Lovely Rita

A sly and light-hearted romp from Sgt. Pepper, which had its genesis in Paul learning, to his delight, that in America female traffic wardens were referred to as “meter maids”. Initially, he thought that the narrator should be angry at getting ticketed all the time, but soon decided “it would be better if I loved her instead”, after which a series of clever and comical lyrics practically wrote themselves, the action culminating on the meter maid’s couch, where our boy nearly – nearly – gets it on with the lovely Rita, “sitting on the sofa with a sister or two”. The high-pitched, apparently electronic tones that ring out in the early going weren’t the product of studio trickery, it’s just Paul blowing through a comb laced with tissue paper, probably an old trick he learned as a schoolboy.

Coming Up

This upbeat little number went straight to #1 in 1980, helped along by a clever video in which various versions of Paul compose an entire orchestra, horns, drums, the lot. It might surprise the reader to learn that John, whose relationship with McCartney was then on the mend, particularly liked Coming Up, and exclaimed, upon first hearing it from the back seat as it played over a car radio, something along the lines of “Fuck a pig, that’s Paul, it has to be him, it’s fantastic!”. At the time I didn’t think much of the song, or the accompanying album McCartney II, but over the years I’ve warmed to both. Listen, if it was good enough for Lennon…

Let it Be

Paul’s other masterpiece from the album of the same name, and an inevitable #1 in 1970, Let it Be served as a powerful swan song for the group, which by that time had already broken up. Just about the only track that sounds better in the original album mix than on the much later Naked collection, this version, with its weighty horn accompaniment, and Harrison’s thoroughly bitching guitar solo, likewise absolutely shreds the much tamer take that was released on 45 for airplay (which you can hear, if you like, on the Blue Album). Its obvious gospel roots, heavenly organ, and references to “Mother Mary” made it seem so hymn-like that it was actually sung in churches, though Mary was in this case not the virgin mother of Jesus, but Paul’s own mom, who died when he was only fourteen. Years later, he remembered the trauma, and how much it gutted his father:

My mother’s death broke my dad up. That was the worst thing for me, hearing my dad cry. I’d never heard him cry before. It was a terrible blow to the family. You grow up real quick, because you never expect to hear your parents crying. You expect to see women crying, or kids in the playground, or even yourself crying – and you can explain all that. But when it’s your dad, then you know something’s really wrong and it shakes your faith in everything. But I was determined not to let it affect me. I carried on. 

Much later in life, stressed and fretful, his mother appeared to him in a dream, speaking the comforting words that Paul soon turned into one of his greatest compositions.

Like a number of his other classics, Let it Be ends on an “amen”, in the manner of the hymns it resembles, with a pair of descending chords known technically as a “plagal cadence”, sometimes referred to as a “dying fall”. Back then all of the Beatles, Paul especially, would have laughed uproariously at the notion that he was ever using anything so highbrow as a so-called plagal cadence to conclude a song, as of course he wouldn’t have known that the musical progression, which he’d probably heard hundreds of times in church while absorbing it into his intuitive musical vocabulary, had a fancy name. Yet it was a device he returned to over and over, and it always worked beautifully. Have a look:

Queenie Eye

A driving, exuberant breath of fresh air that stands with his very best, Quennie Eye appeared on the generally buoyant album New in 2013, earning rave reviews and spinning off this terrific video that features just about everybody who was anybody at the time – listen, if Macca asks you to appear in a video, you show up for the shoot, conducted in this case right there in the sacred confines of Abbey Road’s legendary studio #2. That’s Giles Martin, son of George, and the latter-day producer of numerous Beatles-related re-packagings and re-masterings, up there in the booth, carrying on the family tradition. I love how the song kicks off with strains from a mellotron, the rudimentary music synthesizer featured way back in Paul’s opening to John’s Strawberry Fields Forever – I seem to recall that the very machine, which played tape loops via keyboard, was still kicking around EMI’s storage rooms. I also love the dreamy middle eight, which some music critic whose name eludes me likened to Brian Eno, in which Paul sings of being frightened, but carrying on, and coming back for more.

Queenie Eye was a kid’s game they used to play in Liverpool, a variant on “hide the ball”, which McCartney uses here as a metaphor for the nasty games you have to keep on playing throughout your adult life. The chorus is verbatim from the chant used by school children back in the day.

This “making of” video is actually worth your while, if you’re inclined. It’s touching how the various celebrities and mega-stars are overawed just to be in the space where it all happened, in the exalted company of the real live Paul McCartney. They’re emotional and completely star-struck:

Goodbye

Newly-signed Apple recording artist Mary Hopkin needed something to keep her on the charts, so Paul gave her this; what I said earlier about McCartney gifting the fruits of his “A” game to other artists goes double here, because oh boy, what a melody. I mean – oh, boy. I remember my Beethoven-worshiping father bursting into the little den where my brother and I used to play records, all excited at hearing a melody like nothing he’d ever encountered before. It literally gave him goose bumps. “I don’t know where that even comes from”, he said, “it’s like it’s out of time, from the future”. If you’re continuing to ground the argument that McCartney is the greatest and most evocative melodist of the modern era, you’d do well to cite this one.

I actually like Paul’s austere demo version better.

Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey

A richly orchestrated song suite from the once-maligned Ram, Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey contains so many musical ideas, and is so packed with charming whimsey – not to mention the exhilarating chorus of hands across the water / hands across the sky, cribbed loosely from an old Edwardian postcard – that it hardly matters in the slightest that it doesn’t really mean anything. If you’re immune to its charms, then honestly, I really have to wonder what’s up with you. I loved this recent commentary from Pitchfork magazine, expressing bewilderment at the critical savaging to which the entire Ram project in general, and Uncle Albert in particular, were subjected upon its release:

Critics hated “Uncle Albert”. “A major annoyance,” Christgau opined. Again, from the current moment we can only plead ignorance, and assume that some serious shit had to be going down to clog everyone’s ears. Because “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” is not only Ram’s centerpiece, it is clearly one of McCartney’s five greatest solo songs. As the slash in the title hints, it’s a multi-part song, starring two characters. To put its accomplishments in an egg-headed way: It fuses the conversational joy listeners associated with McCartney’s melodic gift to the compositional ambition everyone assumed was Lennon’s. To put it a simpler way: Every single second of this song is joyously, deliriously catchy, and no two seconds are the same. Do you think early Of Montreal, the White Stripes at their most vaudevillian, or the Fiery Furnaces took any lessons from this song?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16651-ram

Maybe I’m Amazed

One of his greatest songs, and surely one of the greatest love songs ever written, honest, visceral, and expressive not just of the joy, but also the bewilderment and anxious vulnerability, inherent in that first experience of absolutely loving and relying upon another human being. A lot of people will tell you this is the finest of all of his post-Beatle songs (though arguably it isn’t really post-Beatles, since when it showed up on 1970’s McCartney he’d already had it the works for a couple of years); I don’t know about that, but it certainly contends, and it’s yet another marvellous vocal and instrumental performance (everything you hear was played by Paul), while the chord shifts are divinely inspired.

All My Loving

Those lucky enough to have been alive and watching when it happened can today cast their minds back to that magic evening in February of 1964, when upwards of 73 million people tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show to see what all the fuss was about with these crazy English kids from Liverpool, of all places. Ed makes the introduction, the kids start shrieking, then Paul looks straight into the camera, begins singing close your eyes, and I’ll kiss you – and right then, right that instant, the whole course of Western popular culture was irrevocably changed. Everybody noticed the haircuts, the “Beatle Boots”, the smart-looking suits, and the guy whaling away on drums, but a few out there were also able to discern, over the shrill screaming of delirious female fans, one of the standout pop tunes of the era. Among those listening, and fully understanding, was the great Richard Rodgers, probably the only other organism in the fossil record who could ever go toe-to-toe with Paul in the composition of exquisitely memorable popular melodies. He fired off a telegram that Ed read out to the crowd: “I am now one of your most rabid fans”.

Sing the Changes

A positively rousing, anthemic piece played here at a 2009 concert in New York – note how the big screen is projecting the giant smiling face of Barack Obama, then ushering in, so Paul and the rest of us hoped, an era of hope and change after the execrable regime of George W. Bush (it’s rather sad to reflect that at that point, we honestly thought that W. was the worst we’d ever get). The song was produced as part of an experimental side project dubbed “The Fireman”, and resulted from a challenge to write and record a completed track from scratch in the span of a single working day. The lyrics could thus perhaps still use a bit of a polish, but oh, the music, so majestic, so uplifting, of a sort that the likes of U2 or Oasis would surely be only too pleased to have written. The video also showcases McCartney playing with his trademark “lead bass” technique on the legendary Hoffner, the very same instrument he was wielding way back in 1962; note the exuberance and agility of the line, and how he plays it with a pick, rather than plucking it in the usual way. It’s also a treat to see him jamming enthusiastically with drummer Abe Laboriel during the instrumental breaks, and man, that band is tight.

Blackbird

Well, they don’t come any better than this, do they? Another achingly beautiful White Album acoustic number played in the finger-plucking style learned from Donovan in India. Paul has always said that he wrote it as a reaction to the miseries then being suffered by black people in America at the height of the contemporary civil rights struggles, but you don’t need to know anything about that to appreciate its extraordinary grace and universal messages of hope and perseverance. Take these broken wings and learn to fly, he tells his wounded listener. Take these sunken eyes and learn to see. Because no matter how soul-destroying it seems, there’s always a little light remaining in the dark black night, if only you can bring yourself to see.

The second clip provides a “present at the creation” sort of moment, as we watch Paul working on the song in the studio, and discover that the metronomic clicking noise heard on the final track is just the singer tapping his shoes.

I saw him perform this live to a hushed crowd of over 50,000 rapt concert-goers. People wept.

Live and Let Die

Paul reunited with George Martin to produce this taut, dramatic, hugely orchestrated extravaganza for Roger Moore’s first turn at playing Bond, and it worked on every level. The sudden switch into reggae for the middle eight (what does it matter to ya / when you gotta job to do…) is one of those ingenious stunts that only McCartney could have pulled off, and once again we hear him adopting an idiom, writing a song that utterly sounds like a James Bond theme. Twelve-year-old Graeme was extremely pissed that year when it lost out for best song at the Oscars to The Way We Were.

Wanderlust

A song about a sailboat (and what a good name for a yacht, yes?), and fleeing out to sea to escape the madding crowd, as well as the malign clutches of intolerant law enforcement (inspired, perhaps, by his recent stint in a Japanese jail, after he was caught bringing a little weed into the country – hey, it’s medicinal, O.K.?). George Martin was again helming the booth for this and the other songs on 1982’s Tug of War, his first album after the assassination of beloved John. Some may find Wanderlust a little over-produced and even bombastic, but I think it’s magnificent and utterly Beatle-esque, with its inter-twined backing and lead vocals and beautiful brass, besides which there it is again – the perfect musical conclusion, and our old friend the plagal cadence.