mostly david ephgrave

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 ...

The soundtrack to my day today, inevitably, what with it being released this morning, was the new Paul McCartney album ‘Egypt Station’, and to paraphrase one of its lyrics, “It’s been a blast”. Listening to new material from an artist you’ve followed your whole life can be a tense experience, particularly when - like McCartney - they’re eternally teetering toward inevitable comparison with their own past. Paul’s one of a tiny handful of people who somehow manages to be both hugely respected for his work with The Beatles while also often being derided as a figure of fun who supposedly hasn’t done anything to rival his early days for an eternity. Now, the latter half of that sentence is bollocks and is something that - at least in the eyes of the music press - has been refuted so often by reviews of his recent work, which has generally been seen to have hit a bit of a purple streak since the late Nineties. Yet despite this, the cliche's a difficu...

One thing I like Paul McCartney for is his b-sides and his lesser-known work. Sadly, a clichéd view of his solo material has formed over the years that does no justice to his huge back catalogue. At best, people tend to rate Wings 1973 album Band on the Run as a near-return to form of his unparalleled Beatles period, but after that, critique tends to fall silent, save the easy - and unreasonable - allusions to twee granny musak made by Lennon during the bitter early Seventies. In reality, the last twenty years have seen a surprising array of top-quality albums that are regularly described as “his best work since Band on the Run”, whilst forgetting this same comment has been applied to nearly every release since 1997’s Flaming Pie. It’s normally his choice of singles that cloud the water, by not always being reflective of his current output. While there are many songs I’d site as favourites, one popped in my mind that’s worth a mention: the ...