mostly david ephgrave

What does any self-respecting thirty-six-year-old who was given £30 in Amazon Gift Card vouchers for his birthday spend them on? Special Edition remasters of two of Paul McCartney’s best 1980s albums Tug of War and Flowers in the Dirt, that’s what. You’d think this many years into the game my interests might deviate, but apparently not; the man who first bought Flowers in the Dirt on cassette from Wembley Market in his early teens is buying it again in his mid-(don’t you dare say “late”)-thirties on a different format; give it another twenty years and I’ll be paying to have the album implanted into my head. Yet again, I prove where my allegiance lies; I didn’t use the vouchers to buy the 50 th Anniversary remaster of Sgt Pepper- even if that was essentially another Macca-led project; I spent them on his less-celebrated yet often as interesting solo work. A lot of people would sniff at that statement, but only because they’re comparing the man’s la...

For the past few days, I’ve been enjoying listening to one of Paul McCartney’s least well-regarded albums, Pipes of Peace . To give you an idea of how little it’s liked, even the majority of fans on his official forum - who you'd think would have a more red-rose-speedway-tinted view toward his work - find it hard to say a good thing about it. When it was announced that it would be remastered and re-released as the next instalment of his current reissue series (alongside the critically acclaimed Tug of War), the news was met with derision on the Macca Message Board (though you should never listen to people on the Internet. Especially bloggers; they’re the worst). Even I, a full-time ‘McC advocate ’, pulled a face when I heard about it - and questioned why he’d choose it over everything else. Not that I haven’t given the album a fair chance in the past. Every so often, I return to the oft-neglected or derided parts of his back catalogue (in a loose sense, I'm referri...