“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 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.

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….

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.

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…)

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

#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.

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.

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.