The forgotten song Paul McCartney wishes he wrote: “Beautiful”
Most famous, of course, for his work alongside John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in The Beatles, Paul McCartney and his merry men of Merseyside changed the face of popular music almost single-handedly throughout the 1960s. Although McCartney is hailed on a divine level as one of the apical living legends of the music world, he’s not without his envies and influences.
With The Beatles, McCartney took the rock ‘n’ roll blueprint from Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry et al. and ran with it for ten years of groundbreaking, chart-topping success. As the 1970s dawned, The Beatles filed for divorce, passing the baton to the prog-rock generation. At this point, McCartney was still yet to reach 30 and settled into a post-break-up career brimming with collaboration and ongoing inspiration.
As a man with a receptive finger on the pulse, Macca has rarely passed up the opportunity to endorse his fellow musicians, many of whom his work once inspired. In an interview with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker at the Liverpool Institute in 2018, McCartney was asked if there were any songs he wished he’d written himself.
“There’s always a couple that I hear that I think I’d have liked [to have written],” McCartney pondered. “I liked Sting’s ‘Fields Of Gold,’ and I thought: ‘Y’know what, I should have written that.’” He added, “How dare he? I told him: ‘You stole my song.’ I thought that was a nice one, y’know?”
Sting took to Twitter after hearing these kind words from his hero: “Paul McCartney says he wishes he would have written ‘Fields Of Gold’. There are more than a few of Paul’s that I wish I would have written. To hear this from someone I owe my life to is very special. Thank you, Paul.”
However, this wasn’t the only occasion when the Beatles’ bassist revealed a track to which he’d like to have his name attributed. In a 1994 interview with Club Sandwich, McCartney explained that, while there aren’t many songs he’s envious of, a lesser-known golden oldie from 1927 certainly fits the bill.
“I don’t really want to have written anyone else’s songs, but, as a fantasy question, I love ‘Stardust’ by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish,” he revealed. “It’s a beautiful song.”
The song may not be well-known to many of us since it’s nearly a century old, but it has been recorded over 1,500 times as an instrumental or vocal piece – the mark of an influential classic. And, when you strip things back, it makes perfect sense that it would find a place in the fantasy resume of McCartney. Beautifully composed and delicately delivered, the track is a reminder that, at the heart of things, McCartney was never really a pop star.
Yes, he found fame as perhaps the greatest band of all time, enjoyed the pop trappings that came with such a rise to fame, but his devotion was not to making hits that would necessarily sell, but that would satisfy his own desire for songwriting. McCartney was the man behind Sgt Pepper, a concept album that turned The Beatles into music hall troubadors at the height of their popularity, and you don’t perform such a move if you are concerned with making millions and becoming a pop icon.
Music hall, the art of penning a track, this is what really appealed to McCartne and, once his band had created a platform big enough for him to never really have to worry about finding space to share his songs again, McCartney has since forgotten about trying to please anybody and, instead, set about trying to write songs as good as ‘Stardust’.
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