“F***ing awful”: The 1971 Wings song that Paul McCartney never liked
There isn’t too much in the music world that can bring Paul McCartney down. Even when things seemed the direst in the glory years of The Beatles, Macca was always smiling, trying to make the best out of every bad situation. Though things were always looking up, it became harder for McCartney to remain optimistic once his old band called it a day.
In several interviews, McCartney mentioned feeling heartbroken after the band split up, thinking he would stay with his best mates for the rest of his life. Although his solo career began with the demo album McCartney, it wasn’t until RAM that he started incorporating that trademark Beatles sound into his music again. With the help of his wife Linda, McCartney put together a stunning collection of songs that borrowed heavily from his time in Abbey Road while also celebrating the domestic bliss he now found at home.
Part of the reason Wild Life sounded so loose was that McCartney intended it to. The album was recorded quickly in 1971, with much of the material captured in just a few takes in an attempt to recreate the raw feeling of a live band discovering songs in real time. Rather than obsess over studio perfection as he had done with The Beatles, McCartney wanted Wings to feel spontaneous and unpolished, even if that meant leaving rough edges in the final product.
McCartney was finally happy with what he made; he was creatively satisfied, and the reviews were… terrible. From Rolling Stone to his fellow Beatles, fans did not get what McCartney was trying to say on this album, thinking that he had just thrown together a bunch of songs with little to no direction. Needing to shake things up again, McCartney assembled a new band and made a point to sound as different to The Beatles as possible.
For the start of Wings, Wild Life is about as barebones as it gets from an instrumental standpoint. Throughout the project, McCartney, Denny Laine and the rest of the band are jamming on skeletal songs stemming from jam sessions with hardly any lyrical depth. Although McCartney did make peace with his feud with John Lennon on the stunning album closer ‘Dear Friend’, even he couldn’t stand up for some of the jammy sections.
When talking about the song ‘Bip Bop’, McCartney didn’t mince words about how much he hated the tune, telling Q Magazine, “The lyrics are fucking awful”. Granted, Macca has a bit of a point. Throughout its four-minute runtime, McCartney scat-sings his way through the melody and then puts different nonsense phrases towards the end of the line to finish it off.
In that sense, ‘Bip Bop’ almost works as a snapshot of McCartney’s mindset at the time. Rather than chasing the kind of carefully structured songwriting that had defined his Beatles years, he was experimenting with simplicity and instinct, allowing the band to fall into grooves without worrying too much about where they led. While the result may have felt slight to critics, it reflected a musician trying to rediscover the joy of playing in a band after the pressure-cooker environment of the late Beatles period.
Later, during a feature with Mojo, McCartney admitted to taking his foot off the gas a bit too much on this song. He said, “I think when you allow yourself to be kind of playful, the month after or the year after, you can just think, ‘Oh, maybe that was a bit too playful. Maybe I should’ve thought a bit more about that.’ And I was having that kind of feeling about ‘Bip Bop.’ It’s a little bit insignificant, it doesn’t really tax my lyric skills or my melodic skills”.
Critics were even more savage than McCartney was, heralding Wild Life as one of his worst albums and thinking that the ‘Cute Beatle’ had finally lost his touch. It would take McCartney a few more years to finally prove himself to the critics, making Band on the Run and garnering his peers’ respect.
As he looked back on his fellow artists, though, McCartney sees that there’s merit in anything that an artist creates, telling Rolling Stone: “When I’m talking to people about Picasso or something, and they say, well, his blue period was his only one that was any good. But for me, if the guy does some great things, then even his downer moments are interesting”.
‘Bip Bop’ might not have been McCartney’s finest hour, but these moments portray Wings in their infancy.
