Paul McCartney’s almost-illegal album: The Russian ruse that never was and he always regretted
When you’ve had such a seismic impact on the course of musical history, there probably comes a time when it’s hard for you to find a new way to continue making an impression on audiences without it feeling like you’re adhering to some sort of laboured routine. For someone like Paul McCartney, who had been continually been influencing the direction of popular music throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, it was clearly going to become more of a task to retain the interest of his audience.
He’d kept things going pretty well in his post-Beatles career for a while, releasing a number of successful albums as a solo artist and member of Wings in the early ‘70s, but by the end of the decade, things had begun to get a bit hairy. ‘Mull of Kintyre’ has always felt like a dip in quality when compared to his prior achievements, but 1979 saw him commit his first truly heinous crime against music with the release of ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ – a song that singlehandedly threatens to deface his legacy.
It wasn’t al doom and gloom for him after this point, as there are plenty of merits to be found in the oddball pop of McCartney II, but his misguided tumble into festive fare did turn a lot of hardcore fans away from him. You’d think that would be the most major regret of his career, and while I might want to argue a case against some of his ‘80s output such as ‘Ebony and Ivory’ (both one of McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s worst) and his Frog Chorus nonsense, he’s got plenty more releases that he feels troubled by.
By the end of the ‘80s, Macca had a burning desire to take things back to basics on the musical front, and when he went into the studio in 1987, there was a distinct focus on simply recording some jams and seeing what happened. However, when he and his bandmates came to the realisation that the recordings they had made together weren’t half bad, a light flicked on in his head, and he suddenly had a plan for how to distribute the songs.
“Each time we spent five minutes on each song,” he explained to Guitar Player. “In the end, we had quite a nice selection of rock and roll stuff. I said, ‘Well, look. I’m not really happy to release this as my next album.’” Due to the nature of the recordings being scrappy, he thought that it might be better to present the record as a bootleg album, and then had the sudden brainwave to pretend that the recordings had been done by a group of Russians in London.
“We were going to manufacture some records as bootlegs, and say, ‘Look at this! It’s a Russian bootleg of some secret McCartney tapes.’,” McCartney divulged. “But then the record company and my manager said, ‘No, you can’t do that in your position,’ and all that.” However, such was the disappointment that he couldn’t move forward with the bold idea, he managed to convince his management to put the album out exclusively within the Soviet Union. With Сно́ва в СССР, he managed to achieve the first ever gold record in Russia by simply releasing an album of covers from the likes of Sam Cooke, Fats Domino and Little Richard.
However, the fact that the entire fabrication of the story was never allowed to exist as he wanted it to is something that he still regrets today. “‘Oh, you bunch of wimps! I hate you. You’re so predictable.’,” he supposedly told his management as a retort. “I really was quite disappointed by it. I thought it was a brilliant idea. And risky! That’s what I liked about it, that element of fun, electricity.”
