‘Not Such a Bad Boy’: the song that pushed Paul McCartney to “get back out there”
It takes a true professional musician to realise when they made something that didn’t work. As much as some artists try to talk up their new releases like they wrote the greatest thing ever created by humankind, there’s a certain integrity that comes from someone who can admit that they made a horrible mistake or took things in the wrong direction. And while Paul McCartney tends to have those moments where he strikes out, some of the best ideas can come out of those happy accidents.
If anything, most people made it a habit of blasting anything that the former Beatle did when he first started. He had the potential to make great art, but even when he was wildly ahead of his time on albums like RAM, the critics weren’t all that happy with where he was going, even thinking that all those perfectionist tendencies he had in his old band finally caught up with him.
However, when talking about the worst that Macca has to offer, it goes much deeper. For anyone who likes McCartney writing the tight pop songs that he was known for, chances are Wild Life will make your skin crawl, with most of the album being made up of jam sessions that are half-finished to establish Wings as McCartney’s new outfit.
That was never the goal there. McCartney always thrived being onstage, and listening to him perform a medley of his greatest hits during Wings Over America is still some of the greatest material that he has ever made, even with The Beatles, especially with the synthesisers added into the mix for good measure.
Once he worked his way into the 1980s, though, McCartney started to leave touring behind. His last drug bust that resulted in Wings’s final run of shows pretty much grounded him for a little while, and even though McCartney II and Tug of War were great albums, most of them were suited to be put together in a studio rather than cutting loose with a band behind him.
There had to be some point when the bubble burst, though, and Give My Regards to Broad Street is still one of the most befuddling releases he ever put out. While McCartney is no stranger to the camera, his attempt at a pseudo-biographical adventure movie about finding tapes for an album felt completely unnecessary, especially when he tried to outdo his old songs by putting a more 1980s spin on Beatles hits.
If there was one guiding light in the film, it was seeing McCartney start to jam with Ringo Starr again on the track ‘Not Such a Bad Boy’ and realising how much fun he had working off of other musicians, saying, “It really whetted my appetite. The next thing on my agenda is writing new songs and making a new album, but in truth, I think at some point, I probably will get back out there again. That [Chris] Spedding-[Dave] Edmunds-Ringo lineup wasn’t a bad little band.”
But going through the live set again also meant tearing through a few lethargic numbers. Even if ‘Not Such a Bad Boy’ is one of the tunes that picks up Give My Regards To Broad Street, Press to Play felt like a group mindlessly jamming on some of McCartney’s tunes, never quite settling in until he made Off the Ground in the 1990s.
Even though Give My Regards to Broad Street is far from the colossal trainwrecks that many solo Beatles albums can be, it does stand as an important moment for McCartney’s performing career. Anyone of his stature could have spent years in the studio coming up with a million other versions of McCartney-style albums, but this was his chance to bring it to the people all over again.
