Shears” – the supposedly fictional leader of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Shears already held a close resemblance to the real Paul, whose death led to Shears under-going plastic surgery to make himself an exact replica of the real Beatle. There are too many coincidences that have been laughed off by the other Beatles but it is a cold-hard fact that Shears has not been heard of since the fateful look-alike contest of 1965.
Looking at Sgt. Pepper, the first album that Shears “took over”, it is disturbingly eerie that the cover art is essentially Paul’s grave. On the cover Paul is the only member looking straight at the camera and holds a wooden coffin for an instrument, whilst also being propped up by Ringo and George. Red hyacinths, the mythological flower of death, spell out the word “Beatles”. As if this isn’t clear enough, the inside photo again shows Paul being propped by two other Beatles. On Paul’s left arm a patch on his uniform has the letters O.P.D which stands for “Officially Pronounced Dead”.
A series of striking coincidences could perhaps be forgiven if the Beatles themselves weren’t so determined to ignore, slander, and even try and laugh off the “rumours”. The rumours themselves began in 1969 soon after the release of Abbey Road where Paul’s ghostly figure walks barefooted and out of time with the fellow Beatles. Paul McCartney, or should I say Billy Shears, refused to address rumours whilst touring with Wings – work vastly inferior to the real Paul McCartney’s – obviously fearing being discovered for what he really is.
John Lennon, a proud member of the Illuminati, continued to hide the truth and even left mocking messages in Beatles songs. Towards the end of ‘Strawberry Fields’ you can hear a muffled John saying “I buried Paul”. Perhaps the most hurtful clue John left was on his solo album Imagine from 1971 on track 8 ‘How do you sleep?’ A vengeful, hateful song that contains the line “Those freaks were right when they said you were dead.”
It took a while for Billy Shears himself to start gloating about his transformation but in 1993 he released a live album named Paul is Live. A joke that was 27 years in the making and comes at the expense of the great man whose identity he stole. Shears continues to release albums of a constantly diminishing low quality in the name of the Paul McCartney and only a small few are left knowing the real truth.
As the now infamous words of ‘I’m So Tired’ played backwards go:
“Paul is a dead man, (And I) miss him, miss him, miss him”
