“Fiddle about”: the album Paul McCartney wanted to arrange like ‘Abbey Road’
Most Beatles fans always have a soft spot for when one of its members reminds them of their glory years. John Lennon may have wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of his teenage band by the time he moved out on his own, but whenever people heard him singing the line ‘Won’t somebody please help me’ on ‘Going Down on Love’, they couldn’t help but be transported back to the same line that he wrote back in 1965. If there was one member of the group that was more excited to revisit his past, though, it was Paul McCartney.
That’s not to say that Macca continued to make music that sounded like The Beatles throughout his career. He was a true artist in every sense of the word, and that meant going on different musical tirades depending on what he was inspired by, whether that was the pure pop of his 1980s material, the quirky sounds of RAM, or whatever the hell was going on during his experimental period on McCartney II.
But even when he was making his classics, he never managed to get the respect that his old mates did. George Harrison was getting praised for his spiritual angle, and Lennon had his political material, but to everyone’s ears, McCartney seemed like the kind of whimsical pop songwriter who relied only on a catchy tune to get him to where he is. Of course, that claim is entirely off-base, but the tunes didn’t hurt when making albums like Band on the Run.
Since McCartney only had Linda and Denny Laine to work with on the project, the whole thing worked the same way some of his finest Beatles material did. There was even an operatic quality to the way the album ended with ‘Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Five’, but if that was what they sounded like with only three of them firing on all cylinders, what would happen when they got an entire lineup behind them?
“With this new album, I did this scroll thing and sat down and put one song there, and another song here.”
paul mccartney
Although Venus and Mars does stand in the shadow of Band on the Run in many respects, it has one of the tightest tracklists of any McCartney project. Even if he didn’t write every tune, hearing every song fade into each other gives the album a great flow, like going from the hard rock swagger of ‘Medicine Jar’ to the bluesy tone of ‘Call Me Back Again’ before settling down into ‘Listen to What the Man Said’.
McCartney had hinted at this kind of arrangement on Band on the Run, but he felt that his biggest inspiration came from one of The Beatles’ finest albums, saying, “With this new album, I did this scroll thing and sat down and put one song there, and another song here. Fiddle about. Fiddle about. The only time I’ve done this before was on the mini-opera on Abbey Road, the only time I’ve sat down with four sheets of paper and put them in order.”
If The Beatles’ final artistic statement saved all the cascading songs for the second side, Venus and Mars has everything reversed. The songs on the flipside do have their own unique character about them, but the first side works together as a unique whole, even bringing back the ‘Venus and Mars’ theme to open both sides to show that they are intended to be listened to together.
Does that mean we have to be listening to Venus and Mars the same way that most of us look at Abbey Road? Absolutely not. McCartney was always going to be doing his own thing when he had Wings behind him, and while not every song worked during this phase of his career, there was no way that The Beatles were going to make the kind of space-age rock and roll imagery that turned up here.
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