Beatles and bagpipes: The Paul McCartney song that pissed people off
“John Lennon came to the session really stones, totally out of it on something or other, and he said, ‘All right, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’,” said Richard Lush, the Beatle’s engineer when they were recording The White Album. “He went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said, ‘This is it! Come on!’ He was really aggravated.”
Lennon notoriously hated that song, as did all of the Beatles except Paul McCartney, as George Harrison and Ringo Starr have both expressed disdain towards the jaunty pop jingle in the past. Some could argue the song was a sign of the beginning of the end for The Beatles, whereas others could see it as confirmation that Paul McCartney is, in fact, human.
When you look at the discography of someone like Paul McCartney, it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend that so many excellent songs have come from one person. Whether you’re listening to The Beatles, Wings or some of his solo stuff, great music seems to follow the Liverpudlian around like a shadow. It’s nice to look at some of his bad songs as a reminder that even geniuses are capable of producing crap.
Arguably, ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ isn’t actually that bad a song. Do The Beatles have better tracks? Yes, of course, they do. But is that song so terrible that it should receive the disdain that it does? Probably not. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some Paul McCartney songs that aren’t terrible offerings, though.
One track in particular that annoyed his fans was ‘Mull Of Kintyre’. McCartney is anything but a music lover, which means he likes a range of different types of music. However, it’s important for some artists to learn that just because they like a certain kind of music doesn’t mean they need to put their own spin on it.
“I’m not concerned with the genre or the style of the thing. I’ve got very wide tastes,” he said, “In 1977, I fancied doing a Scottish bagpipe song, so I wrote ‘Mull Of Kintyre’. The people who hated it were pissed off with me. And even some of the people who bought it were pissed off with me because they’d bought it.”
McCartney continued, “Of course, it didn’t help that it came out at the height of punk rock. But what should I have done at that time?! Stuck a safety pin through my nose and done some bonkers, punk song?”
Funnily enough, though, McCartney seems to admit here that he isn’t a musician capable of making punk music, as by throwing caution to the wind and diving headfirst into a bad bagpipe song, McCartney was indirectly pretty punk. Additionally, what is more anti-establishment than having one of the best songwriters of all time write something terrible?
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