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.

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