PAUL MCCARTNEY – “Pipes Of Peace”
“In love our problems disappear”: ever since the high days of the Beatles, Paul McCartney had a thing about love. Even after – especially after – he’d had to play the hard-nosed one and break up that band, “love” remained as a presence in his songwriting, something increasingly abstract and mystical: a universal solvent.
There are worse things to have a bee in one’s bonnet about, of course. It’s easy to use McCartney’s lyrics to mock or dismiss his drippiness: the words to “Pipes Of Peace” are certainly clumsier, possibly even triter than those of “Ebony And Ivory”. “Songs of joy instead of burn baby burn”: eek! It’s a similar record, but I think a rather better one. Both songs walk a tightrope over an abyss of crassness: “Ebony” topples in, while “Pipes” has a humility and sincerity that lets it (just about) cling on.
It’s also – though George Martin’s attention-deficit production tries its best to disguise the fact – a sterling melody and a well-put-together song. The calm solemnity of the opening lines, the sad turn on “planet we’re playing on” and the carefree tumbles in the instrumental break are affecting no matter what guff Macca is singing. McCartney’s professed ideal of love is as inert as ever: as usual, it’s prettiness that pulls him through.
5
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,583 views • Share/Save
Actually, playing the video just now I was a bit mean on G.Martin, who deserves credit if only for that proto-Timbaland tabla break near the end!
I definitely agree with you Tom re the comparison with ‘Ebony and Ivory’ – this is better and feels like it could have been a whole lot better if Macca had taken more care with the lyrics.
There’s a strange atonal orchestral bit at the start of the video, not sure if it’s on the actual single – reminiscent of the end of ‘A day in the Life’. That and touches like the tabla make it a little out of the ordinary.
I find the video quite affecting and it serves to undercut the sentiment of the lyrics as does the vocal which has a melancholy quality which is present in a lot of McCartney’s ballads (Yesterday; For noone) – as if in his heart of hearts he can’t believe in the power of love no matter how much he professes to do so.
The call for peace reflects a martial theme to several of the song this year, including ‘Love Wars’ and a forthcoming number 1. Cruise Missiles arrived in the UK in November 1983 and Thatcher and Reagan were cranking up the Cold War rhetoric – beware the savage claw…
Two forthcoming number ones!
Magnificent songwriting craft, yes some of the lyrics are a bit iffy, but I love when a song unfolds, and it seems to have so many options, so many parts working so well off each other.
It’s a far sight better than most of the last few number 1s, although I still prefer the Frog Chorus :)
A 7 from me.
Pleasant enough, but to one who grew up with the Beatles it’s a long way from Paulie at the height of his powers.
For me, it’s rather ironic that 1994 should begin with a voice and a style as comfortable as an old pair of slippers, because a look at what’s to come suggests that it’s this year when my engagement with pop begins to crumble. I’m turning all bourgeois you see – from being on my uppers I was in a position to start looking for a house to buy, and zooming in on a terrace house in an unadopted road in Bedfordshore. In those days before the railway was electrified and the City boom really took off, property in rural Beds – often former brickworkers cottages – was plentiful and relatively cheap, and I would have secured it but for the building society – one Northern Rock – cavilling about the unadopted road. I never tried again. By the end of the year my situation was looking very different indeed. But that’s a story to be unveiled as the year moves on.
My chief reaction to the ascendency of this as an eleven year-old was relief at the vanquishing of The Flying Pickets.
It’s very much the sort of single that rises to the top a week or two after Christmas, isn’t it? Everyone who was going to has bought the seasonal records, nothing specificly of the new year has yet replaced them… This old guy has had a pleasant tune around for a few weeks by now – I’ve heard it so many times that its really got into my head.
I think that this might be the first song on Popular where i always remember the video a lot better than the song. You have to admire the care with which its been put together and edited. As with a lot of McCartney’s solo work the display of cheery humility (multiple Maccas but all good sports) can be read as being a different form of egotism if you’re feeling ill-disposed towards him. I don’t think that I’d go that far.
A pity that it couldn’t have been ‘Take It Away’. Or ‘No More Lonely Nights’.
#2 Watch: A week of Howard Jones’ ‘What Is Love?’
I recently noticed how similar the brilliant horn parts on the outro to “Take It Away” are to Jigsaw’s “Sky High”.
This is just slightly over the hill for me. My serious interest in Macca ends just after “Tug Of War” – the album, not the song so much – which is as weird and cold as his 70s stuff, but with generally better tunes. I haven’t heard the “Pipes Of Peace” LP for years, but I recall a mess of sap and non-funky funk; I think it’s the point where Paul McCartney becomes what people think of as Paul McCartney, if you know what I mean.
Part of the appeal of his earlier solo records is their strangely alienated feeling, a not-rightness, even (especially) when aiming for loved-up warmth. “Pipes Of Peace” feels authentically cosy, rather than just cloying, and while I have a high McCartney tolerance I really can’t handle this one – or much of what came next.
I remember this fondly from childhood so already have some affection for it, but listened to objectively I think it’s pretty good too.
Easily the best of his post-Fab 4 number ones after the musical equivalent of a tin of shortbread and that one with Stevie Wonder
Jeremy and Valerie was it?
Re 8: a mention of Jigsaw’s Sky High compels me to say RIP Clive Scott, who wrote it along with fellow Jigsaw-ee Des Dyer. They also wrote Who Do You Think You Are by Candlewick Green et cet. A classic, old school, Denmark Street pop song writer. I’ll also tip my hat to his Leave A little Love (also Candlewick Green) which, while not a hit, is similarly touched with greatness.
I have a residual soft spot for Pipes Of Peace, partly (v rare for me) through the touching video – is its mateyness where the Thumbsaloft nickname originates? First listen in several years hasn’t done any damage to my affection for it. The complexity and of the melody on the opening lines alone is astonishing. It certainly feels closer to pre-rock Broadway than F***** or any other ’84 Popularistes, and sounds a heck of a lot less gooey than a forthcoming entry from his erstwhile duet partner.
It sounds like McCartney’s actually worked for some time on the entire record – melodically, structurally, production-wise – in a way that gives it a similar feeling to Ram. Too often, he’s good enough to leave the job half-finished (Coming Up, Let ‘Em In, etc etc) and get away with it; I’d like to think this was a no.1 because he spent that extra bit of time on it. “Authentically cosy” it is, no bad thing in my book*.
Oh, the Beach Boy/Frog Chorus harmonised finale is a sweet twist, too.
*My Name Is Aram by William Saroyan
This was the B-side of “So Bad” which in the U.S. was the followup to “Say Say Say”. But MTV played this when it came out, and that’s how most McCartney fans in America probably remember it. By the way “So Bad” peaked at #23. As somebody already posted, the video is more memorable than the song, but not a complete washout.
I don’t think this did much in the US but I hated the album of the same name because it had “Say Say Say” on it, which I desperately wanted to have but which unfortunately came with lots of other songs without Michael Jackson on them. “Thriller” was the first – and for some time the only – album I’d bought, and getting stuck with “The Girl is Mine” instead of “SSS” felt like a cheap ploy to get me to buy an entire other album full of horrible dreck. No peace pipe for me – this album meant war against Paul McCartney forever.
Enjoyed the video a lot at the time. Besides ‘Say Say Say’ this was my introduction to Macca but I can’t remember any sense of ‘oh he used to be in the most famous band ever’ figuring in my thoughts until a few years later (maybe when George Harrison re-surfaced). Funny to think that he was enjoying his last run of huge hits here, never to return to the top 3 of the charts on his own – needed some bloody frogs to help him a year after this. Actually, looking at everyhit, it’s a little strange how many of his later singles peaked between 16 and 25. Even when he dies it’s hard to think of a solo song of his that could return to the top as opposed to the group stuff.
It might be a blessing for a singer not to have a My Sweet Lord/Imagine on their cv.
If Man In The Mirror is anything to go by, I reckon the public will choose to remember the last remaining Beatles with Octopus’s Garden and When I’m 64.
Maybe it’s something pop stars should specify in their will: “In the event of my death, the following songs are to receive promotion…”
I actually bought this at the time. I was 14 and going through my Beatles-nut stage which meant acquiring as many Fab-related records as I could, including solo singles. I don’t think I’ve played it for nearly 25 years.
The video, I recall, was something of a big deal at the time, heavily trailed on TV and a big fuss made of the ’special effects’ (Paul McCartney on one side and Paul McCartney on the other! Amazing!) But the song itself is all a bit ho-hum. I’d say 5 is quite generous.
I think it would be a bit harsh slamming this one, as it is clearly decent and well-meaning. Obviously it is preferable not to be advocating conflict but rather than to sponsor harmony, even if it is done in such a stomach-churningly cheesy way, it would in all liklihood have had Macca’s assassinated partner in peals of silvery laughter rather than in unspeakable outrage.
I love this one, in a ‘when you’re in the mood’ sort of way, although I guess I agree with everyone about the lyrics. But then I suppose one thing I respect about Paul McCartney is that he has always been brave enough to be uncool.
It’s a great introduction and coda, and I’m not sure that on the music front I could find anything that would mark it down. So I’ll disagree with Will at #17 and say that 5 seems a tad low.
i loved ‘pipes of peace’ at the time, but can’t say i’m so fussed these days. it did however mark the start of my Year of Pop. as an eleven-year old (probably about the last age at which you can have a wholly uncomplicated relationship with the charts) it seemed to me in 1984 that all these monster hits represented music that had evolved to reach the point of perfection. looking at what we have to come, i can still see what i meant – to some extent this music is still my ideal of pop music, against which all else is measured. it probably helped that almost everything was at number one for *ages*, and a lot of it’s probably just to do with being that age, but i’ve never felt so connected, both as an individual, and as part of a peer group with what was at the top end of the charts. certainly pop in 1984 was public to a surely unprecedented degree – both in a “oh noes controversy” and a ‘behold this momentous event’ way. but more of all this later no doubt.
(ever so slightly) more relevant to today, myself and some friends once invented a very excellent ‘pipes of peace’ drinking game. the rules were not complex. players stand in a circle passing round booze while singing “play the pipes of peace play the pipes of peace” in a mournful tone until no more booze can be found. for added pop bonus points the game was invented at a party on the infamous FRONTLINE. (though at the rather pleasant herne hill end, disappointingly).
Curious, really, that I never really latched onto this song, because I’d already had my first brush with the Beatles via a singles compilation released six months earlier, but the full-blown obsession really only took off later in 1984 when a friend taped me the White Album. I never even bought this album, which doesn’t seem any great loss, because I can’t see it standing up to 1968-vintage Paul; and yet somehow I ended up owning Give My Regards to Broad Street, which doesn’t stand up to Paul of almost any vintage.
The song strikes me now as standard solo McCartney fare, with musical call-backs to past glories (the faux mellotron) sitting alongside contemporary flourishes (is that R2D2 whistling a few notes?), all propping up a workmanlike tune. I can’t really get excited about it, unlike some other solo-Macca moments before and since. A middling 5.
I quite like the video, though, which is another I’m pretty sure I’d never seen. He should have forgotten about Broad Street and made McCartney Goes Forth.
It suddenly strikes me that I’m almost exactly the age Paul was when this hit number one. Oh God, now I’m going to have one of those what-had-you-done-by-this-age moments. He wrote workmanlike number ones, and I’m writing workmanlike blog comments.
#14 Mull of Kintyre would go back to No1 forever in the event of a McCartney croak. And I know what you’re thinking but come on, Wings is just another name for solo Macca.
22, Yesterday surely?
Re 20: That’s a great point. I was 8/9 in 73/74 and can vouch that records like See My Baby Jive, Leader Of The Gang, Tiger Feet and Gonna Make You A Star seemed like major events at the time, the most POP pop there had ever been; with records regularly flying in at no.1 (hadn’t happened for 4 years, wouldn’t happen for another 6) it must have felt that way to a lot of pop fans.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I? It felt like the perfect time to be the age I was because it felt like pop was aimed directly at ME and my pre-teen contemporaries. I’d never questioned this before, but maybe I’d have felt the same way if I was 9 in 1960 or 1987, really stinky years for pop.
‘84 was my Year Of POP too – everything seemed either the most amazing thing ever or the most terrible thing ever and it mattered VERY MUCH which was winning.
I kind of still feel this abt the year’s music though some things have switched sides since I was 11!
Mm – I was eleven in 1984 and can report the same thing. Apart from the monumental scale of many of the number ones that year, and their prolonged tenures at the top, I think that there are other factors that encouraged this response in me; it was when I started habitualy listening to the Radio (Radio 1 and Capital) and it was when my interest was such that I started buying pop magazines. And thinking about it, the move from primary to secondary school may also have some bearing on the matter.
An interesting thing about these spasms of “this is the moment pop was utterly for-and-about me” is that they possibly don’t simply function interchangeably: for one demi-generation the concluded-average-age this occurs at is 9; for another it’s 15 — there’s an affective dance between the quality of the year considered without this response, and the nature of the response
(which is why ken dodd’s “tears” is not “part of 1967″: who gets to decide the narrative, and when? when do the massed 9-yr-olds come enough of age that they get a decent chance to say OUR YEAR WAS THIS SHAPE… and when do they arrive to find that the massed 15-yr-olds already came of age, possibly six year earlier, POSSIBLY NOT, and already determined how the shape of the year was going to be seen)
^i need a spreadsheet and graphs to express this idea clearly i suspect
when do the massed 9-yr-olds come enough of age that they get a decent chance to say OUR YEAR WAS THIS SHAPE?
aha. they do this at the time, by buying the records that make the year the shape they celebrate, of course. hurrah! or they do in chartopia. the first record i ever bought was released in june 1985…
1971 wasn’t Baby Jump-shaped, it has since transpired.
Anybody got a “my pop year” that isn’t ’84 or ’73/’74? 1978 seems rather child-shaped (maybe why I loathed so many of the no.1s as I was all of 13).
#24 I was 9 in 1987 and I can confirm that I thought pop music was awesome at the time (maybe not a great year for #1s but a couple of instant classics spring immediately to mind). I’m not sure when I started considering such concepts as ‘a bad year for pop’, probably only since the inception of the “blogosphere” ulp.
1984 was the big one for me, too. I was 9-10.
inception of the “blogosphere” = bad year for EVERYTHING
#29 – we’ve just had mine, but 1984 was pretty big too. After that looms the abyss…
this strikes me as the point where the ’60s icons ceased being young and relevant. some would cite the punk era but the pistols weren’t playing the same game as mccartney or the stones, at that point. they wanted to react against mccartney, not compete directly with him. logic would dictate that punk was also the impetus behind “some girls” and “mccartney 2″, ie old bands compelled to learn some new tricks. but by the mid-80s, young and old had at last met each other halfway. the new bands were arguably as commercially-focused as their elders, and the elders had finally run out of new tricks. even up to “tug of war” mccartney was trying some new things or at least actively perfecting his popcraft and updating it for the new decade. this seems to be his first single/album where he has relaxed and lost his ferocious competetive instinct enough to say “i’m paul mccartney and this is what i do. if you’re in the mood for something of this sort, here’s a new album/single”. i think the other ’60s acts were pulling this same move as well. this has been mccartney’s MO ever since. if you want a sandwich, you eat a sandwich. if you want some paul mccartney, you buy his latest. i’ve always loved mccartney, but aside from the odd catchy single or interesting album (“press to play” and “chaos and creation” being the only two i can think of post-’84) he was done and, cheerfully and good-naturedly, admits it for the first time here.
I think from any objective point of view 1984 was a momentous year for chart pop. Six singles sold over a million copies, a figure that’s unlikely to ever be repeated. The charts and those who were successful in them were central to popular culture in a way that’s unthinkable today.
1981 for me – I was 14 mind, but I loved pop for all of 79-82, so 4 Years of Pop, greedy I know….
1984 was a great pop year for me too – but I was 24! I think this partly reflected the fact that I was in my first paying job and had disposable income to spend on records and gigs.
Milestone years for me were 72 – first single (Metal guru) and 76-79 for punk, dub and disco.
I suppose 1964 was the year I really thought pop was mine (rather than, say, my 15-year-old sister’s). 1966 remains the greatest year for ‘my’ pop.
I suppose this is what happens when you grow up in a popless home: I never felt that pop was aimed at me, even in years when I loved nearly everything I heard. It was always something made by (and for) other people, more beautiful, more brave, and more certain of themselves than I could ever hope to be. (And if you were listening to the radio in the 80s, that includes you!)
Even today, listening to pop can sometimes feel like reading a bunch of different fantasy novels: I have to work to keep straight the worlds in which these specific songs matter, none of which much resemble my world.
Sorry! I’ll go off and be maudlin elsewhere now.
Jonathan, that’s a fascinating observation, which makes me think again about McCartney and the “Beatles-nut stage” that Will mentioned at #17, and which lasted for me from 1984-1988. For those of us who weren’t around or old enough in the 1960s or ’70s to enjoy the Beatles first-hand, or even to appreciate the best of their 1970s solo work, there was a real sense in the early-to-mid-’80s of having missed the boat. There were (and still are) two ways of dealing with that: ignore the Beatles altogether, dismissing them as irrelevant to today’s musical concerns (and depending on your musical subgenre of choice, that may largely be true), or immerse yourself completely, as a way of making them part of your world. Our mums and dads might have been there, but they didn’t have Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Recording Sessions to pore over, which I spent much of the summer of ’87-’88 doing; they hadn’t read the same minutiae about the Fabs’ lives in a dozen different doorstop biographies; they hadn’t heard EVERY track; and they’d probably lost interest after Imagine and Band on the Run, if not Let it Be. So we could catch up and overtake them, become more-Beatles-than-thou, just by studying hard – which a certain breed of teen/young adult has both the time and inclination to do.
After Lennon’s death, this was the only way to imagine and immerse oneself into a world where the Beatles themselves still existed, rather than just their legacy; thoughout the 1970s, the Beatles weren’t just history, they were potentially the future, because there was always a chance they might reform. That dream was well over by ’84 – we’d tidied away the Tug of Wars and the “All Those Years Ago”s – and until Lewisohn’s landmark book we didn’t realize that there could and would be a second coming in the form of the Anthologies. All that was left was the past, along with whatever new solo music emerged.
But new solo music carried risks for the nascent Beatles nut. If it was too “now” (1984, 1986) it would break the 1960s and 1970s spell that we were trying so hard to weave over ourselves. If it was too obviously “then” too soon, it would risk coming off as try-hard and inauthentic, which is why Broad Street was such a naff project for McCartney to attempt in 1984. The 1990s were so much more satisfying for the Beatles latecomer: the Anthologies were new, they were now, but they were then as well. They were ours (the young CD-buying public) more than they were theirs (our parents’ generation, apart from the subset who had maintained their fervour for three decades).
McCartney seems to have realised this by the late 1980s, when he recorded his much-heralded Flowers in the Dirt collaboration with Elvis Costello, an attempt to create a sound that built on his 1960s/1970s pop moment, rather than other people’s 1980s pop moments, without being an explicit homage to his past work. If he’d pulled it off it could have been one of his finest hours, but Flowers always felt a bit cold and distant to me (I much preferred Off the Ground, oddly enough). The one who really cracked the formula was George Harrison, tentatively with Cloud Nine and definitively with The Traveling Wilburys – a bunch of 1960s and 1970s rockers coming together as a new band creating new music that was definitely of its time, but which carried all sorts of pleasing connotations for the nostalgically inclined (and for latecomer Beatle-nuts). Mind you, McCartney almost got there first with Rockestra on Back to the Egg, but that pudding was over-egged and under-cooked: too many musicians, on too few tracks, ten years too soon.
Too soon, Paul, too soon. Too soon in 1979 for Rockestra, too soon in 1984 for this “All You Need is Love”-revisited with its mellotrons harking back to Magical Mystery Tour. You had to give us time to study.
It did go to number one, though, so what do I know.
I’m interested in this ‘my pop year’ stuff without really connecting with it… I wonder about the intersection with sibling order and rivalry here….is it easier to own pop if you don’t have too many people already claiming it? For me 73/4 was probably about the time I joined my 3 older siblings in the kitchen for the top 40, learning to listen/enthuse/sneer/argue… but ownership, claiming an identification with and through pop, was more gradual and partial – I remember one of them telling me sometime in 79 (aged 14)that Geno, or possibly Gangsters, ’sounds like something you’d like’ and feeling pleased, recognised/identified. I may even have chosen to ‘like’ Dexys or Two-Tone, just on that basis.
#40. Does anyone listen much to The Beatles’ Anthology albums anymore? The consensus amongst my pop friends seems to be that they can watch the documentaries time and time again, but they never find themselves wanting to listen to the demo versions of songs, although they see no harm in these things being in the public domain. And do we think that we’re going to end up buying the remastered CDs this autumn?
#41. Yes, that’s the crucial other factor. I must be atypical here, because my lone sibling, my sister, is eleven years older than me, so I saw her passing through seventies youth cults through the dim eyes of an infant, and I’m some ways spent my own adolescence either competing with, or rejecting, the memory of this.
Not sure if I have a specific pop year. I turned 18 in 1980 so I feel like I lived through a lot of eras in a short space of time and they all have different meanings.
rory, you make some fantastic points about growing up a Beatles fan after the fact. i grew up in a beatles-loving household, though my parents were fans but not fanatics. it took me years to fill all the gaps in their collection (nothing between Help! and Sgt Pepper) and correct the misinformation (my dad assured me that ringo sang “back in the ussr”!). like you and jonathan, i eventually surpassed them in beatle fanaticism and they couldn’t care less. all the same, i really believe there are things to be learned from the memories of those who were there at the time. my uncle was a teenager with two older sisters and hated the beatles at the time because for seven years they were inescapable. my father insists to this day that Revolver is a weak album and that no one liked it at the time of its release. it and its accompanying singles sold comparatively poorly and was taken as proof that the fad was ebbing. i find this just as fascinating as anything lewisohn or macdonald has written.
also a word about the rockestra: i think the difference between it and the wilburys is that Rockestra was composed (and in the video “conducted”) solely by mccartney, whereas the wilburys were very much a collaborative project, even down to all five members sitting down to write the lyrics together. if you’re interested in the Wilburys check out “A Conversation with Tom Petty”, a book-length interview in the style of the Shane MacGowan one from a few years back. he talks at great length about the formation and working style of the Wilburys.
one more quick note, and i can’t stress this enough: “Chaos & Creation in the Backyard” from 2005 is fantastic and shows that Macca can turn on that incredible talent anytime he wishes to. I’d rate it with his very best work, and its best songs are more mature and introspective than possibly anything else in his catalog.
I’m sure you’re right about Rockestra, johnny – Harrison’s willingness to collaborate served him so much better there. I’ll keep an eye out for that book; the Wilburys were my gateway to Tom Petty, who did fantastic work throughout the ’90s. And I’ll second your recommendation of Chaos & Creation. Definitely a solo Macca highlight.
Billy #42 – can’t say I listen to the albums themselves much anymore, although the odd track turns up on shuffle on the iPod. But like other albums that I once had on high rotation, I don’t really feel the need, I know them that well. So much of the Anthologies was so revelatory at the time that it infected my sense of the originals, creating new personal Platonic forms of “Strawberry Fields” and “Across the Universe” and so on… actually, I think the Anthology “Across the Universe” is its Platonic form.
i love that version of “And Your Bird Can Sing” on Anthology 2…the laughing is a bit naff but there are bootleg versions available without it and the arrangement is beautiful. i wish they’d left it that way.
This got some unexpected extra publicity when Macca was busted for marijuana again. I remember my sister singing “Pipes of Pot” as an alternative lyric.
Barring charity collaborations this is his last no 1 to date. No More Lonely Nights just missed out then came the Frog Chorus. After that he went into freefall commercially.
Re 47: I remember my dad buying Press To Play for his fancy new compact disc player and thinking there wasn’t a single decent track on it. Lots of widdly guitar rock from memory, which I suppose was in the air by the mid 80s but is a genre that has rarely served McCartney’s songs well. His first truly bad album, I suppose, so no hit singles from it and his career finally lost momentum.
My friend Walter did me a homemade 3 disc Solo Macca Best Of for Christmas this year and to my slight amazement its probably been my most played cd of the past 7 months. Even more amazingly theres no noticeable drop off in quality throughout the 3 chronologically arranged discs. The tracks from Driving Rain, Chaos and Creation and Memory Almost are just as good as those from the more lauded McCartney or Band On The Run albums. True, as mentioned above the tracks from the period just after Pipes Of Pipes do suffer from horrifically mid-80s arrangements and production values but otherwise the collection holds up(and holds together) extremely well.
Mention of that Tom Petty interview book reminds me of my dream Macca project- a full length interview book in which he discusses in depth his whole musical career and approach to music as writer, performer, producer and listener. I think such a “McCartney On Music” book would poss have the same impact as Dylan’s Chronicles in its way but i feel McCartney is just too stubborn and precious to agree to such a project…
Will #35: I don’t have the figures to hand, but thinking back to Channel 4’s definitive list, seven singles from 1984 are among the top 100 best-selling singles of all time in the UK, but that distinction is shared with 1997, another list headed by a charity behemoth (spring ’78 to spring ’79 is the other massive 12-month period).
Strangely, though, since we’re talking about a momentous year for chart pop and singles sales, the year started very quietly – in fact “Pipes of Peace” set a record for the lowest sales achieved by a single in a week when it was number one: a record which, unless I’m mistaken, stood until it was beaten by Orson’s “No Tomorrow” in 2006.
As a piece of work, this is well-crafted and very listenable, and as someone mentioned above does show the benefit of having had that extra bit of input (it’s not a song at the “Scrambled Egg” stage, as I used to put it re Macca). Good video too – it was a few years later that Blackadder would protest about the Christmas 1914 footy match “And I was never offside!” Funny we should be discussing this song and this video in the week when the last two WWI Tommies died.
1984’s my year too, I guess. I turned 12 at the end of May (1984, that is) and although I see ’82 as the year I first really cottoned on and ’83 the year I stepped gingerly in, ’84 is when I went ballistic with 7″ buying and chart-obsessing.
Pipes Of Peace was the passing of the torch, the first single my mother ever asked me to pop out and buy for her, and probably the last single she ever spent money on. After that, she regularly asked me to make her tapes. I was now music chief of the household.
I like Ps of P well enough; its B-side So Bad makes me cry.
Re 49: Thanks for the tip-off, Crag. 222 on Memory Almost Full is something else, like a Ghost Box ersatz 70s school TV interlude with McCartney doing rather sinister high pitched ad-lib vocals every so often.
The genuinely touching End Of The End tells us what to do when he dies as well – it isn’t ‘rush out and buy Mull Of Kintyre’. Thumbs less aloft, more at half mast.
thanks Witchita, End of the End is indeed something of a gutwrencher- I also love She’s Given Up Talking from Driving Rain which funnily enough sounds more like a Nigel Godrich production than anything from Chaos!
I remember Elvis Costello saying he wished McCartney would do a tour w/ just a piano and an acoustic guitar and play 30 of his best songs each night- I’d imagine in that context if he performed a run thru of Every Night, Jenny Wren and I’ve Just Seen A Face, say, or Beautiful Night, Fool On The Hill and Pipes Of Peace then musically speaking you wouldnt really be able to see the join…(as it were)
I suppose when you reach Macca’s level however nobody can really stop you from just pleasing yourself. (Something he has in common with Dylan, usually seen as his exact opposite- although for some reason Dylan is praised for such behaviour and McCartney is slagged to death for it…)
crag – i’ve often thought about that interview book myself. there was just an editorial in the US mag Newsweek (of all places) lamenting Macca’s tendency to trot out his not-so-great Beatles songs in concert rather than treat the audience to the fresher new material from the past few years, or even older chestnuts that weren’t hits. the specific example the author gives (and one i couldn’t agree with more) is that macca should drop “drive my car” and do “mrs vanderbilt” instead.
i honestly am surprised that this tactic wasn’t used in the “hey what about me?” PR campaign he’s been waging for the past 10 years or so. you were the innovative beatle, paul? ok SHOW US. to some extent, his last two albums (especially last year’s Fireman disc) have done this. i would love to see him do a tour where he played his very best songs, regardless of popularity. i think him being one of the most succesful and loved songwriters in history but never having released a b-sides collection gives a pretty good indication of how he measures the worth of any individual song in his catalog.
Mrs Vanderbilt-Top tune! Ho-Hey Ho!
Come to think of it when compared to Lennon, how much does the gen pub really know about McCartneys real personality beyond the bare rudiments- arrogant and bossy at times, bit of a tightwad, really loved his missus, veggie and um…thats about it. Hes done an incredibly good job at keeping the “Real McCartney” from us by projecting the usual bland nice bloke image over the years so that people have turned to the songs to find it but found the music so varied in approach and style that even when he appears to be opening his heart in a song such as his paens to Linda or the aforementioned End of the End its still difficult to get a fix on the real man. Its like he’s hiding in plain sight.
I feel McCartney’s two opposing attitudes to his craft-on the one hand the”Mr Entertainment-give the people what they want thumbs aloft fab macca”angle, on the other the “couldnt give a toss” experimentalist” approach are- what makes him such a frustrating and/or fascinating artist to many.
IMO the problem is that whilst McCartney is well aware how great he is(and isnt always shy to mention it awkwardly in interviews) he doesnt seem to always realise exactly what it is about him that MAKES him great….
Totally agree. Nice Dylan comparison, too.
I think that if McCartney thought too hard about what makes him great, or his place in cultural history, he’d lose it. The ‘thumbs aloft bloke on the bus in his Fairisle tanktop’ (which fitted modish Hoxton a couple of years back) is what keeps him sane; his fame is comparable to Michael Jackson and Elvis, after all. I reckon this is why he’s loathe to delve too deep into his legend and is happy to trot out the perceived “Macca” greats on stage and familiar sweet nothings in interviews.
there is also the theory that linda was so much a muse/partner that he can’t do those hidden ’70s gems (“little lamb dragonfly”, “back seat of my car”) anymore because it’s simply too painful.
Pretty and innocuous stuff from Macca with excellent production (esp. the percussion) – IIRC this was kind of sold as a Christmas record which I didn’t really get. Still probably closer than the vile pickets. As is usual in this tale the better single ‘Say, Say, Say’ is the one that didn’t hit No1.
NMEWatch: Tony Parsons, 10 December 1983;
“I find it touching that since John Lennon’s murder Paul McCartney seems to want to be in a duo again. Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson – I am expecting a call in the new year, but don’t try reversing the charges again, McCartney.
Here though he is alone apart from a cast of thousands and while I am certain that it was made with the best will in the world – think of Linda’s Fortnum’s food parcels to the women of Greenham Common – the combination of an ex-Beatle, a song with ‘Peace’ in the title and an angelic chorus of brats appearing at this time of year adds up to something as easily contrived as any of the above monstrosties [various Xmas singles]. Bah! Humbug!”
No single of the week was awarded. Other releases reviewed included;
Bob Dylan – Jokerman
Gloria Gaynor – I Am What I Am
Dennis Waterman & George Cole – What Are We Ging To Get ‘Er Indoors?
Malcolm McLaren – Duck For The Oyster
I loved this song back then because the video had people in the trenches and the FWW christmas truce and stuff, but now I hate it for its Macca cheesiness. Also, I am fed up of hearing about the FWW christmas truce and think there should be a ban on books and songs about it.