‘Crossroads’: the Wings song Paul McCartney called a “joke”
After The Beatles split up in 1970, the public’s musical attention dispersed into new factions welcoming the stars of glam-rock and the prog-rock era to illuminate the skies. The band was by no means forgotten, but the four respective solo careers of the Fab Four could never quite live up to the sum of its parts in the past. However, relative to their peers, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison released a highly impressive scattering of records over the 1970s.
McCartney’s varied offerings of the ’70s included work both as a solo act and alongside his wife, Linda, in Wings. The Wings oeuvre is perhaps best known for the classic eponymous James Bond theme, ‘Live and Let Die’, but a broader peak came in 1973 with their most successful album, Band on the Run.
Following this highly-popular third studio album, Wings regrouped with the addition of Jimmy McCulloch, the former lead guitarist in Thunderclap Newman and Stone the Crows, to record the 1975 follow-up, Venus and Mars. While the album has been somewhat eclipsed in history by Band on the Run, it sported a selection of inspired tracks, including the blockbusting lead single, ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, which peaked at number one in the US and the UK.
However, it is the album’s final two tracks that offer some of the most interesting facets of the release. In the penultimate offering on Venus and Mars, ‘Treat Her Gently – Lonely Old People’, McCartney sings, “Here we sit, two lonely old people/ Eking our lives away/ Bit by bit, two lonely old people/ Keeping the time of day”.
Inspired by the image of an old couple sitting at home whiling away the hours, McCartney decided to cap off the album with a cover of a soap opera theme song. Coronation Street had crossed his mind, but ultimately, he chose the theme song for the ITV soap Crossroads.
“I wrote ‘Lonely Old People’, and I was struck by the image of two old people sitting down in front of the TV on a cold winter night,” McCartney revealed to the Mail in 1975. “They’d be sipping a cup of tea, and what else would they be watching but Crossroads? I’ve always had a soft spot for the programme myself.”
The celebrated composer Tony Hatch wrote the original theme tune in 1964, ready for the first episode, which aired on November 2nd. “I wrote the original song in a day,” Hatch told the Mail. “The producer Reg Watson asked if I could come up with a theme for a new drama series. It was quite a simple little tune, but it was catchy, and it seemed to catch the public’s imagination. I was surprised that it ran for as long as it did.”
Little did Hatch know at the time, one of the Fab Four, who had just broken into the US charts at the time, would cover his track as a well-meaning “joke” 11 years later.
“It’s a joke! It’s after ‘Lonely Old People’, you see,” McCartney added, discussing the song at a New Orleans press conference in 1975. “They are sitting there in the park, saying, ‘Nobody asked us to play’. It’s a poignant moment. Then there’s a little break, and then Crossroads starts up. It’s lonely old people. It’s just the kind of thing that lonely old people watch. It could just as easily have been Coronation Street, but we knew the chords to Crossroads. I just thought that it would be nice to do it.”
Listen to Paul McCartney’s cover of Tony Hatch’s Crossroads theme song below.
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