‘Big Boys Bickering’: the angriest song Paul McCartney ever made
It sounds rudimentary and immature to suggest that the sole giveaway of someone being angry is whether they swear or not – at the end of the day, an odd F-bomb is hardly the end of the world, nor does it necessarily mean anything more significant than any other word in the English language. But for Paul McCartney, it was a very different story. In his eyes, swearing possesses a grave power that should only be used when it’s truly warranted.
Given that he swears no less than six times in his 1992 track ‘Big Boys Bickering’, however, the anger is practically flying out of the airwaves. As a B-side to the song ‘Hope of Deliverance’ from the album Off the Ground, the tune is maybe not one of Macca’s more well-known opines, but nevertheless, it channels an unspeakable level of feeling towards the injustices of society that the musician had previously struggled to come to terms with up to that point.
In many ways, without doing a disservice to either singer, ‘Big Boys Bickering’ harbours a certain slight downtrodden anthemic feel channelled by the likes of Sam Fender in the context of today’s musical landscape. Yet while the notion of rebellion is central to the heart of an artist like Fender, it was less of a familiar territory for the former Beatle as the early ‘90s rolled around. However, quite simply, when looking down the barrel of the issues the world was facing, McCartney felt compelled to commit his two pence to song.
But surprisingly enough, this was not only a rare foray for McCartney into the land of protest music, but also the first time he’d ever used the word ‘fuck’ in a song. Regarding this, he said previously: “The only strange thing is that I haven’t done it before. I mean, I played ‘Big Boys Bickering’, with the ‘f’ word, to Paul Simon, and he said, ‘Have you ever used that word before?’ and I said no. But that doesn’t matter – I think I’m allowed to use it once in every 50 years, don’t you? Once in every 50 years, I’ll use that word – stick around for the next time.”
Swearing aside, however, this only went so far in expressing Macca’s strength of feeling towards the subject of the song, squaring up to the biggest powers that be in the world over their inaction on the climate crisis – a topic he could have written on at any point between 1992 and now and have it be every bit as resonant. As the man put it himself, “You have to be very incensed to find the inspiration to do it right. I think there’s a bit of John Lennon inspiration in this one. It’s Lennon-esque to my mind anyway. John wouldn’t have thought twice about saying ‘fuck’ in a song.”
He added: “But when you think of the ozone layer being depleted, a 50-mile hole over the world that’s going to kill us if we don’t do something, and then you think of what happened at the Rio summit, do you think of that as a ‘flipping hole’ or a ‘fucking hole’?” Although it was certainly a departure from his discography of yesteryear, nothing sums up McCartney’s passion and anger in ‘Big Boys Bickering’ better than when he said: “I’m proud of it. I’m not a teenybopper. I’m an artist. I’ve written serious stuff before, and I’m writing it now. You don’t like it, don’t buy it.”
This is not to say that we should all start looking for threads in the Macca back catalogue that don’t exist – at the end of the day, he isn’t an angry singer, and his music shouldn’t be viewed as such, but just occasionally, a spark lit a fire that you’d be hard pressed to extinguish, and that’s exactly what we witness in ‘Big Boys Bickering’.
