‘Press to Play’: the biggest mistake Paul McCartney ever made
It’s about time we admit the one thing everyone is afraid to say about classic rock: The Beatles were not perfect. While it has been well-documented that not every one of them had the same moral standards as their counterparts, that also applied to when their music could take a bit of a plunge every now and again. Although the band’s mainline studio albums have moments with an occasional dud or songs that don’t work out, Paul McCartney managed to have his true low point further on in his solo career.
If you were to have asked the snooty critics of the time about McCartney’s worst album, they would probably point you to Wild Life. They had already hated RAM for the exact wrong reasons, and since Macca was finding his feet in a new band, the jammy nature of the album was never going to sit well with people who were expecting him to make the next version of ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Let It Be’.
But Wings was an exceptional act throughout most of their career, and even though they went out with a bit of a whimper after McCartney’s arrest for drug possession, ‘The Cute One’ didn’t need to worry about a thing. He was still on top of the world, and looking at the solo hits he would have with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder in the 1980s, he was every bit the pop star that he was back in the day, only this time a bit more sensible than before.
Then again, becoming the wise older pop star does mean getting a bit too comfortable, and records like Pipes of Peace already showed a few cracks in the armour. It’s far from a terrible record, but the few uninspired tracks, coupled with the handful of originals he made for Give My Regards to Broad Street, were already pointing him in the wrong direction. And when Press to Play happened, it felt like McCartney was a different character altogether.
Granted, it’s still a Paul McCartney record, and by definition, that means there are some catchy tunes included in the mix, but the tone is all off. There was always a bit of whimsy in McCartney’s material that fans either loved or hated, but with that style kept to a minimum, the former Beatle feels like he traded in his charm for a good slice of dad-rock, almost like he’s trying on his best attempt at sounding like a high-energy Bruce Springsteen on ‘Stranglehold’.
And while the ballads of the record like ‘However Absurd’ do work a bit better, the pop-oriented numbers are where things really fall short. Despite the old-time album cover, this was McCartney trying to get hip to the times, and with every single squelchy keyboard on tracks like ‘Talk More Talk’, he may as well have adopted a cheesy 1980s perm as well.
Elsewhere on the album, there are some great tunes like ‘Press’, but every time it starts to settle into a groove, it switches to something completely different. And once the energy does pick up on a song like ‘Angry’, hearing McCartney try on faux-rage is downright laughable, especially when his idea of chewing out someone in song features lines such as “I’m sick and tired of sitting back and listening to all of your clap-trap.”
Even when McCartney dove deeper into mature topics like Flowers in the Dirt and Off the Ground, he sounded a lot more sure of himself than he did on Press to Play. Considering how many of McCartney’s albums have a certain tone to them, this album is the biggest misstep because it refuses to settle on anything. He may have made records that were designed to not have any creative throughline, like The White Album, but this is the equivalent of throwing everything at the wall and hoping that fans will eat it up regardless.
