“I love them”: The four artists who shaped Paul McCartney’s granny music
Paul McCartney, sitting with his blanket, cup of tea, Werther’s Originals, and getting his tunes on to go down memory lane. To be fair, these days, that might not be so far off the mark.
To give the man his dues, in all his 83 years, Macca has done more for the rock music sphere than most manage to achieve in their lifetimes. Slagging him off too much doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. But even still, despite its apparent cruelty, John Lennon wasn’t all that wrong when he said his bandmate’s style was pretty much like ‘granny music’.
It was a fairly biting tag, but the whole idea of Macca being obsessed with the classic, traditional, and Vaudeville-esque styles that he grew up listening to – as well as his parents, probably – wasn’t exactly inaccurate. After all, this was the 14-year-old boy who wrote about yearning to be 64.
In this sense, Macca always was an old head on young shoulders; someone who grew into his image, not dissimilar to the jumper someone’s mother would buy at the start of the school year, still five inches too big. You could say it has been a shame that he never got the retirement he always planned for.
But in other ways, living out his rock and roll dream well into his twilight years, as well as paying tribute to some of his geriatric musical heroes, has always been part of the game plan for McCartney. For artists who rose up alongside him, their prime inspirations would have been the likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.
And while Macca spent plenty of time waxing lyrical about their plaudits, his heroes came into a less traditionally cool line-up of Nat King Cole, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, and Fred Astaire. They may not have been the most stereotypical kids on the block, but the former Beatles’ justification was simple: “I love them”.
Of course, much of the discourse on McCartney’s love of granny music is done from a place of ribbing and derision, but when you start diving deeper into his reasons behind it, you start to learn that he kind of has a point. “A good musician, I think, loves music,” he rightly asserted. “And that’s the opener. And I love certain music.”
His whole point was that “it doesn’t have to be music of my generation,” much in the same way now that the younger population can enjoy his music from the 1960s as much as the mainstream charts. OK, we all started out having a laugh and a joke about Lennon’s words at his bandmate’s expense – but when it actually boils down to it, he’s played the trump card.
So as McCartney continues to play the songs of theatrical icons and Vaudeville stars, he’s more than happy with whatever reputation that gives him, whether it’s so-called granny music or not. You’ve got to admit, though – it’s even more funny now, when it’s reached a point where his main fanbase is, indeed, old-age pensioners.
Grannies of the world, rock on.
