The 1971 song that left Paul McCartney embarrassed: “The lyrics are awful”
If there has been one criticism about Paul McCartney across his seven-decade-long music career, it’s that he sometimes gets a bit too cute for his own good. While legions of fans might love the goofy tones of ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ and ‘Big Barn Bed’, McCartney’s penchant for playfulness occasionally strains the outer regions of credulity.
It’s hard not to think of ‘Bip Bop’ when talking about McCartney’s worst songs. It’s an easy target – a complete nonsense track, ‘Bip Bop’ originally appeared on Wings’ 1971 debut LP Wild Life. The album was panned by most critics, with ‘Bip Bop’ being a particular target of scorn. McCartney himself later had some regrets about the track.
Part of the hostility toward Wild Life came from the enormous expectations surrounding McCartney after The Beatles’ split. Audiences and critics were still looking for grand artistic statements comparable to Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper’s, whereas McCartney seemed increasingly interested in looseness, spontaneity and domestic simplicity during the early Wings era.
Songs like ‘Bip Bop’ therefore felt baffling to listeners expecting another carefully crafted pop masterpiece rather than a deliberately lightweight jam built around repetition and mood.
Yet McCartney’s willingness to indulge those playful instincts is also a major reason his catalogue remains so distinctive. Throughout his career, he has often balanced emotional depth and melodic sophistication with an almost childlike sense of curiosity, sometimes producing masterpieces and other times wandering into outright silliness.
While ‘Bip Bop’ may never rank among his finest moments, it reflects the same fearless experimental streak that allowed him to write songs as inventive and unconventional as ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ or ‘Temporary Secretary’.
“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,’” McCartney told Mojo Magazine in 2010. “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.”
“But I think what has happened in rock ‘n’ roll has become so esteemed,” McCartney added. “I mean, people study the shit in university! Well, when we started nobody did and a record like Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ didn’t have to have any significance other than it was just a red-hot record.”
“And so ‘Bip Bop’ was done in that vein where it was like, ‘It doesn’t have to be significant, it’s just a bip and a bop,’” McCartney said. “A little nonsense song.”
“The lyrics are fucking awful,” McCartney would later admit to Q Magazine. “‘Bip bop, bip bip bop, Bop bop, bip bip band, Dig your bottom dollar, put it in your hand…'”
“But (producer), Trevor Horn told me, ‘That’s one of my favourites,'” McCartney claimed. “I can’t hate it that much, cannot I? There must have been a reason I’d like to it in the first place.”
‘Bip Bop’ would be played during Wings’ first tour of colleges and universities around Europe in 1972. The song was retained for their ‘Wings Over Europe’ tour that same year, but by the following year, the band had enough original material to be able to drop ‘Bip Bop’ from their setlists. McCartney hasn’t touched it since and likely never will at this rate.
