The 1971 song Paul McCartney will always regret: “The weakest song I have ever written”
Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness no less, is not someone you imagine was often prone to poignancy, but when he reflected on the impact of hearing The Beatles for the first time, the late singer was positively philosophical.
“The only way I can describe it,” he mused, “is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had.” The remarkable thing is that they kept these lightbulb moments coming in such rapid succession that their reign at the apex of pop culture pinged with bursts of illumination like a brainstorming event at a filament factory,
In fact, the flashes of inspiration flowed so freely that it is hard to fathom looking back. There are only about seven years and seven months between the release of The Beatles’ first single and the last of their original tenure. In that time, they were constantly evolving, constantly moving, constantly shaping the future in weird new ways. Like the Wright brothers before them, the Fab Four were a force that took fierce risks.
With this radical outlook, they liberated their sound not only for their own amusement but also for the greater good of culture. The world was freed-up along with it. As the philosopher Mark Fisher once said, “The Beatles basically trained people to expect things to get more and more experimental the more popular they got.”
We barely give them credit for the fact that as they sat upon a precipice of fame known only to Jesus Christ before them, as John Lennon would infamously assert, they were still only in their early 20s. Yet, they were more than happy to make a heap of all their winnings and risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss. As Lennon would later comment, “We were all on this ship in the 1960s, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.”
Perhaps their biggest risk of all was when they abandoned that ship and broke up. Suddenly, they went from a smooth sailing unit guiding the world towards new lands as cherished conquering heroes to adrift and derided in a sea of uncertainty.
This created a unique environment from which to release music as individual artists. A whole host of paradoxes were unfurling at once, besieging their imminent solo careers with problems: they were settling down and grieving, there was immense pressure but few expectations, and they were hot on the heels of immeasurable success but suddenly facing the foreign task of having a point to prove.
Paul McCartney absconded to his farm in Scotland to simultaneously settle into family life and start squirrelling away on McCartney. ‘Hotly anticipated’ is an awfully overused phrase in music journalism, but for once, it was a genuine maxim: Macca was working on arguably the most hotly anticipated album in music history.
In many ways, it delivered. Or at least it delivered as much as it could. Even over half a century later, whether McCartney is a masterpiece remains subsumed by what it isn’t: The Beatles. And, ultimately, it wasn’t as good. How could it be?
Breaking free from the Fab Four
It seems that McCartney began to ask himself that same question. How could he ever match up? In a 2004 interview with Uncut, he earnestly reflected, “Now I feel I’ve got enough credit for what I did in The Beatles. Even so, there’s no getting away from them. They still exert this astonishing power. They’re like a magnetic force. The more all four of us tried to pull away from them, the harder they pulled us back. And they still do. It continues to amaze me.”
The unique situation that catapulted them to the pinnacle of music history was impossible to recreate. Timing and fate had a lot to do with it. That dawned on the members heavily in the aftermath. McCartney had the self-confidence to know that he was a remarkable songwriter who could still turn out classics, but Paul Simon was a remarkable songwriter, too, as were Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and bands like The Kinks, but none of them got close to matching the fabled Fab Four.
The strange and unfathomable heights they assailed to meant that “there was always the shadow of The Beatles” to contend with. As McCartney mused, “There’s days when I wake up and have to remind myself that I wrote songs with John Lennon.”
He humbly added, “I know John must have had moments when he thought, ‘I wrote with Paul McCartney’. It’s fantastic that he was a part of my life in that way. Imagine the luxury of being stuck on a song and being able to hand it over to John Lennon to finish off. Do I miss that? Of course I do. Hugely.”
In the early 1970s, he was trapped in the inertia of acceptance and defiance. He was trying to match The Beatles and their experimental ways with records like Ram, a gem that was panned upon release and only rose to 38th in the US year-end chart. While also sustaining his popularity with easy tripe like ‘Ebony and Ivory’ that was nevertheless a smash hit.
Often, he floated between these two poles. This creates a confusing second chapter for McCartney. He somehow simultaneously became known as a magical master of his craft and a man of mawkish mishaps.
As George Martin would later reflect regarding the solo work of the group he once produced in an interview with Paul Du Noyer, “I think John did a lot of good stuff, and Paul did too, but it wasn’t as good as when they were together and I think they have to accept that. Paul went through a long period when he was writing stuff that was ok.” That was a far cry from where he had been used to.
“There’s a couple of times in life when you are forced into taking a risk. After The Beatles, this was my situation: ‘Do I keep going with music, or not?’”
Paul McCartney
Most of the time, he was happy to accept that peaks and troughs were a natural part of the playing field when you’ve written over 700 songs. He was a family man, just happy to be creating music. He made peace with that. Yet, in another paradox, he also found that this comfortable acceptance led to works he would live to lament.
In time, some of these lamentations would curdle into a deeper worry that he was eroding the lustre of his hard-earned legacy. He singled out ‘Bip Bop’ on Wings’ 1971 album, Wild Life, as the moment he worried he had embraced this acceptance a little too firmly, and found himself riddled with regret about the potential for an admittedly subpar effort to undermine his standing as a legendary musician.
A gentle and harmless ditty entirely devoid of meaning, he told Q in 2015 that ‘Bip Bop’ was the worst song of his entire career. “The lyrics are fucking awful,” he cursed. “The weakest song I have ever written in my life”. However, it wasn’t simply the insipid vapidity that he lamented in the subsequent years, but also how that might be perceived.
Even within The Beatles, he had faced unfair accusations that he was the ‘melody man’, and his pals were the ones with great depth and ideas. Lennon certainly didn’t help matters when he accused him of occasionally dabbling in “granny shit” music. With ‘Bip Bop’, he had effectively handed the holy grail to the cynics who held that belief.
He had hated it even at the time of writing and was ready to cast it towards the ash heap of history, but his trusted producer, Trevor Horn, convinced him that it was one of his favourites. The ever-personable McCartney acquiesced, but he is still yet to come around to Horn’s misguided viewpoint.
In Conversations with McCartney, he laid out the crux of his grievance: “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.”
Viewed in the context that McCartney hopes musos will adopt, ‘Bip Bop’ is the sign of a liberated musician simply playing around on a Sunday morning after the eight-day week of The Beatles. Aside from the utter inanity of a track that effectively just says “Bip Bop, Bip Bop” over and over, the melody is actually pretty pleasant, and you could even argue the lo-fi production is seminal to the indie movement.
But viewed in the context of what he fears will befall him, it’s the meaningless nonsense of a man who was nothing without his old friends, and surely it proves even they, the sacred Fab Four, weren’t bulletproof without the Kevlar of hype and accepted hyperbole.
Thankfully for McCartney, that’s just a fear that will likely never come to fruition. But it is also one that has proved burdensome, muddying his mind, leaving his flow a little murky. For that reason, this harmless and largely forgotten little ditty has always stuck in his craw as a regret that just might mire the retrospective view of his work in years to come. As he concludes, “I’ve always hated that song.”
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