Five Paul McCartney songs to make you wince
Any artist with a 60-year recording output is going to have the odd dud, embarrassing blunder or regrettable misfire. If you’re Paul McCartney, you’ve got plenty of shockers to choose from, boasting a voluminous 26 studio albums with nothing touching the magic captured on The Beatles’ dazzling body of work and intrepid creativity largely found in his outside work with The Fireman or his classical works.
A lot of bad Macca material were huge hits and successes on their own terms. Few would profess to honestly love 1977’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’, yet it shot to the top of the UK Singles charts and achieved its goal—a chance to indulge in his sentimental affection for the Kintyre peninsula he was living the farm life on. Or take his wimpy festive cut ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, a plodding synth drear outshone by a tonne of other Christmas tunes, but never without a doubt that McCartney poured his sincere love of Yuletide behind his Yamaha CS-80.
The fact is, the mawkish and twee songwriting is often McCartney in his element. An unabashed love of the old music hall tradition is evident even in The Beatles ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ or ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ without a shred of inauthenticity, despite alienating the band and many fans to this day. McCartney’s cloying excesses have overshadowed how experimental and creatively curious he was compared to the public perception of John Lennon’s avant-garde maverickism—from introducing the group to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s musique concrète, captaining their Magical Mystery Tour psychedelic feature, to cranking the volume way up for ‘Helter Skelter’s raucous proto-metal.
With all said, we’re going for the wince factor here, beyond the plentiful smattering of bad songs to pluck out the cuts that baffle with their very existence.
Five Paul McCartney songs to make you wince:
‘Bip Bop’
Some songs make all the sense in the world confined to a group’s shared idioms and in jokes, or the silly ditties dreamed up on the cuff to entertain your children. Whatever you may think of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ or ‘Yellow Submarine’, such frivolous slices of pop sit alongside ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ in charming little tales to sing around the campfire.
The wholly fairly maligned Wild Life Wings debut features another of McCartney’s twee kids’ numbers with ‘Bip Bop’, the deeply irritating bluegrass stomp filled with a nonsense lyricism that swiftly tests even the most committed Macca fan’s patience with his vocals’ pitch dialled up to ensure maximum irk. This should never have left the home recording taped in his Scottish Campbeltown home and featuring one of his children laughing in the background, at best remaining as a bonus track or addition to some McCartney compendium of outtakes and oddities. Instead, he stretches the grating bother across two whole songs with ‘Bip Bop Link’. Unforgivable.
‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’
McCartney and politics rarely ever collided, yet following Wings’ debut album Wild Life, he and Linda arrived unannounced at EMI studios to rush-cut their very first single in response to The Troubles engulfing Northern Ireland. Written and recorded two days after British Paras opened fire on Catholic protestors in Derry’s Bogside area killing 13 on the day of the massacre known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, it appeared to be a bold and courageous effort on McCartney’s part to step into a new terrain of lyrical solidarity, dropped in the conflict’s deadliest year.
Cynics at the time accused McCartney of clamouring for credibility due to Wild Life‘s critical underwhelm, but McCartney was never one for such contrived motives. While sincere anger at the British Army’s murderous actions isn’t in doubt, 1972’s ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ is still hopelessly tone-deaf and naive, a horrible mismatch between the track’s jaunty protest and the deep pain felt by the Nationalist community, and atrocious lines like “Great Britain, you are tremendous” spectacularly cack-handed when dealing with an imperialist occupation. The single resulted in a personal backlash, too, with Protestant Derry man guitarist Henry McCullough’s brother being attacked by Unionists in a London Irish Pub.
‘Ebony and Ivory’
Throughout the 1970s, Stevie Wonder fiercely articulated the trauma of Black America and the racial turmoil that tore through the decade. While less explicit, McCartney’s ‘Blackbird‘ from 1968’s The Beatles double LP touched on the topic of the Civil Rights struggle and the horrors of Southern USA’s Jim Crow era with a tranquil sense of poetry at odds with the 1960s’ tumultuous climate yet imbued with a sage contemplation.
So what exactly had the world of race relations and anti-Apartheid pressure groups done to deserve ‘Ebony and Ivory’? A piddling soft-pop traipse gunked with saccharine keys and atrociously obvious analogies—ebony and ivory, on a keyboard, get it!? It’s incredible that the man behind ‘Living For the City’ and ‘Black Man’ allowed himself to be associated with such simpering, defanged mush, and the real kicker? The South African Broadcasting Corporation didn’t even deem the song banworthy til two years later when Wonder dedicated his 1984 Academy Award to Nelson Mandela, such was their song’s inoffense.
‘Spies Like Us’
McCartney was such a fan of the 1985 Spies Like Us comedy that, having somehow accessed the picture, which was still in development, he called director John Landis and insisted on providing its tie-in single. Being a huge Beatles fan, Landis found it hard to say no, obliging McCartney his piece of the Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase vehicle not far from its general release.
McCartney’s rushed enthusiasm to cut the single raced past stopping and considering if it was any good. Opening with a chunky drum stomp that feels lifted straight from a keyboard preset, McCartney aims for goofy Bond pastiche with a joke that wears seriously thin before its intro’s over. Featuring some of the worst chanting vocals committed to popular music, ‘Spies Like Us’ is an example of evident joy in the studio but leaving the listener utterly bewildered and wondering what all the fuss is about.
‘Fuh You’
Following 2015’s ‘FourFiveSeconds’ with Rihanna and Kanye West, McCartney demonstrated an admirable appetite for modern music trends and flexed a collaboration that felt authentic and organically part of the contemporary pop climate. Two years later, McCartney sought the services of One Republic hitmaker Ryan Tedder to craft another offering that supposedly would get along with other chart hits he’d worked his magic on from the likes of Adele and Taylor Swift.
What resulted was Egypt Station‘s second single, ‘Fuh You’, a crushingly mediocre slice of pop homogeneity that feels assembled from giblets and off-cuts of other Tedder chart cloggers at the time, bereft of the faintest whiff of originality or flair that may have dared poke its head had Tedder not stuffed McCartney into his insipid sonic mangle. The song’s as irritating as the title, each coy little “fuh you” refrain triggering waves of violence with every infuriating pillow punch gag that manages to plumb an extra depth of unfunny with each cutesy quip. Dreadful.
