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.

'...I'm Gonna Look at You 'til My Eyes Go Blind."

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...

Shakerpuppetmaker.

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...

Not The Bayeux One.

The Carole King album Tapestry has been my 'getting-ready-in-the-morning' soundtrack for the past few weeks. It's been a favourite album ever since I was a student, which makes for a pleasantly gentle way to usher in the start of a day. I've always been a fan of a well-crafted song, which is something of a Carole King hallmark, ever since she started writing with her first husband in the early Sixties. Tapestry may be an unimaginative choice for a favourite LP, as it suggests I haven't delved that far into her career, but it's still an undoubted classic; anything with '(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman', 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?' and 'You've Got A Friend' on it can't really fail; if nothing else, it proves she likes writing songs with long titles. Next month, she's set to perform the album live in its entirety for the first time at a gig in Hyde Park, which I would have loved to have gone to, if it weren...

mostly david ephgrave

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