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 ...

I’ve been looking forward to the latest installment of ‘Take it Away: The Complete Paul McCartney Podcast’, which became available today, as it covers the album 'Flaming Pie' - an album I have great affection for that kicked off a bit of a late-career resurgence for Paul - and while I’m only halfway through Part One and am intrigued by the polarized feelings it's evoking, one comment really stuck in my throat, when one of the hosts said, “It sounds depressed and tired to me”; well yes: his wife was dying. I know it wasn’t intended callously; it goes without saying that they have a lot of love for the man - they wouldn’t devote so much time to discussing his music if they didn't - but it still surprised me, perhaps partly because it’s so different to my perception of it. I’m not saying the album’s perfect; there are definitely a few low points on it, but there are also some gems, and if there's a tiredness lurking beneath the surface, this could stem from the b...

Over the past few weeks I’ve been indulging my fangirl obsession for a certain musician’s back catalogue by dipping into ‘ Take it Away: The Complete Paul McCartney Archive Podcast’ . The subject matter is as self-explanatory as it is ambitious: the hosts Ryan Brady and Chris Mercer set out to discuss all of Macca’s post-Beatles work, from his 1970 solo album McCartney through to the present day - with an episode per album - while also taking into account as much of his unreleased material as they can lay their hands on along the way. Listening to them cover a topic I’m so familiar with is like comfort food for the soul (to use a clunky image). It’s the sort of thing I would have loved to have been part of myself, if there’d been someone around to do it with; curse the massive distance between the podcast’s hosts and me. And even I've learnt stuff I didn’t know about my most revisited subject, and heard snippets of demos I was unfamiliar with t...