Paul McCartney picks his favourite album of his career: “That’s the one”
I specifically remember sitting in front of the TV in 2022, watching an empty pyramid stage moments before Paul McCartney was set to deliver his headline set. My mum was in the room with me and admitted, “I don’t think I know that many Paul McCartney songs,” to which I replied, “I imagine you’ll know about 75% of this set.” Sure enough, only moments later, her foot is tapping and she’s humming away to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
The truth is, whether you have made a point to listen to his body of work or not, Paul McCartney is one of the rare breeds of artists who defines taste. His sound doesn’t fall into a specific genre, and instead is something that has managed to permeate the charts regardless of what style of music is popular at the time. His sound is equal parts definitive and timeless.
What’s the secret? Well, part of it lies in its simplicity. One of the most far-out projects that McCartney ever did with The Beatles was their concept album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Even McCartney admits that the idea for the album came from the fact that he was listening to more experimental and “offbeat” stuff.
“I was listening to a lot of kind of offbeat music… crazy stuff life John Cage,” he said, “The whole concept was for us to pretend to be someone else so that’s why the uniforms … it was just a way to remove ourselves from just being Beatles and not be fed up with being musicians. […] It allowed us to do crazier things than we might otherwise have done.”
However, despite the ambitious nature of this album, the music contained within was still relatively straightforward in terms of chord progression and structure. Graham Nash highlighted this simplicity when discussing their song ‘A Day In The Life’. “Their incredible simplicity and their incredible melodic structure is stunning to this day,” he said. “With all due respect, within this western scale of music, there’s what? Twelve notes? Are you kidding me? The Beatles were unbelievable, and I think we all knew it.”
McCartney’s musical output didn’t stop once the Beatles split, either. He released a number of albums as a solo artist and also wrote many songs for his other band, Wings, which he formed in 1971. McCartney wrote a large number of songs for this band, and one of the best albums he believes he’s responsible for is a by-product of Wings rather than the Beatles.
Band On The Run was released on December 5th, 1973. It was the fifth album McCartney put together since leaving The Beatles, and you could tell he was beginning to finally find his feet outside of the band. The album remains one of his most popular, as that simplicity remains, but it is used to put together huge tracks such as the titular song and the likes of ‘Jet’ and ‘Picasso’s Last Words’. The record really packs a punch and remains a great listen to this day.
“Those kinds of things – album titles and artwork – normally come later on in the process,” said McCartney, “I just wrote a bunch of songs, which luckily I remembered, because the demos got stolen! ‘Band on the Run’ was always going to be the big, epic track on the album. But I didn’t necessarily know it was going to be the title. But it eventually comes to the surface, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s an obvious title. That’s the one’.”
