The Mirror and the Scene

Recently I've been going through quite a Paul McCartney phase. Some might even say that is ill advised. I came late to The Beatles 'proper', having been initiated by my friend Steven when I was fourteen or fifteen but with the result of only liking the occasional track, which in most cases were the Lennon tracks or the Harrison tracks, generally finding Paul's music saccharine, and dare I say boring.

The songs which featured on this list of Beatles dislikes were the typical moon/spoon stuff along with 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be', 'Eleanor Rigby', and 'Yesterday' and so on. The only time I'd ever been taken aback by the song Yesterday, was out of context in a Mantovani type string arranged segment which featured in the film Once Upon A Time In America in between Ennio Morricone's beautiful theme score, other than that I couldn't bear to hear it.


The songs I gravitated towards back then were the more mystical dreamlike Lennon songs like 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'Julia', 'Across the Universe' or the sincere every-note-counts of Harrison's 'Something' or 'Here Comes The Sun'. As pieces of music and sentiments I found them somehow more endearing, more enduring and more heartfelt and soulful than I did of the McCartney material, one exception being oddly, 'I Will' (which as saccharine as a choice it may be) was something I heard first covered (even more saccharine) by Art Garfunkel!

Now, on the flip side one could equally say that Lennon's mystical dreamlike songs were as indulgent as McCartney's were bland.

Other than that most of my musical obsession was taken up for a good few years by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, at least until I turned 21 and was knocked out of the addiction and flung fully into the world of the world of music 'outside' of the Bob Dylan cradle thanks to a broken heart and a new set of mates with more diverse tastes in music.

Anyway, several years ago, after having had a quite strident, 'not interested' opinion on the Beatles aside from the odd track, I began to take them more seriously.

I think the thing that often turns people off The Beatles is the hype surrounding them and the esteem with which they are held, so that even before you've heard their music you know who they are and everyone thinks they're great. The inner contrarian/cynic in me was immediately turned off and decided to avoid these horrific Beatles at all costs.

At some point I got to see A Hard Day’s Night, and began to realise that behind these - what I thought of as - throwaway nursery rhyme rock n' roll songs, or songs you find in a 'Complete Keyboard Player' book in the homes of middle class parents, or a school music teachers idea of 'good' music, were these really satirical, ironic and hilarious figures who were not the sanitised bollocks I'd always believed them to be.

I distinctly remember as a young teenager leafing through my granddad Gibb's 'teach yourself how to play keyboard' to find among 'When The Saints Go Marching In', 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' and deciding from then that everything that was wrong with the world, with music and with people must have something to do with those fucking abhorrent songs and those fucking 'Complete Keyboard Player' books. To this day I still hate 'When the Saints Go Marching In', 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore' and hope they along with every fucking moron who has ever played those songs on a keyboard marches into a fiery furnace of misery.

Anyways, getting back to my love for the Beatles. Seeing A Hard Day’s Night opened my eyes. These chaps were funny and talented and swept up in a new kind of entertainment world which they would serve as future role models. They hadn't had their spirits kicked out of them, the way these despicable Reality-TV-talent-shows now currently murder kids' spontaneity and sense of instinct and when you watched them performing songs from the album the movie takes its name, you realise how effortless and brilliant those melodies were, which can only have come from a mixture of the Rhythm & Blues they'd heard from vinyl shipped in from the states down on the Albert Docks when they were still tear-away teddy boys in Liverpool to the 'granny music' John accurately described as Paul's 'influence' from his father.

When you combine those two elements, and John, Paul, George and Ringo's equal love for Rock n' Roll and Country Music, you have what at that point was the future synthesis and model for modern popular music obviously...

Now getting to McCartney. I can leave Lennon aside, as I had always preferred his music, always thought of it as more emotional, visceral, subversive and sincere. 

My entry to McCartney's music was actually not via his Beatles output initially (I came to appreciate that again later), but his first - DIY - album McCartney and the second one Ram, which as far as I'm concerned are both brilliant. As far as DIY, McCartney set a standard, otherwise established as far as I can tell with Skip Spence's 1969 work Oar.

The linchpin without a doubt with McCartney was the song Junk, that beautiful nostalgic recollections of a junk shop where signs in the shop window wonder why. He gave the artefacts a humanity and married it with a beautiful sorrowful melody, and the fact that unlike some of his earlier work, it wasn't laden with gooey schlocky lushness, but was sparse, spare, a bit rough around the edges made it beautiful. Followed by 'Every Night', 'Oo You', 'Man We Was Lonely' and 'Teddy Boy' (a failed Beatles song Lennon hated, and which in another context I'd probably hate too). Again, taking the contrarian stance the typically honoured 'Maybe I'm Amazed' leaves me cold. Its shit Paul, shit.



So McCartney led me to Ram and the amazing 'Uncle Albert' et al, but most importantly to revisionism of his work with The Beatles and so began my appreciation of the man's music both as a writer and crucially as an arranger. You only have to hear his bass contributions to the other Beatles' work to see how he could lift a song up at the right places. Although Lennon was good at dropping a 'Spaniard' in the works with his wit and cynicism, his musical forms were far less advanced than Paul's, but at times they were equally spellbinding. 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' is ample evidence of how great Lennon could be.

From there I went back to 'Penny Lane' and admitted to myself that I no longer hated it, I loved its nod to the Beach Boys. Then I decided I could stomach Paul's ode to the mysterious Eleanor (Rigby). Having previously thought it boring and farty to make up songs about imaginary people, their imaginary lives (although much evidence suggests she was real) and their lonely existence. Now I think of it as song craft, and admirable to a point. But further back you need only look at a song like Things We've Said Today, which has such a fantastic feel and melodically is gorgeous, never mind the obvious cliché choices people always comment on like 'Here, There and Everywhere', which is also a tremendous song.

I even came to almost like 'The Long And Winding Road' (mainly the piano playing), which had long been a song I had hated for its seemingly pointless sentiments leading to the irritating verse ending chords which cry out that 'daa daa, daa daa, daa'. McCartney certainly knows how to verge on elevator music and Lennon could bring him back from this abyss, but equally McCartney could save John from his indulgence of the self in song. Alas we have Ian Macdonald's book Revolution in the Head, so I may as well say no more on any of this.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that although McCartney irritates me like the incessant drip in the bucket from a leaky ceiling, sometimes I think 'damn, that's a good fucking song'.

Aside from the first two records and obviously avoiding the utterly yuckifying Broad Street, I have steered clear of most of McCartney's other solo work and always kept a 'file for later' policy on 'getting into' more of his stuff. But in referring to the previous paragraph, sometimes I'm nicely surprised by a new song I had not heard before. Two examples of this were hearing 'Jenny Wren', from Chaos and Creation.. and 'Calico Skies'.

The guitar arrangement of the former song is in the classic Macca-Blackbird vein, but it's pretty, prettier than 'Blackbird', and a better song to boot (controversial?). The lyrics are pretty straightforward, but something about the song suggests it was an inspiration song, the guitar piece particularly. Although lyrically it could never match it, it somehow reminds me of how Dylan must have written 'Dark Eyes':

Like so many girls, Jenny Wren could sing
But a broken heart, took her song away

Like the other girls, Jenny Wren took wing
She could see the world, and its foolish ways

She saw poverty, breaking up her home
Wounded warriors, took her song away

For the guitar players out there, the song is down-tuned a tone and the change from Am to Cm is a beast, as is the standard picking change from Am to G to F on the 'breaking up her home' part.





Equally 'Calico Skies' had a similar effect on me. Again, like much of Macca's output the song could verge on the cheese-factor, specifically a video performance of it with him playing it by a crackling fire in a forest with his tracksuit bottoms on. Plonker. I've picked a live version to show below, because I enjoy the strings on it, more than the video footage of Paul playing it by a smoking fire! Although even the strings are slightly cheesy. Either way, great song Paul!

Interestingly, both songs, both just over two minutes in length and both seemingly inspiration songs which feel like they were written relatively quickly share a similiar sentiment about a cruel world outside, with Calico Skies referencing 'crazy soldiers' and 'weapons of war', and Jenny Wren, 'wounded warriors' and 'the broken world' and its 'foolish ways'.



Of recent there seems to be either a cunning PR campaign to revitalise his career or a general revisionism growing (or probably both) around McCartney's cultural role/impact in terms of an avant-garde musician with his interest in electronic music and his apparent love of early experimental music/music-concrete. I had been one who thought of this revisionism in the various music magazines, as rather annoying cynical ploys to reinforce his influence as the Beatles, sell more records and compete with Yoko Ono's genius John Lennon branding.

Having gone through my own revisionism of his work, it seems that in the mainstream at least there is no need to reinforce his credentials, as apart from the young muppets on Twitter asking 'Who the F&*% is Paul McCartney?' after his recent Grammy outing, most know who he is and certainly out of the mainstream enough people appreciate the best of his work. Yet even where I think the arguments (tied in with the 'Carnival of Light' debate) for this 'McCartney as the experimenting Beatle' are weak, there is some importance in this revisionism in that it reminds people that amongst the schlock and the clangers, there are some real diamonds that should be heard.

Having already expressed my hatred of 'The Complete Keyboard Player' manuals and the like I will step back slightly from that. One thing I think crucial about McCartney is how influential a piano player he is. Something that I haven't seen mentioned much. You can pretty much guarantee that students of music theory will have at some point learnt what I had viewed as those atrociously bland and boring songs 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' at music lessons and that essentially the style in which they played those songs came directly from Paul McCartney’s own fingering technique.

Paul McCartney, a self-taught - dare I say - raw and 'natural' musician (whose musical scope and melodic ear is pretty astonishing) who in fact has probably influenced a million student piano players and future classically trained musicians and songwriters perhaps even unconsciously in their playing of piano and in their composition. There are positives and negatives to this obviously, on the negative someone boring like Jamie Cullum or even Chris Martin when that silly prat gets anywhere near a piano.

Even more crucially, McCartney is not hailed as a great piano player, yet most of the kids who learn piano will have within their playing style, especially if they follow the educational playbooks, something of McCartney’s instilled within their own, that unmistakeable piano sound that you hear on 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be' or even 'The Long and Winding Road' have been the basis for many kids to learn piano. Even back when I was at secondary school you'd hear the trickles of those songs flowing down from the music rooms as the teacher tried to teach the kids a 'modern' song instead of a Mozart or whatever else. That's probably why I always hated those songs, because i associated them with institutions and establishments and they seemed to fit so nicely into the worst elements of taught music because they were not idiosyncratic, but in a sense definitive, concise and easy examples of 'how to play'. His playing is almost a lesson in instruction for piano, basic chord patterns, roots and fifths and the switches between them and underneath deceivingly simple and catchy melodies. Look at any musician, who was generally tutored whether at school or privately and somewhere within their style is Paul McCartney and the traces of his Granny Music.

Equally, the same can be said of his guitar style specifically on 'Blackbird'. These two points are something I can't imagine (no pun intended) apply in the same way to John Lennon or Bob Dylan or any other songwriter, although a couple of Lennon's songs, particularly 'In My Life' which have something of the McCartney feel, also have that classic Lennon trope, shift from major to minor on the IV chord (e.g. C to Cminor in the key of G) which has found it's way into the popular song.

So, sorry Paul for not giving you credit where credit was due sooner. I still think you need a kick up the arse sometimes, and although your songs don't always move me soulfully or emotionally you're one hell of a song crafter and musician and an absolutely necessary tonic to people in the John Lennon camp, who can be as loathsomely indulgent as you can sometimes be loathsomely bland.