The classic Spike Milligan line that inspired Paul McCartney’s 1982 disasterpiece
A well-meaning single that has propped up karaoke machines for decades, ‘Ebony and Ivory’ is not one of Paul McCartney’s greatest songwriting efforts, but it did see him collaborate with a fellow songwriting legend in the form of Stevie Wonder. Yet, the Motown stalwart wasn’t the only beloved figure to have a hand in the single.
Retrospectively, it is easy to poke holes in ‘Ebony and Ivory’ as being overly simplistic and somewhat naive in its approach to racial harmony, not to mention its painfully vacuous 1980s pop sound. At the time, though, McCartney’s heart was certainly in the right place when he sat down to write the song at his farm in Scotland circa 1978.
At a time of grave racial divisions both in the United Kingdom, where National Front far-right marches were becoming increasingly commonplace, and Enoch Powell’s horrific ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was still fresh in people’s minds, ‘Ebony and Ivory’ was a reminder of the power of racial unity.
It must have had some effect, too, given that it became one of Paul McCartney’s three number-one hits as a solo artist, and faced a blanket ban in South Africa, which was still ruled by the apartheid regime in 1982.
Given that it featured a bona fide icon of the American airwaves in Stevie Wonder, too, the song’s impact managed to transcend the Atlantic Ocean, as well as allowing Macca to pay homage to the Motown sounds that had inspired him decades earlier, during his time with The Beatles.
Whichever way you look at it, the impact, context, and importance of ‘Ebony and Ivory’ far outweigh its sub-four-minute runtime. Yet, McCartney might never have written the song, were it not for a remark made by comedy legend Spike Milligan.
According to George Martin’s 1983 book Making Music, McCartney had been inspired to write the chart-topping ode to racial harmony after hearing Milligan say, “Black notes, white notes, and you need to play the two to make harmony, folks!” For his part, the Goon Show alumnus was borrowing from a turn of phrase that stretched back over a century, and was used most prominently by the Pan-Africanist writer James Aggrey during the 1920s.
The fact that it was Milligan’s delivery that caught McCartney’s attention, though, is in keeping with the enduring relationship between his discography and the realm of comedy. In fact, the Beatles as a whole boasted a lasting connection to the comedy world, from McCartney’s appreciation of Beyond the Fringe and The Goon Show to George Harrison’s financing of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. McCartney even produced a single for the psych-tinged comedic geniuses at the heart of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
‘Ebony and Ivory’ wasn’t a comedic outing, of course, and Milligan had his own chequered history with race relations, reflected by his habit of donning Blackface in the horrendously outdated 1969 sitcom Curry and Chips. However, that fateful quote not only reflected Paul McCartney’s lasting debt to the emerging world of alternative comedy, but it also provided the former Beatle with one of his most iconic post-1970 songs.
