‘Junior’s Farm’: The track Paul McCartney never got tired of playing live
Paul McCartney is still rocking around the world. Now well into his 80s and decades into his career, the musician shows no signs of slowing. Anyone lucky enough to catch him live will attest to that as the icon steps onto the stage and plays a three-hour-long tour of his career, from the biggest hits to his favourite deep cuts, which always includes this one song he’s never got sick of.
McCartney’s setlists feel like the ultimate proof that his passion still remains. It would be easy enough for him to hit the stage and play an easy, short and simple set of best-sellers. He could easily play the most beloved Beatles tunes, throw in ‘Band On The Run’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ for the Wings fans, maybe a few solo tunes for good measure, and finish with ‘Blackbird’ or ‘Hey Jude’ and be done with it.
But his shows are the exact opposite of that. While audiences definitely still do get the hits, he also treats them to a huge array of songs from all corners of his career. He takes the time to play the whole of the Abbey Road medley, shreds his way through ‘Helter Skelter’, and even pulls his own old deep cuts like ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’. The Wings catalogue gets a good outing, too, including an explosive rendition of ‘Live and Let Die’ and a high-octane playthrough of ‘Jet’, among others.
One song always has to be there, though, as despite not being one of his biggest or best-known songs, McCartney simply loves to play it. “‘Junior’s Farm’ remains a good live song,” McCartney said, singing the praises of the 1974 track that existed as a stand-alone single for Wings. Unattached to any album and written years earlier as the musician ran away to a quiet country life following the split of the Beatles, he described the track as his “post-Beatles getting-out-of-town song”.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason why he loves it, representing a moment of renewed joy in his career when he finally had Wings up and running and found a home for these ideas he’d been squirrelling away. But mostly, McCartney simply thinks the track is a banger and sees that night after night, it gets the crowd going as one of his favourite songs to play live.
“It’s got a lot of elements that work well – a recognisable introduction and a good steady rock and roll beat, and then these interesting, slightly surreal lyrics and a rousing chorus of ‘Let’s go, let’s go’”, he said, explaining that he typically puts it early on in the set to start the night on a high.
Despite being about his own experience out in the country, he finds that on the faces he spots in his audiences, it’s clear that everyone has their own ideas of whatever fun place they’re escaping to, explaining, “That gets people in the mood to set out, ‘just in the nick of time’, for their own version of ‘Junior’s Farm’, whatever that might be – wherever they want to disappear and hide out and just lie low.”
With an instantly hooking introduction and a chorus that demands a big, whole-crowd singalong, it’s one of those tracks that seems to have landed on the ultimate golden recipe for a great live experience, and McCartney has never grown tired of cooking it up on stage.
