“F*cking awful”: Paul McCartney names the worst song of his career
Paul McCartney is one of the most prolific songwriters still standing, with the best of 1,000 compositions under his belt, but even the all-time greats don’t always get it right.
Whether it’s McCartney, Bob Dylan or David Bowie, any artist who has been around for decades with a penchant for risk-taking will, occasionally, write a heap of shit. The skill comes in knowing when a song falls into this category and ensuring it’s buried in the faults forever rather than unleashed into the world, but some will sneak through the cracks.
McCartney was still in his 20s when The Beatles split up, and if he wanted to, he could have never written another song again while still being viewed in legendary status. However, songwriting is just what he does, which is why he’s still releasing new music well into his 80s, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
There are several songs he’s made that the world could live without, with ‘Fuh You’ and ‘Ebony and Ivory’ immediately springing to mind, but neither of those is the creation that McCartney detests most.
McCartney is usually pretty adept at knowing when a song is worthy of escaping the confines of the studio and appearing on an album.
Another important factor is his ability to surround himself with like-minded musicians, who will tell him if a song isn’t up to standard. However, in one instance, McCartney should have trusted his gut rather than being told by a colleague that a song was a stroke of genius when he knew from the start that it was substandard.
Artists can often be their harshest critics, but they know their work better than anybody else, and as a result, usually their opinion is on the money.
If McCartney had listened to his own advice, he would have backed himself to exclude ‘Bip Bop’ from Wings’ 1971 album, Wild Life, which he later said was the worst song he’d ever written.
At the time of penning the composition, McCartney was still getting accustomed to working in a new environment in a post-Beatles world. On the one hand, he relished the chance to experiment in uncharted territory. However, he could have done with the Fab Four delivering him some harsh truths with ‘Bip Bop’ that stopped him from releasing it.
If you ignore the lyrics, ‘Bip Bop’ is a semi-enjoyable way to spend four minutes, but its nonsensical nature makes ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ seem like Leonard Cohen in comparison.
‘Bip Bop’ is not deemed a cult classic by any stretch of the imagination in the McCartney fan community. However, nobody is more scathing about the song than him. When asked about his worst song during a 2015 interview with Q Magazine, he replied, “‘Bip Bop’. The lyrics are fucking awful”.
After reciting a selection of the track’s most cringe-inducing lyrics, such as ‘Bip bop, bip bip band, Dig your bottom dollar, put it in your hand’, he explained how he’d hated it from the moment it was written. Despite his better judgement, McCartney was persuaded it was a work of genius, revealing, “(Producer) Trevor Horn told me, ‘That’s one of my favourites’. I can’t hate it that much, can I? There must have been a reason I liked it in the first place.”
While McCartney was able to have a laugh and joke about ‘Bip Bop’ in 2015, he used to genuinely believe it might define his legacy for all the wrong reasons.
By 1989, McCartney saw ‘Bip Bop’ as the nadir of his songwriting and felt that it represented a stark contrast from the heights he hit with The Beatles. He explained in Paul Du Noyer’s book, Conversations with McCartney: “That’s my theory, that in years to come, people may actually look at all my work rather than the context of it following the Beatles. That’s the danger, as it came from ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Fool On The Hill’, to ‘Bip Bop’, which is such an inconsequential little song.”
The former Beatle then went a step further in his damning analysis of the Wings track by adding, “I’ve always hated that song.”
Ultimately, ‘Bip Bop’ is not even a footnote in McCartney’s back catalogue. McCartney could have released several albums of a similar derisory standard to ‘Bip Bop’, and it would barely begin to dent his reputation as one of the greatest ever to pick up a pen.
However, McCartney allowing one mediocre ditty to become an albatross around his neck says far more about the ultra-high songwriting standards than ‘Bip Bop’ defining his legacy.
