Jo Jo Laine

Born: 13 July, 1953, in Danvers, Massachusetts.

Died: 29 October, 2006, in London, aged 53.

AS A typical American teenager, Joanne LaPatrie sent fan mail to Beatle Paul McCartney, saying she had renamed herself Jo Jo after the song Get Back, and that she dreamed of marrying him. She never lived that particular dream but she did marry McCartney's fellow singer and guitarist with the post-Beatles group Wings, Denny Laine, and spent a lot of time at McCartney's High Park farm near Campbeltown while the two men wrote and recorded songs.

She had met the former Moody Blues singer when, as a pouty model, she talked her way backstage at a Wings' gig in the US. She ended up touring the world with the ex-Beatle, his wife Linda and Laine, later admitting that most of it was "a blur" from drugs and alcohol.

Long before her marriage, she had been known as "one of the original rock chicks", claiming to have been the lover of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Rod Stewart and a host of other rock stars.

By the time she married Laine, in 1978, she said the former Beatle was "no longer my type" but, as Denny's partner, she got to live for weeks on end with Paul and Linda McCartney on their getaway farm on the Mull of Kintyre. Friends said, however, that there was little love lost between Linda and Jo Jo - of whom Cream drummer Ginger Baker once famously said: "No sane man would ever go near her."

She is thought to have been the inspiration for some lyrics of the Cream song Strange Brew - "She's a witch of trouble in electric blue, in her own mad mind she's in love with you, with you.... Now what ya gonna do?"

During their visits to the Argyll farm, McCartney and Denny Laine were said to have spent much of their time keeping the flamboyant and "spacey" Jo Jo out of the "bright lights" (at least compared with the farm) of Campbeltown and out of trouble. Paul and Linda also kept her out of the famous Mull of Kintyre video, in which local Scottish farmers and their children joined the McCartneys, Laine and the Campbeltown pipe band for a beach barbecue.

Jo Jo Laine was born Joanne LaPatrie in the town of Danvers, outside Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. She believed the fact that Danvers, once the heart of what is now known as the "witch trial town" of Salem, may have shaped her personality. In her CV in recent years, she described her religion as Wicca, a neo-pagan belief deriving from an old witchcraft cult.

In the same CV, she gave her marital status as "Swinger" and her sexual orientation as "Not Sure."

While still a teenager, her good looks and pouting lips got her work as a model and, after moving to Los Angeles at the age of 17, she found herself on the covers of such magazines as Vogue and partying with film stars and rock musicians. She reportedly lost her virginity to Jim Hendrix backstage at the 1969 Woodstock love-in and she never denied it, but, if so, she would have just turned 16 at the time. She had certainly spent time with the legendary guitarist by the time he died the following year.

She lived with Laine for several years before marrying him on 5 November, 1978, and performed as a vocalist with the Denny Laine Band after Wings fell apart in 1980. Paul McCartney's bass can be heard on the band's album Japanese Tears, on which Jo Jo sang the lead vocal on the track Same Mistakes, but the album had mostly been recorded during breaks in Wings' sessions.

Jo Jo Laine's voice has been described as "sweeter than Linda McCartney's but hardly likely to give Whitney Houston sleepless nights". After her divorce from Denny Laine in the early 1980s, she sporadically recorded singles and CDs, some produced by the legendary Jimmy Miller (producer of many of the Rolling Stones' greatest albums), including many covers of early Beatles' songs. She had brief success with a band called The Firm before former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page usurped that name for his own new supergroup.

A Best of Jo Jo Laine album, mostly of Beatles' songs, was due out in the UK when she died in a south-west London hospital last Sunday, a week after falling down the stairs at home.

"Spacey" as ever as a 40-something in the 1990s, Jo Jo Laine became one of the many "wifelets" of Alexander Thynne, the bohemian Marquis of Bath, sharing him with a number of other women on his Longleat estate until moving back to London in 1996.

She is survived by her two children with Denny Laine - Heidi Jo Hines, a 32-year-old singer, and Laine Hines, a 33-year-old guitarist (Hines was Denny Laine's real surname), as well as another son, Boston Kane, a 23-year-old music producer, from a later marriage.