“Like the old days”: Paul McCartney’s solo song that reminded him of The Beatles
By the early 1990s, Paul McCartney had long been floundering critically following a run of underwhelming albums. Shifting his solo career aside after Off the Ground, McCartney and the remaining Beatles joined forces with Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne to work on the Anthology project—a dual ITV documentary and triple-CD venture exploring their legacy and compiling rare studio sessions and outtakes dating back to the late 1950s.
Years before ‘Now and Then’s AI restoration, The Beatles had officially dusted off two 1970s John Lennon sketches as The Beatles’ new singles, 1995’s ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’.
Creatively buoyed by Anthology‘s nostalgia trip, McCartney’s stroll down memory lane informed the direction of 1997’s Flaming Pie. Corralling Lynne again for production duties, old EMI maestro George Martin was roped in for orchestral arrangements, Geoff Emerick returned for his engineering chops, and the album’s very title was a nod to Lennon’s comic anecdote given to Mersey Beat in 1961 as to the origins of their former band’s name: “It came in a vision —a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, ‘from this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A'”.
Having tinkered with the record’s third single as far back as 1986, ‘Beautiful Night’ was dusted off and afforded its definitive version when old pal and Beatle drummer Ringo Starr passed by McCartney’s Hog Hill Mill studio in East Sussex’s Icklesham. “I’d always liked it, but I felt I didn’t quite have the right version of it,” he told GQ in 2020. “So I got this song out for when Ringo was coming in and right away it was like the old days. I realised we hadn’t done this for so long, but it was really comfortable and it was still there”.
Old friends and their idioms and in-jokes made their way into the final cut: “So we did ‘Beautiful Night’ and we tagged on a fast bit on the end, which wasn’t there before. And as we were coming away, out of the studio into the control room, Ringo’s doing like an impression of a doorman: ‘All right then. On your way…’ If you listen closely, you can hear we left that in”.
The magic was back. Having far too much of a good time, McCartney grabbed his Höfner bass with Ringo behind the drum kit, and Lynne playing guitar and jammed an impromptu R&B number with lyrics largely made on the spot. This became ‘Really Love You’, notable as the pair’s first ever shared credit.
Flaming Pie was met with the best critical reception since 1982’s Tug of War, spelling a run of albums that would mine the old Macca songsmith spark towards his latter-day apex on 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich.
McCartney’s always been Ringo’s biggest fan. When joining McCartney onstage in 2019 for a special performance of ‘Helter Skelter‘, McCartney couldn’t stop himself from turning his back to the audience in between verses to watch his old comrade at work.
