“Sharpen the chisel”: Why did Paul McCartney call his album ‘Flaming Pie’?
No matter how dispersed the band members became, Paul McCartney was never really all that estranged from The Beatles. Even in the 1990s, two decades after their official split, he put his solo career on hold to nurture a Fab Four-centric project, injecting it with his full attention so as to not disappoint fans. In 1997, he was back on the road with his solo efforts following the release of Flaming Pie.
While working on The Beatles Anthology, McCartney peered fresh out of 1993’s Off the Ground, which became one of the musician’s more forgettable works. That, coupled with working on a special Beatles retrospective, put him in an oddly refreshing mindset ahead of Flaming Pie, one that urged him to revisit some of the band’s older tricks and consider using them in his solo work.
Listening back to past material forced him to realise the very reason The Beatles became a global phenomenon in the first place and work towards emulating some of the same charm in his solo guise. He also infused his new material with an overwhelming aura of nostalgia, but perhaps that was a more inherent approach after having just immersed himself in a time long gone by.
Flaming Pie emerged as a Beatles homage of sorts, not just because McCartney went back to basics and prioritised simplicity, but because he felt naming it after what could be construed as an inside joke with John Lennon made longstanding fans stop and listen. Flaming Pie wasn’t just a quirky name choice; it referred to Lennon’s old remark when musing about how The Beatles got their name.
In his signature cynical fashion, Lennon responded to the question with abstraction, saying: “It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, ‘from this day on you are Beatles with an A.'” Equipped with the perfect name for the record, McCartney created songs that reflected the allure of earlier Beatles material, using The Beatles Anthology as a “refresher course” on all-things creativity.
As he later reflected, “[The Beatles Anthology] reminded me of the Beatles’ standards and the standards that we reached with the songs. So in a way it was a refresher course that set the framework for this album.” He also noted how revisiting some of the band’s records surprised him because he noticed “how simple, and yet complete, some of the early Beatles work was.” He added, “Whereas I might have been a little bit lazy in the past, and just thought, ‘Ah, near enough,’ which is very tempting to do, I made it a point to go in and sharpen the chisel and get it a bit tighter.”
At the same time, he had a lot of fun doing it. There’s always a slight misconception about the former members of The Beatles wanting to go on and do something completely different to what they did in the band, which, to a point is true—but as the years went by, McCartney enjoyed the lighthearted atmosphere within much of their music, which encouraged him to re-evaluate his own approach and return to the style he knew best.
As a result, Flaming Pie was a much greater success than Off the Ground, with many considering it one of his best solo efforts. Some songs exhibit a subtle note of melancholy, of course, but for the most part, it’s as close to a solo homage to his childhood friends as you could get, and a solid reminder that Lennon is always right there, pushing him to be even better.
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