FEATURE:
The Digital Mixtape
the greatest musician who has ever lived turns eighty-three. Aa part of The Beatles, Paul McCartney has written some of the most enduring and important songs ever. His work with Wings, Linda McCarney and as a solo artist is part of music’s greatest catalogue. I am marking his upcoming birthday by collecting his best songs and deep cuts from 1983 to today – as he is soon eighty-three. Rather than bring in some biography that charts his whole career – that will take a while to read! -, I want to highlight his earliest days. A bit about his family and the household he was born into. The Paul McCartney Project provide some useful background of this genius musician:
“James Paul McCartney was born on 18 June 1942 in Walton Hospital, Liverpool, England, where his mother, Mary Patricia (née Mohin; 1909–1956), had qualified to practise as a nurse. His father, James (“Jim”) McCartney (1902–1976), was absent from his son’s birth due to his work as a volunteer firefighter during World War II. Paul has one younger brother, Michael (born 7 January 1944). Though the children were baptised in their mother’s Catholic faith, their father was a former Protestant turned agnostic, and religion was not emphasised in the household.
McCartney attended Stockton Wood Road Primary School in Speke from 1947 until 1949, when he transferred to Joseph Williams Junior School in Belle Vale because of overcrowding at Stockton. In 1953, with only three others out of ninety examinees, he passed the 11-Plus exam, meaning he could attend the Liverpool Institute, a grammar school rather than a secondary modern school. In 1954, he met schoolmate George Harrison on the bus from his suburban home in Speke. The two quickly became friends; McCartney later admitted: “I tended to talk down to him because he was a year younger.”
“The type of people that I came from, I never saw better! In the whole of the world! I mean, the Presidents, the Prime Minister, I never met anyone half as nice as some of the people I know from Liverpool who are nothing, who do nothing. They’re not important or famous. But they are smart, like my dad was smart. I mean, people who can just cut through problems like a hot knife through butter. The kind of people you need in life. Salt of the earth.”
McCartney’s mother Mary was a midwife and the family’s primary wage earner; her earnings enabled them to move into 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, where they lived until 1964. She rode a bicycle to her patients; McCartney described an early memory of her leaving at “about three in the morning [the] streets … thick with snow”. On 31 October 1956, when McCartney was fourteen, his mother died of an embolism. McCartney’s loss later became a point of connection with John Lennon, whose mother, Julia, had died when he was seventeen.
McCartney’s father was a trumpet player and pianist, who had led Jim Mac’s Jazz Band in the 1920s. He kept an upright piano in the front room, encouraged his sons to be musical and advised Paul to take piano lessons, but Paul preferred to learn by ear. He gave Paul a nickel-plated trumpet for his fourteenth birthday, but when rock and roll became popular on Radio Luxembourg, McCartney traded it for a £15 Framus Zenith (model 17) acoustic guitar, since he wanted to be able to sing while playing. He found it difficult to play guitar right-handed, but after noticing a poster advertising a Slim Whitman concert and realising that Whitman played left-handed, he reversed the order of the strings. McCartney wrote his first song, “I Lost My Little Girl“, on the Zenith, and composed another early tune that would become “When I’m Sixty-Four” on the piano. American rhythm and blues influenced him, and Little Richard was his schoolboy idol; “Long Tall Sally” was the first song McCartney performed in public, at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition”.
Ahead of 18th June and the eighty-third birthday of Paul McCartney, I wanted to put together a special mixtape. Songs from his career that take us from 1983 to now. The best of the past four decades or so. I wonder whether we will get another album from McCartney. He is still touring but, in terms of his solo output, was 2020’s McCartney III his final studio album? Someone so prolific, I am sure that we will hear something from him soon – let’s hope so! Listen to that distinct and peerless music and it is clear that Paul McCartney, as a songwriter, is the greatest…
WHO has ever lived.