When Paul McCartney secretly parodied his greatest album
Though known as “the cute Beatle,” a far more accurate description of Paul McCartney would be “the prolific Beatle.” During his time with The Fab Four, Paul was constantly writing’; constantly putting one compositional foot in front of the other, pushing The Beatles to work harder, craft better songs, and release more inventive albums. Eventually, his unflinching determination made him the group’s fall guy – but even after The Beatles parted ways, Paul continued unabated.
Perhaps the finest example of Paul’s post-Beatles work comes in the form of 1971’s Ram, a joyful, rambunctious and incredibly inventive collection of songs recorded in New York with guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken and future Wings drummer Denny Seiwell. The record was widely slated upon release, with John Landau (Bruce Springsteen’s future manager) describing it as the “nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far” and “emotionally vacuous”.
Such criticisms were like water off a duck’s back. Whether the critics liked Ram or not was of no consequence, not if Paul was proud of his work, which, judging from his 1977 instrumental reimagining the album, he must have been. Released under the name Percy Thrillington, the true creator of the track-by-track Ram cover album wasn’t revealed until 1989, when McCartney finally confessed that he was responsible for Thrillington’s output.
Recorded in 1971 during the Ram Sessions, Thrillington got shelved when Paul and Linda McCartney decided to form Wings. Six years later, the LP was released to a largely unenthused public. At that time, nobody knew that it was Paul’s work, though his involvement was implied by a painted image of his face featured on the back cover. In fact, quite a few people strongly suspected that Thrillington was a man in a mask. In 1966, Rolling Stone argued that Percy Thrillington was clearly an invented name, though the author didn’t seem sure of who it had been created to disguise.
Thrillington was sold as the product of a fictitious and faintly aristocratic socialite called Percy’ Thrills’ Thrillington. This gave McCartney an excuse to indulge his love of skiffle and reinvent Ram as though it had been composed in the 1930s.
In the end, Paul was left with an album that could easily have served as the soundtrack to a television adaptation of Jeeves and Wooster, an Agatha Christie murder mystery, or, as is the case with ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, a pastoral art porn film. Thrillington is a testament to McCartney’s talents as an arranger as well as a composer. Check out one of our favourite cuts from the 2012 remastered album below. It’ll make your day.
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