“Got a good kicking”: Paul McCartney on why he was wrong for releasing ‘Press To Play’
No artist can claim to have a spotless track record throughout every aspect of their career. Even though there might be some fans that will follow their favourite acts to the ends of the Earth, there comes a point where everyone has to admit that they aren’t musical angels and that they have a few back pages not worth returning to. And while The Beatles have the closest thing to a perfect career that rock and roll has ever seen, Paul McCartney admitted that he was far off the mark when working on this album from the 1980s.
Then again, most people of Macca’s generation were already in for a bit of a shake-up when tackling the MTV generation. David Bowie managed to make the jump from Ziggy Stardust to pin-up star when Let’s Dance got rolling, and with a few co-writes with Michael Jackson, McCartney was already turning into one of the best pop stars of his generation, even if it meant sitting through something like ‘Ebony and Ivory’.
Once the decade reached its end, though, MTV started to warm up to some of the rock and roll legends of old. George Harrison would have one of his last major hits, and given the fact that everyone from John Fogerty to the Grateful Dead were having resurgences, that should have been a prime time for McCartney to make a dent, but that’s not what happened.
First of all, the former Beatle already had to come off of the bad press for Give My Regards to Broad Street, which, while occasionally charming, was taken as a major offence by fans who preferred the classic Beatles recordings rather than him reimagining his old tunes. When he did get back to the studio, though, McCartney decided that it was time to reach peak middle age and go full-on dad rock on Press to Play.
While it’s unfair to call this a completely skippable album, ‘The Cute Beatle’ is not in his element all that much. Tunes like ‘Press’ are fun enough, but listening to him try to capture his past weirdness on ‘However Absurd’ or try to make his own version of a punk tune on ‘Angry’ is borderline self-parody coming from the same person who was singing ‘Let It Be’ with thousands of people at Live Aid.
Although Macca has gone the way of Eric Idle by always looking on the bright side, he did cop to Press to Play being fairly messy, saying, “An album like Press To Play – that got a good kicking when it came out in ’86. Quite right, too. It’s not that I make a below-par record and think, ‘Oh well, it’s crap, but I’ll stick it out anyway.’ I must like them when I finish them. What can I say? Sometimes I’m wrong.”
If this was the low point of McCartney’s recording career, though, it didn’t take him long to bounce back. His work on Flowers in the Dirt with Elvis Costello made for a great cynical partner to bounce ideas off, and listening to Flaming Pie, it was clear he was taking the pieces that worked from that dad-rock phase and incorporating some beauty and a bit of whimsy back into his sound.
But as it stands, Press to Play is still one of McCartney’s most neutered albums. Although he had gained a reputation as one of the most easygoing people in the music industry, having an album that was meant to be a more mature take on his old sound was never going to suit him all that well.
