1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 184. Paul McCartney – Paul McCartney (1970)

 

This is the first post-Beatles solo album, although I see Lennon and Harrison also release albums this year that make the list. I don’t think Ringo (I ought to call him Starr to be consistent, but that doesn’t sound right) has an album that Dimery considers noteworthy enough, which is odd considering his solo stuff tends to be the kind of country rock that Dimery (or his contributors) seem to love.

But enough snide asides about the inexplicable obsession with Dave Crosby. This album feels more like a collection of demos than a finished product. It was recorded after McCartney had fled up to Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre following the dissolution of the Beatles, a man on the verge of (or undergoing) a nervous breakdown, and the music comes from his wife Linda’s suggestion that he try writing some songs to stop himself from going under.

A lot of the tracks are acoustic guitar pieces that last a few minutes at most, and fade out. The album opener, The Lovely Linda, sounds like something that he improvised on the spot as a personal note to his wife, and it kind of feels like we are intruding on a personal moment. Like many of the songs on here it plays with a bit of a tune for its huge 45 seconds of run time, and then fizzles out. Apparently it was meant mainly as a test for the recording equipment McCartney was using – apart from a few bits and pieces from Linda this is all him, overdubbing himself. 

That Would Be Something has him doing a kind of proto-beatboxing with percussive vocalisations. There’s only really one track, Maybe I’m Amazed, that sounds like a finished product, and the one you’re likely to hear getting airplay. Lyrics throughout reflect both the loss of something big and profound (McCartney’s life playing with his friends as The Beatles) but also its replacement with something small and profound (domestic life with Linda).

Musically it’s not a particularly exciting album. Since reading how Lennon referred to McCartney’s songs as “granny music”, I can’t help but think that, yeah, he was probably the most pedestrian songwriter of the Beatles. But I also can’t help but thinking that Lennon was being a bit of an arse, and becoming more and more cruel to a man who was, after all, his childhood friend. And that, I think, is where the album is interesting. Like Syd Barrett or Skip Spence, this is the music of a man in need of help, but fortunately for McCartney he had a supportive family to help him out of the darkness.