Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— December 2009 - January 2010
Music
musician/composer is Paul
McCartney? This may seem like an odd question,
given that his unprecedented and unparalleled
commercial success, even if it has not always been
matched by concomitant critical approval, means
that everyone thinks they have the story on Paul.
After all, McCartney is listed in The Guinness Book
Of Records as the most successful musician and
composer in popular music history, with gold
discs and sales of million singles. ‘Yesterday’
(credited to Lennon/McCartney, as all songs by
either one as Beatles were, but composed entirely
by McCartney) is listed as the most-covered song
in history, by over , artists to date. Wings’
single ‘Mull of Kintyre’ became the first sin-
gle to sell more than two million copies in the UK,
and remains the top selling non-charity single
there. He is the most successful songwriter in UK
singles history, based on weeks that his compo-
sitions have spent on the charts. As a performer
or songwriter, McCartney has been responsible
for number-one singles on the US Hot
chart, of them with The Beatles, the rest with
Wings or as a solo artist. You want someone for
the British finale of Live Aid in , and again
for ’s
th
Anniversary Live show, who
you gonna call, Bob? The X-Factor final ?
Fab Macca, of course. And yet, who would care
to define, accurately and based on a more than
superficial knowledge, what his music is actu-
ally like?
He’s been at it for a long time now, and his dis-
cography encompasses everything from charm-
ing folk to layered pop to amiable, household
rock’n’roll to piledriving, uncompromising heavy
metal to art-pop inclinations to lounge to classical.
He touched on the English folk tradition in songs
like ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Blackbird’, from
’s The Beatles (aka The White Album) and
‘Jenny Wren’ from ’s Chaos and Creation
in the Backyard, joining the dots between Davy
Graham, Nick Drake and Richard Thompson.
There are the forays into blues, ‘Used To Be Bad’
and ‘Really Love You’, on ’s Flaming Pie.
The more arcane corners of his back catalogue
stretch from the classical Liverpool Oratorio
() to the electronica-based Liverpool Sound
Collage (), to say nothing of the little-heard
Thrillington (), made up of easy listening,
big-band swing orchestral/instrumental versions
:
Being good at pop means his rockier and
art-rock sides sometimes lose out
d e s m o n d t r a y n o r
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES
of songs from his second album (co-credited to
Linda) Ram (), recorded under the alter-
ego Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington. Indeed, he has
a penchant for adopting a persona for his more
outré excursions from his cosily good-humoured
public image, as the three pseudonymous collab-
orations as The Fireman, with ex-Killing Joke’s
bassist and pioneering ambient house producer,
Youth, demonstrate. ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’,
from Ram, sounds like nothing so much as Tom
Waits’ junkyard clatter avant la lettre, which in
turn sounds like…? Leadbelly? In interview, he
has evinced mild annoyance at being dubbed ‘the
greatest living composer of love songs’, maintain-
ing such a view is based largely on a misconcep-
tion, and that he has written his share of nasty
songs as well. “Remember ‘Helter Skelter’? That
was me”, (Incidentally, the usually incisive Ian
MacDonald, in his meticulous concordance of
Beatles’ songs, Revolution in the Head, has a def-
inite blind spot for this composition, failing to
share its composer’s regard for it, declaring: “…
their attempts at emulating the heavy style were
without exception embarrassing”.)
So, he is a chameleon, and there perhaps lies
his problem with how he is perceived: people
who can be all things to all men (and women)
invite the accusation that they have no real self.
Devoid of essence, they don a series of masks,
and tell you what you want to hear. It is even
possible to treat what should be a positive char-
acteristic, this voracious musical curiosity and
impulse towards experimentation/innovation,
with suspicion: why does he need to pretend
to be someone else when he is doing it, rather
than using his own name? It seems he is torn
between self-conscious commercialism and the
kind of music he makes when he’s not trying
too hard to sell records. Then again, he hardly
needs the money, so why worry if sales of a par-
ticular record are large or small? Is he afraid of
confusing his fair-weather, mainstream audi-
ence? Or is it that he needs the status and rec-
ognition his continuing fame affords? Without
being tiresomely Freudian about it, one of his
bonding experiences with John Lennon was that
they had in common the early deaths of their
mothers (McCartney’s of cancer when he was ,
Lennon’s run over by a car when he was .) The
psychology of public performing suggests that
not only is taking to the stage in pursuit of the
love and approval of millions a means of subli-
mating grief, but also a belated attempt to prove
oneself to an absent parent.
The chief arguments marshalled by his detrac-
tors begin with the assumption that the years of
mediocre, formulaic pop were motivated prima-
rily by avarice. The term ‘filler’ - as used by mp
single-track downloading kids about their par-
ents’ album collections - could have been coined
for much of McCartney’s solo output. Then there
is the fact that he can undoubtedly be lyrically
facile. His tendency towards whimsy and mawk-
ish sentimentality are trying. Has a major art-
ist ever released a more cringingly banal single
than ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’? And let’s not even
get started on the ham-fisted pleas for together-
ness, ‘Pipes of Peace’ and ‘Ebony and Ivory’, or the
dubious / response, ‘Freedom’. It can some-
times seem that if arch media prankster Victor
Lewis-Smith’s assertion that the Beatles are dying
in the wrong order has any validity, then Ringo
will be next.
However, there is much to be countered in
his defence. Firstly, when the group they formed
as teenagers split up, The Beatles were all still
young men: George , Paul , John , Ringo
. Apart from being an utterly jaw-dropping
achievement, the revolutionary arc of their
studio albums and two dozen singles, all recorded
in only six and a half years, was also going to be a
hard act to follow in their solo careers. McCartney
even seems to have presciently realised this at the
time: Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight/Carry
that weight a long time.
Further complications were added to the fear
that whatever they would do individually would
never match what they had done together. There
was the long competitive feuding with Lennon,
the character-assassinating answer songs, the
comparisons in the press not only of their work,
but also their personalities. Plus, he was Paul
McCartney, ex-Beatle, and so unlike most début-
ing solo artists, nobody was going to tell him that
he couldn’t release whatever he wanted to release,
which might account for the poor quality-con-
trol. It is frequently overlooked that that qual-
ity control barometer has certainly been more
active in recent years, albeit in part as a response
to a lack of chart action, with Chaos and Creation
in the Backyard () and Memory Almost Full
() late career highpoints, while his latest
album as The Fireman, Electric Arguments, is
an exhilaratingly loose-limbed, improvisatory
freak-out. Then, those who
prepare a face to meet the
faces that they meet, if pub-
lic figures, have the advan-
tage that while many feel
they have ownership of
them, nobody really owns
them. Melody comes eas-
ily to him, and this facility
can lead to his seeming, or
more seriously being, fac-
ile, musically as well as lyr-
ically. Being good at pop
means his rockier and art-
rock sides sometimes lose
out. But he is conscious of
the dangers of his own soft
side, addressing it directly
and self-deprecatingly on Chaos and Creation’s
‘English Tea’: Very twee, very me. It has been
plausibly speculated that ‘Mary Had A Little
Lamb’ was a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the ban-
ning of preceding single, Paul-as-protest-singer’s
comment on Bloody Sunday, ‘Give Ireland Back
to The Irish’.
But the greatest rebuttal to his critics is the
sheer scope and excellence of the set list he will
bring to Dublin, as documented on newly-re-
leased live opus Good Evening New York City,
which is pretty much the same songs in the same
order as he has been playing on his US tour over
summer . The songs, weighted two-
thirds in favour of Beatles over solo stuff, con-
sist not only of standards like ‘A Day in the Life’,
‘Let It Be’, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Yesterday’, but less famil-
iar material like Electric Argument’s ‘Sing The
Changes’ and ‘Highway’.
Besides, the international institution that is
Sir Paul McCartney MBE hardly needs any special
pleading by me. With tickets for this sold out show
purportedly fetching up to € on touts’ web-
sites, even those grubby commercial considera-
tions have long since been well taken care of.
Paul McCartney plays the O2, Dublin, on Sunday,
December 20th.
“It can sometimes seem that if
arch media prankster Victor
Lewis-Smith’s assertion that
the Beatles are dying in the
wrong order has any validity,
then Ringo will be next”
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES
