“We were expecting it to flop”: The Paul McCartney song he thought no one would like
Any artist who expects success is normally tempting fate. The whole point behind playing music is to serve the muse before anything else, and if anyone expects that everyone is going to be tuned to their same musical wavelength, the more tragically hilarious it is when their tunes sink without a trace. In the case of Paul McCartney, it feels like most people are on board with whatever he has up his sleeve before he even opens his mouth to sing.
Even up to the present day, McCartney has proven himself to be one of the most interesting artists working solely for his immaculate ear. He simply knows the kind of notes that will make people’s hearts dance, and even if he had stopped making music altogether outside The Beatles, he would justifiably never have to work again based solely on writing beloved anthems like ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be’.
Considering how much of a thrashing his first albums took in the press, the idea of stopping after a few years must have been on his mind at some point. No one is supposed to take everything the press says seriously, but looking at how far up his old bandmates were going, Macca was being questioned by critics about whether he had lost his edge or had become a relic of the 1960s.
If he was going to remake his image, though, McCartney knew that he would need the songs to back it up. Wings already had a few albums that had little or no acclaim to them, but the minute he hunkered down and delivered Band on the Run, everyone was more than happy to give him his flowers again. He had crossed the popularity threshold, but his reign over the 1970s was far from over.
That didn’t mean that the world was safe from a few corny moments. McCartney clearly loved that old-time music that he heard from his parent’s generation, and if anyone was going to get a pop tune like ‘Listen To What the Man Said’, they were also going to have to listen to ‘You Gave Me the Answer’. Before anyone had even heard ‘Mull of Kintyre’, though, McCartney thought he had crossed a line in some respects.
Considering the massive bagpipe melody and him strumming away on acoustic guitar, he thought that this would be one of the main Wings singles that no one would have liked, saying, “We were expecting it to be a flop. We thought we should really be putting out something thrashy, fast and loud. But it had occurred to me that there weren’t any new Scottish songs. I like the pipes, you know. The skin-tingling, bloodcurdling thing. So we released it, thinking ‘Nah… it’s not the time for it.’”
It’s not like McCartney didn’t have good reason to think that. This was the era when punk rock was rebelling against anything too pompous, and a song bringing in the bagpipes would have been a death sentence. As it turns out, though, people were more than happy to entertain Macca’s vision, becoming one of the biggest singles in UK chart history by the end of the decade.
The former Beatle even got vindication from some punks, once remembering a moment where a mohawk-clad misfit came up to his limo, only to tell him that ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was one of his favourite tunes. There’s no good explanation as to why some songs work and others don’t, but every single punk who resonated with this song could have easily formed their own folk-punk outfit later down the line. If they could love this on the same level as Sex Pistols, they would be shell-shocked by the time they heard Flogging Molly.
