In recent years Paul McCartney has taken to re-issuing his back catalogue. This feature was commissioned for Strangelove Magazine [in 201] to mark the re-release of the solo albums McCartney and McCartney II.

There’s a jukebox stacked with hits from the 1950’s that takes up residency
in the corner of Paul McCartney’s London office. On the adjacent wall
there’s a large painting by the abstract expressionist Willem De Kooning.
The objects say a lot about McCartney’s eclectic taste. As each year rolls
by the artist attempts something new while keeping one eye over his
shoulder. This year has seen McCartney tour, write the score for a NYC
ballet, Ocean’s Kingdom, and release a retrospective volume of his late wife
Linda’s photography, Linda McCartney: Life In Photographs.

Two projects dear to his heart and crucial to the songwriter’s legacy are
the re-issues of his solo albums McCartney [1970] and McCartney II [1980].
The first was recorded, almost in secret, as McCartney was cut adrift from a
band Derek Taylor described as ‘the greatest romance of the twentieth
century’, the Beatles.

McCartney II preempted the demise of McCartney’s seventies super group,
Wings. Alongside the standard editions, each album now comes as part of a
deluxe multi-disc/book ensemble that features period photos, notes from the
artist, outtakes and archival footage.

McCartney was recorded between London’s Morgan Studios, booked under a
non-de plume of Billy Martin, Abbey Road and at McCartney’s home in St.
Johns Wood. Often, without studio staff at his disposal, McCartney became
his own engineer and producer.

“McCartney was my first solo album after the Beatles, and it was one that I
played all of the instruments on,” McCartney explained earlier this year.
There’s only a few people that have done that: I know Stevie Wonder has done
that kind of thing but this was the first time that I had done it.”

“I was in a kind of post Beatles world and I used my living room as a
studio.  I recorded on a Studer four track machine. They’re still great
machines; they use inch [wide] tape. An engineer explained to me that the
reason you can actually get more drums and bass on it is because it’s
physically bigger tape. I said, ‘Well that sounds daft’, but apparently it’s
true. You’ve got more room on the tape to record on.”

“I put the tape machine in the living room and when I had a minute I would
just go in there and make something up: I’d set the drum kit up, figure out
how to drum it, do a test run track and listen back on headphones. And if I
didn’t like it or the snare drum wasn’t loud enough, I’d move the microphone
closer. It was very basic – a very primitive way of doing it, but it worked
for me. Some of the best recordings have been primitive. If you think of
Heartbreak Hotel or Whole Lot of Shakin’ from the rock n’ roll era, or
Beck’s early music that was recorded in his bedroom.”

“I remember plugging the microphones straight into the back of this great
big machine and I just recorded drums, a bit of guitar, a bit of bass, sang
a bit, did a bit of electric guitar. I thought, yeah, that’ll do and I just
carried on going. I had a bunch of tracks – and I thought, ‘What haven’t I
got?’ Well, I didn’t have an acoustic number, so I did Every Night. I didn’t
have a piano, so I did Maybe I’m Amazed. There are some little instrumentals
that were just for me, like Momma Miss America. They’re quirky little
things, but now I get a lot of people saying ‘Wow!'”

The cover art for McCartney, we assumed, reflected his state of mind at the
time, a spilt bowl of cherries. It’s only now that McCartney lets us into a
secret that we’d been reading the photo incorrectly for forty years.

“Linda and I were on holiday with lots of birds outside the little villa we
were renting. There was a little low wall and we used to go to the bar and
get a bunch of glacier cherries and we found out the birds really loved
them. You’ll see on the artwork of the re master – you can see all of the
birds on there but we masked it out – so it doesn’t look like a wall. It
looks like a gateway through space – a highway through the universe with
cherries on it. It was all very mysterious, but we just liked the image that
that made – a bit funky for an album cover. That was the back of it and the
front was a picture of me with my, then baby, Mary, in my jacket because it
was cold. Linda knew I was going to release an album and so she took all of
these photos of me with a guitar and we sent them to a friend of ours David
Putnam, who is now Lord Putnam – My Liege! He looked through them all and he
said ‘Well, there’s only one’ and we said, ‘Oh, is there? Which one?’ and he
said, ‘The one with the baby, of course!’ That has now become the important
photo that people think of as the album cover.”

Maybe I’m Amazed later became a hit for Wings when a live version was issued
in the mid-1970’s. The genesis of Every Night went back as far as 1967,
while Hot As Sun had been around since McCartney’s teens. Teddy Boy had been
rejected by the Beatles as part of Let It Be and The Lovely Linda was
impromptu jam originally intended to test the equipment.

“Maybe I’m Amazed sums up the time for me – Linda and I had just got
together and that song was my amazement with getting with this great girl. I
think it just worked. I didn’t really stress – I just came out with lyrics
like ‘hung me on a line, pull me out of time’; just little phrases that
occurred to me about this relationship. That sums up the period and the
feeling for me, and I think it’s probably the one off the album that people
would say was the best.”

“I’m hopeless on singles, I always do the wrong thing – it’s funny really,
and I don’t mind that I do – you can’t figure everything out. I think it was
Get Back that I didn’t think of, and it was Twiggy that said ‘Oh, it’s
great.’ I thought ‘What? It’s just a little jam?’ It was the same with Maybe
I’m Amazed: I thought it was nice and I liked what it meant personally but I
wasn’t sure what other people would think about it.”

“Maybe I’m Amazed turned out to be Liza Minelli’s favorite song.. I was
surprised she’d even heard it. We ended up doing a live version and that
ended up being number one in America, which was very cool.”

Before the solo accolades rolled in McCartney took the break up of the
Beatles pretty hard. He hit the bottle, retreated to his farm in Scotland
and some days found it difficult to get out of bed. Linda and his own
competitive spirit finally rallied him.

“Conditions were so fraught with the break up of The Beatles,” admits
McCartney now. “There’d been so many business problems with the new business
manager, Allen Klein, coming in. That had meant that our relationships
within the band had got very tense and there were all sorts of heavy
meetings – and all of that led to the break up of The Beatles. For me, one
of the great sadness’s of the break up was that we were no longer making
music together. Ok, the fact that we were mates breaking up was heart
breaking, but at the back of it all there was also this thing of ‘What do we
do, you know, what do we do with all of our music?'”

“So for me, the thing was to keep going: to record some stuff on my own,
which is what I did – those very basic recordings became McCartney. The idea
that I did music with The Beatles, and now I wasn’t going to do music…
that was frightening. So I just did stuff on my own for a bit, and then I
played it to a few people and they went ‘Wow, that was really interesting’
or ‘amazing’ or ‘cool’. That’s when I thought actually this is an album –
it’s a quirky one, but it’s an album. Then I did that whole process again
later for McCartney II.”

Still, McCartney missed being in a band. After recording RAM in New York, he
formed Wings.

“Instead of forming a big super group,” McCartney told me years later in his
New York office, “we just decided that what we were going to do was go right
back to the beginning and try and remember what it was all about. I think
when you normally start a group it’s with a couple of mates who live in the
same street, they don’t even have to be able to play. There’s something
about that spirit that, if you persevere with it, it gets better, and I
think an audience notices that. That’s why we did it.

“We went out like a band of gypsies, and literally went up the road looking
for a place to play. We found some universities, and that was it. I think we
wanted to get away from the big Beatles thing and high profile thing I’d
been doing for so long. We wanted to discover what Linda and I could make of
it.

“We’d done a few surreal things towards the end of The Beatles, and I’d
liked that. I like that in art. I liked the freedom of it. With Wings, it
was like we were trying to create something new. We were doing, ‘Monkberry
Moon Delight’, it was very surreal. The more of that we did, the more we got
away from The Beatles sound and style, which what I was trying to do.”

Wings, after scoring hits with Silly Love Songs, Band On The Run, Letting
Go, Mull Of Kintyre and more, called it a day after McCartney was busted
trying to take marijuana into Japan when the band arrived for a tour.

“I think we would have been quite happy to make another record, [after Back
To The Egg in 1979], but after the non-Japanese tour and the bust that was
the deciding thing. Looking back I think I had had enough of the Wings
period. I’ve got a bit of a theory that I got myself busted to end it. It’s
crazy; I hope it’s not true. It’s deep psychology if it is, and I’m not sure
I want to be doing that. Everyone warned us not to take pot into Japan. I
took a bloody great bag in. It’s outrageous. It was horrific, I deserved to
get busted.”

More solo success ensued with McCartney II. Highlights on the record
included Waterfalls and the tune that helped John Lennon renew his sense of
commercial combat, Coming Up.

“A nice thing about Coming Up was something that I read that John had said
at the time, I think from his record producer, when he heard Coming Up, he
said ‘I’ve gotta get back to work’. That’s just how it was with us – if he
wrote a good song I would then have to write a good song! So it was a good
process to get us to annoy each other into writing a good song. It worked
very well and after that he got back into the studio and wrote some really
great stuff.”

“When I did McCartney II, it was the second album I’d made playing all of
the instruments on it, so that theme linked them. So it seemed like a good
idea to re-release them together.”

“I’ve always had at the back of my mind that there would be a McCartney III
thing, but some of them turned into Fireman [albums]. The Fireman’s latest,
Electric Arguments, [should] be in the collection… because I played
everything on it. I can see that happening in my mind, when I get a moments
time.”

ENDS