The 1993 song Paul McCartney was told to forget: “You can’t do this”
It’s impossible for anyone to try to stifle an artist’s creativity. Whether or not they make something that doesn’t align with your beliefs or rubs you the wrong way, it’s their choice whether to put it into a song or make their own solid gold hits out of the deal.
And even for someone who had as much power as Paul McCartney held over the music industry in his prime, he wasn’t safe from getting a slap on the wrist from time to time.
For someone so closely associated with optimism and melodic charm, McCartney occasionally surprised audiences with how politically outspoken he could become. While he rarely embraced confrontation in the same way Lennon did, moments of genuine outrage were capable of pulling him far outside his usual comfort zone.
Then again, McCartney seems like the last member of The Beatles to cause any major disturbance. Even though he was the first member to talk about their use of LSD in the press, he was always more interested in remaining professional and keeping a cheeky demeanour with the press whenever someone tried to accuse him of being one of the bad boys of rock like The Rolling Stones.
But ever since the band’s breakup, no amount of controversy John Lennon stirred up ever got him in as much trouble as Macca. Despite the well-publicised problems that he had being detained in Japan and nearly locked away for the rest of his life on a drug possession charge, McCartney was never safe from the occasional barb with different artists, eventually having a few spats with Michael Jackson when ‘The King of Pop’ seized the rights to The Beatles’ entire back catalogue.
Even then, McCartney’s public image largely remained intact because he projected an air of diplomacy and professionalism that contrasted sharply with many of his contemporaries. He preferred persuasion and wit over provocation, which made songs like ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ feel especially jarring at the time.
Whereas Lennon was the more cutthroat member of the band in the press, McCartney could be just as scathing in his songs. Despite his former partner’s reputation for laying it all out in his songs on tracks like ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Power to the People,’ people didn’t expect something as scathing as ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ from McCartney when hearing about The Troubles going on outside the country’s borders.
Despite McCartney living in Scotland at the time, he was still immensely proud of where he came from, but when he heard about the horrible atrocities that happened on Bloody Sunday, he wasn’t about to roll over and accept it. That said, he did end up getting a few strange looks from higher-ups when he motioned to put the record out as a single.
As soon as he showed up at the EMI offices with the record to go out as a single, though, McCartney faced major pushback from his label for the first time, saying, “I sent it over EMI, and I immediately got a phone call from Sir Joseph Lockwood who was the head of EMI. But Sir Joseph, he said, ‘Paul, you can’t do this…the Irish situation.’ I said, ‘The thing is, I’m not really a protest songwriter, but this is affecting me deeply, and I feel like I’ve got to say something.’”
Then again, it’s not like it’s the greatest song that Macca has ever made. Since this was the strange middle period between the beginning of Wings and coming off of RAM, the former Beatle was still wet behind the ears, and since a lot of the lyrics don’t have much more to say other than creating some kind of peaceful resolution, the song sounds a little preemptive by his usual standard.
This is strange because even Lennon managed to have a few spotty moments in his tracks about the subject, with ‘The Luck of the Irish’ sounding a lot thinner than many of his other folk tunes. It was clear that both of them were on two different creative pages at this point, but this is one of the first times it was abundantly clear that they worked better together than apart.
