I've Only Got Two Hands (But One of Them's Giving a Thumbs-Up).


You’d think by now this wouldn’t surprise me, but listening to the season-four-opener of ‘Take it Away: The Complete Paul McCartney Archive Podcast’ (Ryan Brady and Chris Mercer’s impressively thorough Macca solo-career retrospective) only serves to underline how vastly underrated McCartney’s post-Beatles work is.

(Excuse the hyperbole, but I didn’t get much sleep.)

The topic of the episode is his 2005 album ‘Chaos & Creation in the Backyard’, which both Brady and Mercer admitted to not liking at first - which nearly had me climbing onto my fist-shaking soapbox - though it soon became clear how much they now hold the album in reverence.

But why I did I react so defensively? Because while I know how frustrating it can be to be a McCartney fan - particularly when he rolls out the same tired, sanitized “John and I never came out of a writing session without a song” stories (and insists on playing gigs with a setlist that barely dips into anything post-1982), every so often he'll release an album like Chaos that provides strong evidence of how endlessly inquisitive, curious and inspirational the man is.

It’s genuinely some of his finest work, and we know how high-end his career started out. It also marks a sharp gear-change in the quality of his recent solo output; while most Beatles fans probably stopped keeping up with his albums post-Wings' split bar a few hyped exceptions (*cough* Flowers in the Dirt *cough*), Chaos proves that when he allows himself to be pushed and challenged by a good producer, he can still come up with material to make the best songwriters jealous.

While the Take it Away chaps took a while to warm to Chaos, the moment it fell into place for me was surprisingly early. The day before it was released, the London radio station XFM broadcast it in its entirety (which I could only just pick up through living on the outskirts) with track-by-track analysis from Paul, and it hit me by track two - the haunting and vulnerable ‘How Kind of You' - that we were set for something special. Waiting for a new album from someone you love but don't always trust to make the right choices can be a tense experience, though in turn it's exciting when they nail it (as I felt with this year's album Egypt Station); It’s like catching the eye of someone who's precious to you and falling for them all over again.

(As I said: very little sleep.)

The biggest potential gift the new episode of Take it Away could give is the chance to bring such a great album to a new audience; I'm jealous of the people who’ll find it. Forget Tug of War, Venus and Mars or even Band on the Run: Chaos & Creation in the Backyard marks a key moment in Macca’s career when his new work became truly interesting.

Popular posts from this blog

Shakerpuppetmaker.

Image
Have Parker from Thunderbirds and Noel Gallagher ever been seen in the same room? The resemblance is uncanny. So much so, I think something’s afoot. If my suspicions are correct, I've stumbled across a secret that will blow the music and puppet industry wide apart. In the mid-60s / mid-90s at least. It doesn’t take long to see the signposts. There’s the similarity between the name of Oasis’ first single, Supersonic, and Supermarianation, Gerry Anderson’s puppetry technique. The Gallagher brothers would often wear Parkas . Live Forever was clearly a reference to Captain Scarlet and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to the size difference between Noel and his bandmates. The more you think about it, the more brazen it gets. It’s fishier than Area 51, Paul is Dead and JFK's assassination put together. The only glitch to the theory is scale . According to Wikipedia, Anderson’s marionettes were 1’10” and Gallagher is 5’8”. How does he maintain an illusion of avera...
Read more

Stevenage: A (Tiny) River Runs Through it.

If ever a river was mis-sold, it’s the Roaring Meg in Stevenage. I just walked past it on my way to the retail park that has taken its name. They’re similarly uninspiring. The river is less of a roar and more of a dribble; cystitis sufferers produce greater flow. The retail park is soulless. What was once a thriving enterprise is nearly devoid of atmosphere, save an underlying essence of emptiness and despair. With a Toys R Us. When it was first built I was excited. Back then, the thought of a bowling alley, an ice rink, a Harvester and a Blockbuster Video within a small surface area was enticing. I celebrated many birthdays on site. There was an indoor cricket pitch there for a while where I once had a joint party with a friend. Why someone with an almost pathological fear of sport would agree to such a venture is beyond me, but I did it. Now, there’s very little at the Roaring Meg of note. The river would be a metaphor for the shopping ce...
Read more

Hoo-ray and up She Rises.

So much has happened since my last post in March that this blog risks sounding like an itinerary. The main news is that Hitchin Mostly Comedy will return in the summer at a new venue, the Queen Mother Theatre . The road to this decision was convoluted, though enough fell into place en route to leave me optimistic about this new start. The catalyst was a survey I ran via our mailing list a few months back, in which I asked, "If the club returned in the current climate, with tickets still around £15 (and with similar line-ups), would you still attend?"; the response to which, in simple terms, was a resounding yes. Nearly 250 mailing list subscribers responded in a single week, with around a hundred also taking the option to leave some feedback. And only two people were abusive, which counts as a win when you consider they posted their comments online anonymously. Imagine how many more insults we would have received if the comedy club was a woman. Particularly if she was Diane ...
Read more