FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney in 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Paul McCartney and Me: The Interviews: Dan Rebellato
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AS part of my run…
PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Rebellato
of forty features leading up to Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, I am interviewing some very special people and asking about their relationship with his music. The iconic McCartney is rumoured to be headlining Glastonbury this summer - so it will be an epic occasion for those who will get to see him on stage after such an awful past couple of years (we do know for definite he is taking his Got Back tour to North America from the end of April through to the middle of June). This time out, I have been speaking with the playwright, teacher and academic, Dan Rebellato. As I am a big fan of Chris Shaw’s I am the EggPod (where a delicious pot pourri of guests discuss Beatles and solo Beatles albums), I know Dan is a big fan of McCartney’s output. He has spoken about The Beatles’ Let It Be (1970), Wings’ final album, Back to the Egg (1979) and, very recently, Paul McCartney’s 1980 album, McCartney II (he also covered Ringo Starr’s underrated Ringo). I ask him about the recent documentary-film, The Beatles: Get Back, and what he took from it, in addition to what Paul McCartney’s music mean to him. The detail and depth Dan provides shows what passion he has for McCartney’s music and unmatched talent! As the legendary and much-adored musician turns eighty on 18th June, it is great hearing what people have to say about his music, legacy and importance. It has been a pleasure discussing with the great Dan Rebellato what Paul McCartney…
IN THIS PHOTO: Rhythm guitarist-vocalist Denny Laine, lead guitarist Laurence Juber, a playful Paul McCartney, a floral bouquet-brandishing Linda McCartney, and drummer Steve Holley represent Wings’ final line-up circa 25th November, 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Evening Standard/Getty Images
MEANS to him.
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Hi Dan. In the lead-up to Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday on 18th June, I am interviewing different people about their love of his music and when they first discovered the work of a genius. When did you first discover Paul McCartney’s music? Was it a Beatles, Wings or solo album that lit that fuse?
I am roughly Lady Madonna years old, so I don’t remember a time where I hadn’t discovered Paul McCartney’s music. It was everywhere in the 1970s, before I was even aware what I was hearing. Live and Let Die, Band on the Run, Let ‘Em In, Mull of Kintyre: these songs were just part of the air we breathed, and The Beatles’ music was the ground we walked on. When I eventually got properly into The Beatles and bought their albums one by one, I was astounded at how many songs I already knew.
Like me, you must have been engrossed by The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+. How did it change your impression of The Beatles at that time, and specifically Paul McCartney’s role and influence on the rest of the band?
I genuinely can’t remember what I expected from Get Back. I was looking forward to it, of course, and I knew it would be interesting, but I really had no clue that I would watch the whole eight hours with my jaw dropped open as I did. The idea that such a thing was possible; that stuck in film cans somewhere was this extraordinary footage; that it was ever going to be so possible to accompany The Beatles as they recorded an album and rehearsed a concert, so intimately, in such vivid detail, with all the tension and all the laughter, the tea and creativity, the interplay of friends and rivals and guests and collaborators. Has there ever been such an intimate portrait of so important a group of artists, capturing so much of their creative process? It feels like possibly the single most important Beatles release since they split up.
I can’t get over it.
In fact, I’ve always been slightly envious of people who were around when The Beatles were releasing their records. What must it have been like to put Sgt. Pepper on for the first time in 1967? But this makes me feel like I’ve finally had that experience. This is as much of a revelation of what The Beatles are like as anything I’ve ever experienced: more thrilling than Anthology, more vivid that the biographies. It’s brought The Beatles back and it’s extraordinary. It feels central and essential to The Beatles. A year ago, if you wanted to immerse yourself in The Beatles, I’d have told you “Just listen to all the albums and all the singles and that’s everything you need”. Now, I’d add “…and watch Get Back”.
It’s transformed my sense of those January 1969 sessions. Like everyone says, these have always been the miserable sessions where The Beatles as good as split up. So vivid was that story that The Beatles themselves seem to have believed it. There’s some truth to that in the Twickenham phase (episode 1) but, if anything, the problem seems to be Twickenham itself. It’s so vast and open, it was evidently very exposing; there was no real chance of having a quiet conversation to sort out problems. It laid bare what would have been fine in a studio: they hadn’t yet got on the same page about what they were doing. It raised the stakes at the point they needed to be lowered, so that people could have been open, creative, free, to try stuff out and fail happily.
The Beatles often stumbled into great ideas (Sgt. Pepper wasn’t a grand plan; just something that evolved), but when you have a film crew and a budget and deadlines and people hanging on your decisions, you can’t busk it, and that heightened the tensions. And once they get into Saville Row, they’re a different band. They’re funny, they’re creative, they’re full of enthusiasm for what they’re doing. Oh lord, when Billy Preston turns up and starts playing with them, it’s out of this world: the looks on their faces, the amazement that this is the missing link they all needed; Billy’s modesty and his funkiness and his grin and his fingers just make everything better. And the rooftop – well, that was always great, even in the original Let It Be movie, but to have it so beautifully restored, looking sharp and joyous, and seeing the lads’ palpable thrill at performing again…honestly it make me cry.
“In fact, I think they all do, but it just underlines what we all knew but which is so remarkable to see laid bare: he was overflowing with great songs – and not just great songs: some of the most beloved songs of all time”.
McCartney comes out astonishingly well from Get Back. In fact, I think they all do, but it just underlines what we all knew but which is so remarkable to see laid bare: he was overflowing with great songs – and not just great songs: some of the most beloved songs of all time. I read once that he wrote Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road on the same day, and I’ve always been slightly sceptical of that. Is it possible that anyone could create two of the most famous rock ballads of all time in a single day? I’m less sceptical now. Songs are pouring out of him and he knows it. And the idea always was that Paul was pushy and arrogant and demanding in these sessions. In fact, he’s in a really difficult position: he’s got a very good idea for the band, that they make a new album but rehearse it and perform it live, but he’s not the leader of the band. It was always - by mostly unspoken agreement - John, but John is no longer interested in being the band leader (he’s more focused on Yoko);. Also, while Paul’s got all these songs, John expended himself on The White Album (1968’s The Beatles), and he is still recovering from the miscarriage, and he is intermittently out of it on heroin. Paul wants to push the live show to happen, but he knows that the more he pushes, the less likely it will be to happen. And – for a twentysomething, working-class bloke in the 1960s – he shows remarkable emotional intelligence and articulacy in navigating how this works.
But then they all come out of it well. George may be a bit sulky and resentful (and has a right to be), but when it’s working, he is completely there: when Get Back appears, he knows it’s great; when Billy Preston arrives, he knows this is fantastic. And even though he didn’t want to go on the roof, once he’s up there, he’s loving it. Ringo is the one they all adore, the one who locks the songs together, the one – I think – who finally gets them to play on the rooftop, but most of all just a relentlessly inventive drummer, in an unflashy, un-self-advertising way. And John, checked out though he is for a while, maybe not coming up with all the songs, but what energy he brings, what humour. Even though he doesn’t want to be the band leader, he is the band leader, and what Get Back made so clear to me is that part of the miracle of The Beatles is that they had a leader who had all the attributes of the person who undermines the leader: he was funny and naughty and mischievous and impulsive and cynical and gullible and lazy and brilliant. This isn’t the character profile of the teacher; it’s the profile of the naughty kid at the back of the class. But he led them and he gave them all permission to be who they were.
And they really were a band. Everyone (including me) has rhapsodised about Paul creating Get Back out of the thin air, but actually the whole band then go to work: George and Ringo adding that chugging, shuffling rhythm; John bringing that great guitar solo; Billy Preston his electric piano lick, the idea to instrumentally fade in, the two-chord crashes that introduce the verses, the cymbal smash on the chorus – these are all worked up by The Beatles as a really great working band.
And bloody hell they looked beautiful, didn’t they?
Since 2017 (with a fiftieth anniversary release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), Giles Martin has brought us reissues and remastered versions of Beatles albums. Although he has made no announcements about any this year, is there a Beatles album you would love to see reissued with extras and demos?
Obviously, the correct answer is all of them. The same technology that Peter Jackson used to lift individual voices and instruments out of mono recordings is getting better and better, and clearly there will be a point when the early records can be given the Giles Martin treatment, and I am here for that.
But the idea I want pitch to Apple is a big fat box-set called The Beatles Live. It would start with John Lennon at Woolton Village Fete, then Some Other Guy from the Cavern, followed by all of the Star Club in Hamburg tapes (finally given an official release). Then we’d have a selection of their early British concerts, then a selection of American gigs - maybe including Ed Sullivan, Hollywood Bowl and Shea Stadium -, selections from Scandinavia, Japan and Australia, and then Candlestick Park.
And finally we’d have the whole of the rooftop gig with no edits at all: just one long continuous and sublime show. All of it spectacularly cleaned up, sharpened, put in stereo and so on. It would probably be 15 discs and cost a fortune, but I need this in my ears.
I thought that 2020’s McCartney III ranked alongside his very best albums. Not many songwriters can produce such good work almost six decades after their first song/album. Why do you think Paul McCartney remains so consistent and enduring?
I don’t know. It’s a mystery – as creativity usually is.
He is just phenomenally talented. A friend of mine said recently that Paul doesn’t need to have a personal crisis to make great music; he just needs to be awake. He seems to have certain personal qualities that keeps him from losing focus: there’s clearly a steeliness to him, a very strong sense of self-possession; he knows exactly who he is. And that balances with an enormous open-heartedness towards the world. People have sometimes mocked his optimism (‘thumbs-aloft Macca’ etc.), but it’s not some bland cheerfulness. He just seems ready to be open to the world and experiences it vividly. The joys as well as the suffering.
A song like Waterfalls (from McCartney II) shows both of those things. It’s a love song, but one at the edge of unimaginable pain.
Maybe an impossible question, but what does Paul McCartney, as a human and songwriting icon, personally mean to you?
This is like the fallacy in the movie Yesterday, which imagines a world which is exactly the same as ours but suddenly everyone has forgotten The Beatles. The fallacy is that our world is unimaginable without them. They didn’t just produce a solid set of songs but, genuinely, they shaped who we are. They wrote pop music, but they also changed entirely what we thought popular music could do; they were at the heart of the Sixties change in social attitudes; they offered an alternative vision of masculinity, so it is impossible to unpick The Beatles from our lives.
And of course I feel the same, personally, about Paul McCartney. There are hundreds of his songs that are part of the fabric of me. I don’t know who Dan is without Get Back and Take It Away and Maybe I’m Amazed and Coming Up and Off the Ground and For No One and Sing the Changes and With a Little Help from My Friends and Jenny Wren…and I could literally go on for pages. I think Paul McCartney is a great artist, an extraordinary pop composer, and a wholly admirable human being…
Will that do?
“There are hundreds of his songs that are part of the fabric of me”.
In 2015, you wrote an article about how the song, The Frog Chorus/We All Stand Together, is used by some to claim McCartney is overrated. You rightly observed that the song is magnificent. Do you think McCartney is underrated or unfairly maligned by some to an extent?
Yes he is – or rather he was.
I think there’s a history to this. Paul didn’t split up The Beatles, but he was the one who announced it; he sued his bandmates (quite rightly, but it must have looked oddly vindictive at the time); and he wrote pop songs. That meant that, in the 1970s, a generation of rock critics – actually the first generation of rock critics – took a dislike to Paul. John was writing painful and personal songs and combative political songs: this is what that very blokey group of writers thought was expressive of the authentic rock attitude: rebellious, cool, aggressive, very male. Paul, by contrast, seemed to be poppy, soppy, uxorious .A craftsman rather than an artist. (Let me be clear: I think these accusations are either untrue or nothing to be ashamed of.) Paul barely got a good review in Rolling Stone throughout the ‘70s. He also had the temerity to sell incredible quantities of records, which for some is proof that his work must be lowest-common-denominator.
Related thought: one of the symptoms of his genius is his ability to create songs that sound like they’ve always existed. And that means it’s easy for some ignorant people to think they must be derivative or safe or conventional. Take Mull of Kintyre. It sounds like it must be based on a nineteenth-century Scots ballad or something but, incredibly, it isn’t. It is a totally new and fresh song that sounds immediately like a classic. I think of that with the rooftop gig in January 1969. It must have been extraordinary to hear Get Back and I’ve Got a Feeling thundering down from the skies, because this would be the first time anyone outside The Beatles’ circles would have heard it but the public take it in their stride because this is what they do: create music that you never hear for the first time because it already seems familiar.
But then, of course, Lennon was murdered and, in the zero-sum game of rock journalism, Paul became vilified. (Was it Victor Lewis-Smith who said, “The Beatles are dying in the wrong order”? Tell you what. I think Victor Lewis Smith is dying in the wrong order.) It coincided with his only real lapse in sure-footedness, with the sequence of Pipes of Peace, Broad Street and Press to Play (though I think there’s lots of great stuff on all those records individually) feeling a bit aimless as a whole: MOR followed by the curious re-recordings of some of his songs, followed by a record filled with zeitgeist-chasing production. At least that’s how it seemed.
In fact, very few Sixties stars had a great Eighties. Dylan, The Kinks, The Who, The Beach Boys – all of them hit lows in the Eighties (or, perhaps more pertinently, as they reached their forties). And that meant that, really, people stopped listening – or listening superficially and dismissing; sometimes listening only to dismiss. We All Stand Together is a great example: a sumptuous, beautiful children’s song dismissed as if there’s something shameful about the man who wrote Helter Skelter writing a song for kids (and as if no one remembered Yellow Submarine).
Things started to change with the Beatles Anthology I think, and simultaneously with Britpop and McCartney recording Flaming Pie -which gets his first really great reviews since Tug of War. The resurgence of cultural interest in The Beatles meant that everyone seemed to remember how extraordinary they were and how lucky we are that Paul’s still around. (I think it’s a very good record, though I think the main difference is that people listened to it respectfully – I’m not sure it’s actually that much better than Off the Ground, especially the expanded version.) And I’m not sure he’s put a foot wrong ever since. I don’t think he has released a weak album for 25+ years, and some of them have been extraordinary. I think his gentler model of masculinity and his evident love for Linda and his commitment to his kids has also aged very well. And all of that culminates with Get Back, where Paul is this bewildering, astonishing magical fountain of music is laid bare – and looking so utterly fucking gorgeous. I mean, Christ, his hair alone should win an Oscar.
And it does mean that I wonder if we’re now in danger of under-rating John Lennon?
“The resurgence of cultural interest in The Beatles meant that everyone seemed to remember how extraordinary they were and how lucky we are that Paul’s still around”.
The most current Paul McCartney compilation, Pure McCartney, arrived in 2016, and it featured more of his better-known songs. Are there particular deep cuts (from Wings or his solo career) that you would include on your own McCartney compilation?
I was amazed that Take It Away didn’t make it on there. Great lyric, exhilarating arrangement, funky bass line. A truly great single. Paul doesn’t seem to rate Back to the Egg, but I’d add Getting Closer (fantastic power-pop single), Spin It On (Stooges-like pop-punk), Old Siam Sir (thunderous Zeppelinesque rock stormer), and frankly probably To You, After the Ball/Million Miles, Winter Rose/Love Awake and So Glad to See You Here. Back to the Egg is one of my favourite Wings records, and I can’t wait for the long-expected Archive edition.
I’m Carrying from London Town should have been on there. A haunting ballad with great lyrics and a ghostly arrangement. I love the Jon Kelly mix of A Love for You (from the Ram sessions). Daytime Nighttime Suffering (the B-side to Goodnight Tonight) is magnificent. Tomorrow and Some People Never Know from Wildlife and Little Lamb Dragonfly from Red Rose Speedway are beautiful pastoral numbers. I’d put his late Dave Grohl collaboration, Cut Me Some Slack, on there.
Oh. I love Despite Repeated Warnings from Egypt Station. I know some people find Driving Rain hard going, but From a Lover to a Friend and the title track are great examples of McCartney not being relentlessly upbeat, but expressing terrible pain, loss and vulnerability in a way I find endlessly moving.
More happily, I love Ever Present Past and See Your Sunshine from Memory Almost Full – oh, and in similar vein, Keep Under Cover from Pipes of Peace. I’m jumping around the back catalogue, I know, but Mamunia off Band on the Run is heavenly. Check My Machine (B-side to Temporary Secretary), Summer’s Day Song and One of These Days from McCartney II, and the longest version of Secret Friend (an outtake from those sessions) you can find would be good. Two Magpies and Lifelong Passion from Electric Arguments (an album by The Fireman: an experimental music duo consisting of McCartney and producer Youth)? Riding to Vanity Fair from Chaos and Creation? Title song from Off the Ground? This is getting ridiculous. Oh. If we’re allowed to put unreleased songs, Cage and – one of his very loveliest songs and a mystery to me that he’s not put it out – Waterspout. And, hey, what about Givin’ Grease a Ride from the McGear (a collaboration between Paul and his younger brother, Mike McGear) album? That’s got to be at least a double album’s worth of stuff not on Pure McCartney!
You have appeared on Chris Shaw’s superb Beatles podcast, I am the EggPod, and discussed Back to the Egg by Wings, The Beatles’ Let It Be, and Paul McCartney’s McCartney II. If you had to choose, which are your favourite Beatles, Wings and McCartney solo albums?
It genuinely changes all the time, but I think I am Team Sgt. Pepper as the best Beatles album. It’s not necessarily got the best songs, but I find it such a completely joyful experience listening to it from end to end. Favourite Wings? Well, I’m going for Back to the Egg, but it’s a fight out with Band on the Run. I prefer the production on B.T.T.E. Favourite solo album. Ram is the obvious choice, but today I’m going to say Electric Arguments, which was just so startling: completely classic McCartney and completely a 21st-century record without sounding like he’s trying to sound ‘with it’. (Mind you, maybe that’s not a solo album exactly. Hmmm.)
“If you wanted to study songwriting, I don’t know that you could do better than breaking down his songs to see how they tick”.
As an academic, might there be a case to argue that Paul McCartney is an important historical figure that should be taught at schools and universities more? Do you think we will ever see someone with his ability and influence ever again?
Who knows? It’s hard to think the stars will align in quite the way they did when The Beatles appeared. The pop/rock band-as-auteur that the Beatles really embodied and made a model for everyone else no longer seems to be an idea at the centre of the culture anymore…probably because of streaming? But I also think that the culture has so diversified that it’s much harder for a single act to command that national attention the way that it does seem as though when Sgt. Pepper came out. It simply became something everyone had to hear and have a position on.
Should he be taught in schools and universities? Yes, absolutely, and I’m sure he is. If you wanted to study songwriting, I don’t know that you could do better than breaking down his songs to see how they tick. And no one can study post-war British culture and society without at the very least touching on The Beatles. The question is how to study The Beatles and Paul. I’m not sure the narrowly (formalistically) musicological approach is quite right. There’s such a mixture of songwriting, performance, attitude, and context in his achievement that I suspect we still don’t quite understand it.
It was great reading The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present and learning the stories behind the songs. Is there a Paul McCartney song or lyric that has great personal relevance or holds huge significance?
I had a relationship break-up in 2000 which left me quite shipwrecked. I hadn’t expected it and, at that time, had thought it would be my whole future, so it was shattering. But at the same time, I had a huge project on at work, so had very little headspace to process what had happened. And I was at Waterloo Station one morning waiting to get the train to work, and realised I’d brought my Sony Discman™, but not any actual CD to listen to. There used to be a small Our Price record shop on the station concourse, and I went in thinking I might get an album by some new interesting band, but the first thing I saw was The Beatles’ 1 album – the singles compilation. I knew all these songs backwards of course, but I realised it would be comfort food for the soul, so I bought it.
And listening to Hey Jude, probably for the 2000th time in my life, the lyric that I’d always thought of as a meaningless placeholder, “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, suddenly seemed to me absolutely crystal clear, unambiguous, and profound. I didn’t have to just be the passive recipient of the bad news that had happened to me; I could take charge of my life, my feelings, my situation. I remember feeling it was an image of Atlas, bearing the earth on his shoulder; having that power to shift a world with a simple move. And by the end of the journey, I feel like I’d started to process my grief and move towards some kind of reconciliation with what had happened. So, thank you Paul.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney captured during a shoot for GQ in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Collier Schorr
If you had the chance to interview Paul McCartney now and ask him any one question, what would it be?
What does it feel like, in your body and mind, when you feel a song coming?
If you could get a single gift for McCartney for his eightieth birthday, what would you get him?
John Lennon back.
To end, I will round off the interview with a Macca song. It can be anything he has written or contributed to. Which song should I end with?
Maybe I’m Amazed.
Because when I think of Paul, I have lots of feelings – admiration, perplexity, gratitude – but, more than anything, maybe I’m amazed…