‘Hope of Deliverance’: Paul McCartney’s forgotten Christmas song
Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ showcases all of the classic Christmas song tropes. Sleighbell percussive parts, a singalong hook and a bridge full of vibrato ‘ding dong’ harmonies. While a song that some would comfortably argue fits in McCartney’s canon despite its adherence to the commercial tropes of a festive season hit, there’s no doubt its success relies on the latter point. It’s a suitably Christmassy hit because it’s deliberately festive.
Take away the lyrical content of ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, and it would still feel like an innate Christmas song. Why? Well, sleighbell percussive parts are a traditional trope not only for their connective imagery to our favourite red-nosed reindeer but for their more ‘jingly/jangly’ profile. Christmas songs are often described as jangly, signifying that something within that word lies an inherently festive sound.
Organs, twelve-string guitars and high-pitched percussion instruments all go some way towards achieving this sound and are, therefore, key ingredients in most of the famous Christmas songs we’ve come to know and love. But of course, these instruments have been used in popular music to good effect and are not always associated with the holidays. Be it the famous organ chord progression in Booker T and the MG’s’ ‘Green Onions’ or the 12-string in Fontaines DC’s summer hit ‘Favourite’, there are plenty of songs that use those instruments and avoid the temptation of singing about snowfall on top of it.
But as an artist who went on to pen one of Christmas’ most famous tunes, it’s a wonder as to what it was about the melody of ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ that provoked McCartney to use as a Christmas song and not one of his many other songs that showcase a use of ‘jingly’ instruments.
Speaking to Club Sandwich about his 1993 solo hit ‘Hope of Deliverance’, McCartney told the story of its origin and the jingly instrumentation that inspired it: “I went up into the attic of our house just to get away from everyone,” he said. “There’s a trap door, you go up a little ladder and then close it, and no one can get at you, so you know you’ve got a couple of hours to yourself. So I went up into the attic and took with me a Martin twelve-string guitar and, just for a bit of fun, I put a capo on it”
He continued: “On a 12-string it makes for a very jingly sound, which reminds me of Cathedrals and Christmas. So that led me into the field of hope, of deliverance, and then I added about the darkness that surrounds us. You know, if you’re involved in rescuing people in Somalia then that’s the deliverance – you want to get out of there safely, if you are involved in poverty then that’s your deliverance, to get out of that trap. Homelessness, disease, whatever, big or little, we’ve all got them. So that was it really, it just became a kind of optimistic song, either to, perhaps, a girlfriend, or to a God-figure”.
The song went on to become quite a controversial release for McCartney, with it being his first official release to include a swear word, which, given the song’s lyrical intent poses an existential question to the audience of our complicity in deep-rooted societal and environmental issues, is rather artistically undermining.
In a different interview, McCartney spoke about the controversy, saying: “For the first time in a song I used the word ‘fucking’, which I knew would upset some people.”
Confirming the difficult he had with the overall sentiment of the song being overlooked, he said: “When you think of the ozone layer being depleted, a 50-mile hole over the world that’s going to kill us if we don’t do something, and then you think of what happened at the Rio summit, do you think of that as a ‘flipping hole’ or a ‘fucking hole’?”
Either way, the song was a relative commercial failure, but one McCartney remains proud of: “I’m proud of it,” he once shared. “I’m not a teenybopper. I’m an artist. I’ve written serious stuff before, and I’m writing it now. You don’t like it, don’t buy it.” 30 years on from the release of ‘Hope of Deliverance’, with the world hurtling towards deeper climate disasters and increasing levels of social unrest, it feels as though his controversial B-side could be a more apt soundtrack for a modern Christmas – even if he does drop the F-bomb.
