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.

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...

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...

Comedy That's Worth a Letch.

Today, I nipped to Letchworth to meet with illustrator (and one-time - two-time - comedy poet) Mushybees, to discuss an event Mostly Comedy will act as surrogate parents to as part of Letchworth’s Arts Takeover in a couple of weeks. Months ago he got into contact to see if we’d be up for co-organising a comedy stage as part of Letchworth’s weekend of arts-based attractions in July; something I’d provisionally said yes to, before things got hectic in the lead-up to Edinburgh and we didn’t take it any further. Despite not getting down to the nitty-gritty straight away, we managed to pull a line-up together in a back-and-forth of emails yesterday, leading to me getting Glyn’s blessing and us deciding we’d officially go ahead with it (whatever ‘officially’ means in this context). In reality, it’s not complicated: from 12pm until 6pm-ish on the 22 nd July, Glyn, Mushybees and I will host four Edinburgh previews from four acts (including me), before Nor...

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