Five Paul McCartney lyrics that should be deleted from history
Paul McCartney readily admitted that The Beatles didn’t always sweat over their words. Part of the magic of the band, in fact, was that they didn’t sweat over much.
When you’re releasing over 200 songs in eight years while shouting films, writing poetry anthologies, and changing the world, and everything else in between, how could you sweat over the details? Thankfully, they somehow managed to produce masterpieces that changed the world all the same. Something about the breezy brevity with which they worked infused their finished art with the pop and fizz of effervescent enthusiasm.
From ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to ‘The Fool on the Hill’, McCartney cemented himself as one of the finest lyric writers of the day. And he had a way of making these songs resonate with the masses. As George Martin commented, “If you dissect Lennon and McCartney, they shared all the royalties and all the performing rights, I bet you’ll find a good 65% are Paul’s writings that got the performing rights, when you know what Yesterday’s done, the biggest performing song of all time.”
Yet, he also justifiably insists that McCartney had a great sense of originality and quirkiness in his writing, too. You don’t have to look much further than solo songs like ‘Single Pigeon’ for evidence of that. However, as you’re looking, you’ll also get the sense that McCartney could often get carried away with a melody. Whenever you unearth one of his rare songwriting sins, you can always picture him in the studio, excited, bobbing his little bowl cut about.
In fact, he lived and breathed on the capacity to make a cock-up, being a key part of his creative process. “One of the things I always thought was the secret of The Beatles was that our music was self-taught. We were never consciously thinking of what we were doing. Anything we did came naturally,” he says in his book, The Lyrics.
Later on in that anthology, he even cites an example of that natural flow in motion when discussing the track, ‘The World Tonight’. “This song has a line that’s one of my favourites of all the lines I’ve ever written: ‘I go back so far I’m in front of me’. It’s one of those lines where you don’t know what it means, but you do know what it means,” he says. “I have no idea where it came from, though!” That unfussiness is bound to turn up triumphs and the odd turnip – it’s simply Macca’s job to ensure that they’re not in equal measure.
So, while he readily admits that the lyrics weren’t always sweated over, on a few occasions, perhaps they should’ve been. We’ve assorted these shameful moments below.
Five Paul McCartney lyrics that should be destroyed:
‘The Other Me’
“I know I was a crazy fool
For treating you the way I did
But something took hold of me
And I acted like a dustbin lid.”
How, exactly, does a dustbin lid act? Efficiently? Robustly? With a willingness to shield unpleasant smells? Of course, we can assume that Macca is trying to convey that he regrets his shoddy behaviour, but there are so many other more passable rhymes for ‘did’ that we can’t rule out that he may well have acted more obscurely and ambiguously than we ever bargained for.
And the enterprise of holding his worth rhyming efforts to account seems fastidious; it’s worth noting that the world, myself included, has decreed this man to be one of the greatest songwriters in human history. Alas, this section – an opening verse, no less – from the awfully titled Pipes of Peace album proves that off days are out there for all of us.
‘She’s A Woman’
“My love, don’t give me presents
I know that she’s no peasant.”
Once again, Macca strikes with a revolting opening line. If nothing else, it’s at least brave that he starts with such shoddiness and thinks, ‘Well, we’ll see where this goes’. The syntax is slung together with all the precision of a blindfolded bricklayer. But at least the language gives it a novel medieval feel—like something a jester short of ideas might sing moments before being executed.
At the time that this was released as the B-side to ‘I Feel Fine’, the band had just discovered Bob Dylan. Clearly, they were clinging to his coattails a little here, but needless to say, this is to the folk star’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ is what a Wetherspoons’ carpet is to the Sistine Chapel. At least it says a lot for B-sides, offering bands a handy open goal.
‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’
“Great Britain, you are tremendous
And nobody knows like me
But really, what are you doin’
In the land across the sea?“
“Great Britain, you are tremendous” is so oddly off-kilter and hammy that it’s strangely reminiscent of a Donald Trump utterance. The grasp on politics is also equally limp-wristed and platitudinal, plodding along the surface of the issue. In fact, for a protest song, the whole Wings track is all la-di-da and jangly, as though it’s saying, ‘Hey, give Ireland back to the Irish, but not before this groovy middle eight by my mate Denny’.
Although his heart was in the right place with this 1972 effort, McCartney going political is like Mary Berry rustling up a vindaloo. He’s always been a force for good, but everything is just a little too mild, milquetoast, and peculiarly maddening with the strange phrasing that riddled this meek effort.
‘Bip Bop’
“Wip wop, women want
Wip wop women wear
Wip wop, women want
Wip wop women wear.”
With 1971’s ‘Bip Bop’, I even find McCartney in agreement, with the songwriter telling Q that it’s the worst song he has ever written. “The lyrics are fucking awful,” he earnestly commented. He explained in Paul Du Noyer’s book, Conversations with McCartney: “That’s my theory, that in years to come, people may actually look at all my work rather than the context of it following the Beatles. That’s the danger, as it came from ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Fool On The Hill’, to ‘Bip Bop’, which is such an inconsequential little song.”
All the same, it’s Paul in one of his ‘wacky’ moments, and they always come with an ingratiating charm. But sadly, it fell so short of the nonsense poetry that John Lennon pulled off for ‘I Am the Walrus’ that it further ingrained the problematic falsehood that he was the radical ideas man, and McCartney was the “granny shit” melody man—though Lennon’s own comments certainly didn’t do much to dispel that.
‘The End’
“In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
The closing word on The Beatles is one that McCartney has always been very proud of. But surely he got it the wrong way around? If by making love, he means spreading harmony, then that should be the primary focus before you go taking it. ‘What you put out comes back to you’: that’s the phrase, not this strange inverse anomaly.
If you really wanted to get pious and totally overread the whole thing, you could view this line as symbolic of the downfall of the 1960s: peace and love were still governed by the principle that you take for yourself first of all. Even The Beatles, whose music was a driving force for good, used to quip, “Now, let’s write a swimming pool”.
Besides, what even is taking love? In the end, the whole thing feels like a profound closing statement to sign off on, but it’s really just a poetic-sounding platitude that strains under the weight of cynical inspection. The Beatles deserved better.
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