“That’s dead straight”: Paul McCartney on the most direct song he ever wrote
It’s never easy trying to pull inspiration out of thin air. No matter how many times artists go back to their old bag of tricks, there tend to be those little moments that seem too personal to put into a song. Some things are best kept private in some cases, but despite being one of the most well-known songwriters in the world, Paul McCartney thought ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ was the most direct target that he ever had.
But when broken down, there doesn’t seem to be too many things that McCartney can talk about that he hasn’t covered somewhere before. The man has been on display for the world pretty much his entire life, and while he’s more than happy to talk about those times with The Beatles, not every one of his songs has his emotions out front and centre.
Looking through some of his most personal tunes, a song like ‘Let It Be’ is much more about its religious connotations to some people than it is about his mother, Mary, coming to him in a dream. And while he will go on and on about the good times that he used to have with John Lennon when singing the song ‘Here Today’, most of us don’t need to hear him saying the word ‘Fab’ in the lyrics or talk specifically about the night they were on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Nor should he really need to, either. Some of the best songwriters have used ways to twist their personal stories and turn them into something, and even if it comes off a bit basic at times, it’s that simplicity that turns it from this little idea that someone had when messing around on a guitar to something that the entire world can call their own.
In the case of ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, though, there’s no real window dressing. Amid the political unrest going on in Ireland in the wake of Bloody Sunday, McCartney wrote a tune all about putting an end to the violence, almost making a political satire in the same way that John Lennon used to do on ‘Revolution’ with his reference to Chairman Mao.
Despite having a decent tune behind it, McCartney thought that it being so specific wasn’t really his style, saying, “I’m not often specific, because it’s just not my way. I’m much more comfortable talking about it but veiling it somehow. I think that’s stronger. I mean, my biggest protest song was ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. There’s no metaphors there, that’s just dead straight. But I didn’t think it was a very successful song. I wouldn’t say it was one of my best. So to write overtly about a situation is a little more difficult for me.”
And it’s hard to really argue with Macca regarding the song’s quality. The makings of a great song are in there somewhere, but given how good Lennon was with political commentary, the tune is just screaming for Lennon to come in with some witty line to offset everything or add something in for a middle eight.
Then again, since the waters were still fairly choppy following The Beatles’ breakup, there was pretty much no way that a co-write of that magnitude was ever going to happen. But with ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ by McCartney and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by Lennon, we were given two halves of what could have been one great protest anthem.
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