Credit: Dangerous Minds / Alamy

On November 16th, 1979, Paul McCartney released ‘Wonderful Christmastime’. A song that more or less confirmed the suspicions of all who’d regarded him as the granny music peddling, cuddly albatross around the neck of real artists like John Lennon and George Harrison. Then, two months to the day later, his image changed drastically when he was arrested for drug possession at a Japanese airport.

By rights, this moment should feel like the perversion of a childhood icon. Like that time Pee Wee Herman got caught jacking it in an adult movie theatre, or if Big Bird from Sesame Street was suddenly revealed to be running a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Many likely believed it would be detrimental to his squeaky clean image, but those in the know would have known that Macca had always been a lot edgier than he let on.

To this day, McCartney remains a man of contrasts. Sure, he wrote ‘All Together Now’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, but he was also responsible for ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’, as he’s only too happy to remind us.

Away from music, he’s also been known to indulge in an illicit substance or three. Not to the level of some of his peers, but definitely to the extent of your average weed enthusiast. After all, it would have to take an enthusiast to do something as boneheaded as his airport arrest.

McCartney, like everyone who sets foot in Japan, was surely well aware of the risks. Presumably, he knew that the penalty for being caught with weed was up to seven years’ incarceration. It wouldn’t even be prison time; it was hard labour you were sentenced to. Imagine that, a literal Beatle working in Hishikari mine for seven years.

Yet still, he risked it. Not because he had to, you understand, or because he was holding it for someone else and they’d take his thumbs if he lost it. No, like a real stoner, McCartney tried to blag his way through customs for a much simpler reason. It was simply really good shit, man!

McCartney does concede that he made barely any effort to hide the offending hash. In retrospect, he reflected that it was almost entirely his fault that he was suddenly cuffed and sent to the notorious Tokyo Narcotics Detention Centre to await his formal trial.

For nine days, he lived as an inmate, yet he was far from just another jailbird. He was still one of the most famous people on the planet and, infamously, that can lead to mixed results when you’re suddenly thrown into jail.

Thankfully, McCartney’s fellow jailbirds took to life with a Beatle with aplomb. Though there was an unassailable language barrier, McCartney tried his best to ingratiate himself with the others and with his natural charm and charisma, found himself so liked by gen-pop that they started to request songs of his. Leading to block-wide sing-alongs of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude’ that no guard could stop. Though word was they weren’t really trying all that hard.

In fact, McCartney felt so comfortable while inside that when he was offered the chance to wash privately, he (according to Phillip Norman’s biography Paul McCartney: The Life) turned them down. Resulting in the wonderfully surreal mental image of a starkers, mulleted Paul McCartney led a shower full of hardened Japanese criminals in a sing-along of ‘Yellow Submarine’.

Following this incident, McCartney was freed after nine days without charge, and while he was glad to leave, he had made friends while inside and was sad to leave them.

Though he probably did hide his weed a little better the next time he returned to the country.