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"When she was 20, she arrived in England determined to marry Paul McCartney - she had a big crush on him," says her daughter Heidi. She met Denny Laine backstage at a gig in 1972, "but she told me that the moment she met my dad, after a Wings concert, she knew they were soulmates", and within two days they were an item. “It was the ultimate groupie’s dream,” Jo Jo recalled.
Her daughter explains. "She fell in love with him, even though he was just a waged member of the band with little money. My brother Laine was born within a year of them getting together and I followed 11 months later.They were the happiest times. My earliest memories are of my eldest brother and I being surrounded by love and laughter. Even when finances were tight, she would find enough to see that we never wanted for anything. To the rest of the world she might have been the ultimate rock chick, but to us she was just the best mum. She was always there for us. No matter what was happening in her life, we always came first. We were very close".
"We lived on a houseboat before Dad started making lots of money. Mum was always in the kitchen cooking. She liked us to sit down to meals together, even if Dad was away on tour." Heidi recalls. "It was a fun house and she was always smiling. She used to dress us up in colourful, fancy-dress costumes and we would role-play."
Denny co-wrote the hit Mull Of Kintyre with McCartney in 1977, and his new-found wealth enabled the family to buy Yew Corner in Middlesex, a house which had been A.A. Milne's inspiration for Pooh Corner in his Winnie the Pooh books.
Yew Corner became legendary for the Laines' wild parties throughout the Seventies. But Heidi recalls: "We were always kept away from that sort of world. Mum tried to create a stable home and sheltered us from all that."
In 1978 Jo Jo Laine’s brother Thaddeus, a heavy drug-user and schizophrenic, shot their father at the home they shared in Florida after a row about his drug taking. Her father survived, but remained paralysed for more than a year before dying in 1980.
The tragedy put a strain on Jo Jo Laine’s marriage: Denny began having an affair with her best friend, and Jo Jo took to drink and antidepressants, and filed for divorce, which was effective in 1980.