‘McCartney II’ gave Paul McCartney a new career
The fact that Paul McCartney managed to get a solo career after the dissolution of The Beatles is a small miracle.
No one wanted anything to do with the guy who supposedly split up one of the biggest bands in the world, but even though John Lennon came out of the gate with some fantastic tunes, it didn’t take everyone that long to come around on what McCartney was doing once Wings officially took flight. But even though Macca settled into his solo career after the 1970s, McCartney II gave him a lot more possibilities than anyone ever realised when they first heard it.
Because when you think about it, this isn’t an album that was supposed to be “influential” by any means. McCartney was just looking to make songs for his own amusement most of the time, and it wasn’t until he started playing it to some of his friends that he started to realise that he had hit on something a bit more powerful than what he had done on his original debut record. But whereas that sounded like a demo with one diamond in ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, McCartney I is packed with one daring experiment after the next.
Since he didn’t have a lot to work with in terms of songs, a lot of the record was him creating tunes from scratch with nothing but a machine and his wits. He was never going to shy away from making a beautiful song like ‘Waterfalls’ or ‘One of These Days’, but the sequencing on the record is what really caught his ear. This was like putting on a new disguise, as he had done on Sgt. Pepper’s, and while he didn’t stay there for very long, he went from being one of the biggest stars in the world to an underground innovator almost by accident.
Granted, a lot of what he was doing was clearly inspired by what David Bowie was doing in Berlin and what Kraftwerk had been up to around the same time, but the DIY aesthetic is what made it so novel. McCartney didn’t need a big budget studio to come up with some of the most beautiful songs of his career, and when you listen to the jams, some of the best moments on the record are when things get a little bit too zany.
‘Coming Up’ was already one of John Lennon’s favourite McCartney tunes, but despite people not taking to the vocal delivery, ‘Temporary Secretary’ is one of the biggest earworms of his solo career, which ends up getting more hypnotic when you look at what DJ Hellraiser did with it on the album Twin Freaks. And if you took Macca’s voice off of a song like ‘On the Way’, that spooky backing track wouldn’t have felt out of place at all if it had turned up on Gorillaz’s debut record.
Then again, there’s another reason why Macca had a new career after McCartney II. Since he no longer had his writing partner by the time he started working on his pop songs in the 1980s, McCartney II was like a stopgap between his time as John Lennon’s writing partner and the person who was going to be carrying on The Beatles’ legacy for a while. And since his best friend was no longer there to bounce off of, he could at least throw in a few bonkers ideas as a nod to his old bandmate.
So the real strength behind McCartney II is that it gave McCartney permission to be a little wacky. While he capitalised on precisely none of that momentum when making Tug of War and some of the more lackadaisical records in the late 1980s, the entire reason why The Fireman exists was to give him an outlet to make the same kind of out-there ideas that he had been working on in this record.
And now that The Fireman has either been retired or inactive for the past few years, the fact that McCartney has kept experimenting on all of his records is thanks to him throwing caution to the wind here. No one would have guessed that they would hear one of the biggest classic rockers of all time suddenly finding the time to throw different acid-house beats onto a record like New, but it was all in the service of Macca reinventing himself the same way that he used to do back in the day.
He didn’t have to be tied to one genre anymore, and while he looked back on his Wings days with a little bit of regret for the longest time, McCartney II will forever be the moment where McCartney’s musical psyche seemed to go in a much different direction. He could still make silly love songs until the end of time, but if the public could get behind him making something a bit more avant-garde, what was stopping him from leaning into some more imaginative tunes every now and again?
