'The impression of Flaming Pie that may stay with the listener is an elegiac one despite most of the songs being either mid or up-tempo. The year after the album's release, its ballads would have struck a chord for fans upset by the death of McCartney's wife of nearly 30 years.'
by Paul McCartney
There is a pretty firm consensus that Band On The Run (1973) is probably Paul McCartney’s
best album since The Beatles broke up - even though it does feature a generous
measure of the slapdash lyrics that so underwhelmed critics during his glory
years with Wings. As the world’s most gifted tunesmith of the last 65 years or
so, it has been McCartney’s blessing and curse that songs seem to come so
easily to him. Consider for a moment, these standards - all composed by him
while he was in The Beatles:-
McCartney and Lynne |
‘Michelle’
‘Eleanor Rigby’
‘Here, There & Everywhere’
‘She’s Leaving Home’
‘Fool On The Hill’
‘Blackbird’
‘Hey Jude’
‘Let It Be’
‘The Long & Winding Road’
Quite apart from the mass of other great more up-tempo material he created with or without John Lennon, those classic ballads above represent a tough act to follow and, despite turning Wings into one of the world’s most successful bands in the 1970s, McCartney has been adjudged to have been too often satisfied with facile melodies and throwaway lyrics.
As far as I’ve been concerned, if McCartney had never
composed another song after The Beatles, he’d have already done more than
enough to ensure his place in the history of popular music. The notion that
artists should somehow always create at their optimum level is absurd, particularly
with genius, that rare flame which
tends to burn brilliantly but briefly. Genius is an overused term, but one
which certainly applies to McCartney and which can be heard in the ambition and
Beatlesque flourishes of BOTR. Whilst
he could – and still can – knock out cracking tunes almost at will, those
moments of genius have naturally flashed less frequently.
If BOTR is
the most Beatlesque of McCartney’s albums it may have been given a nudge by his
told-you-so satisfaction in ’73 at seeing the other members of the band
belatedly coming round to his way of thinking about the odious manager, Allen
Klein - who they were now all busy suing. FP
coincided with Paul, George and Ringo coming together again with George
Martin to assemble the Anthology project,
released through ’95-6 and, as McCartney confirms in the sleeve-note, that process had inspired him to try harder with what
became FP.
Issued more than 4 years after his previous release
(the longest gap between releases of his solo career) FP was the 23rd of his 36
albums since The Beatles*1 (as of 2015). It
proved a leisurely business in its making, with 12 of its 14 tracks being
recorded with co-producer Jeff Lynne during '95-7 whilst ‘Calico Skies’ and
‘Great Day’, both co-produced with George Martin, dated back to ’92. Geoff
Emerick, from the old firm back at Abbey Road in the ‘60s, led the engineering
team and a certain Ringo Starr was called up for a couple of tracks. Steve
Miller*2, one of McCartney’s American pals from way back when, was also stirred
into the mix on several cuts.
Lynne had also worked behind as well as in front of
the desk on albums by fellow Traveling Wilburys George Harrison, Roy Orbison
and Tom Petty as well with Ringo. At Harrison’s suggestion, he was also in the
chair for the ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ singles which trailed The
Beatles Anthology in ‘95. On FP, McCartney reins in Lynne’s natural
tendency towards ELO-isms and the record never sounds over-produced.
'The Threetles' |
The impression of FP
that may stay with the listener is an elegiac one, despite most of the songs
being either mid or up-tempo. The year after the album’s release, its ballads would have struck a chord for fans upset by the death of McCartney’s wife of
nearly 30 years. Diagnosed with cancer in ’95, Linda, who took all of the
monochrome photographs featured in the CD booklet, died in ‘98 and, although
none of the songs seem to have been written as direct responses to her
condition, an air of bittersweet wistfulness pervades the slower songs even as the
faster ones rock and roll in the singer’s usual cheery,
get-up-and-get-on-with-it style.
Unlike many professed ‘solo’ albums by other artists,
McCartney plays most of the instruments on the record himself: various guitars
and keyboards, drums and percussion and, of course, bass – including the very
instrument played by Bill Black on Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ some 40
years previously.
Fittingly, therefore, given FP’s re-forging of past links, it is that stand-up bass which
appears on the album’s opening track, ‘The Song We Were Singing’ which, as
pointed out in the sleeve-note*3, ‘seized the soul…of the schoolboy McCartney’.
A mainly acoustic number, the singer reflects nostalgically on late nights in
good company spent smoking and drinking, seeing ‘the world through a glass’ and
putting it to rights before fondly recalling the songs connected to those
bygone times. The songs – and the track really ought to be called ‘The Songs We Were Singing’ – aren’t named,
which has the effect of including the audience in the experience described,
allowing them to think back to their own favourite old tunes.
It’s a fine entry, with McCartney semi-scatting the
rising refrains, almost daring you to keep up with him (because you will be singing along by the second
chorus). The strong start is consolidated with ‘The World Tonight’, a rock
number that finds McCartney and Lynne riffing on electric guitars and which
features another arresting, uplifting chorus. Although the lyric moves between
both first and second person, it appears to focus on someone vulnerable to the
glare of celebrity ‘hiding from a flock of paparazzi’ whilst, at the same time,
being experienced enough with fame to rise above it and make their escape: ‘I
go back so far, I’m in front of me.’ Paul sticks with this appealing non-sequitur, telling us in the
liner-note, that John would have told him to ‘leave that one in’. And even if
it doesn’t quite make sense, its inner logic, combined with the singer’s
powerful delivery, makes it sound convincing.
Quality-control takes a dip with ‘If You Wanna’, the
first of the tracks featuring Steve Miller, the others being ‘Young Boy’ and
‘Used To Be Bad’. These are the 3 slightest inclusions on the album. The first
is a musically monotonous invitation to go on a driving holiday in a Cadillac;
the second is a rather insipid stroll about ‘a young boy looking for a way to
find love’; and the third is a bluesy jam about someone who er, well, used to
be bad. And apart from a few mildly diverting guitar solos from Miller and some
nifty bass, that’s about all that can usefully be said about these Miller Lite
moments.
You would be hard pressed to find a McCartney album –
apart from BOTR – that isn’t weakened
by what, for him, are relatively substandard tracks and FP is, therefore no exception in that sense. Such tends to be the
way of it with albums by most acts, especially in the CD era with its
temptingly expanded capacity. A few good tracks may be as much as the average
music fan hopes for but, where McCartney differs, is that he will probably – as
in the case here – be offering listeners several really first-class songs even
on albums scattered with rather ordinary material or downright dross. As I’ve
said, it’s naive to expect from him the phenomenal standards set by The Beatles
who, after all, could count in their ranks another
genius in Lennon and a tremendous third contributor in Harrison as well as
Starr – significantly more than the makeweight he’s often been lazily written
off as.
Not many songwriters, however, would be capable of
taking up the slack and delivering ‘Somedays’, one of this album’s undoubted
highlights. The song is the quintessence of subtlety, framed by McCartney’s
immaculately played acoustic and Spanish guitar accompaniment and George
Martin’s tasteful arrangement for strings and woodwind. There’s a restrained
poignancy about it, suggestive of a love song for Linda or George and Ringo or
perhaps all of them. Lines like ‘Somedays I cry, I cry for those who live in
fear’ and ‘Somedays I laugh, I laugh to think how young we were’ resonate with
his relationships with them at the time the piece was written and the chorus
underscores the strength of the sentiments; ‘We don’t need anybody else…Inside
each one of us is love.’
Along with ‘Somedays’, three other beautiful ballads
help to raise FR’s bar. ‘Little
Willow’, the notes tell us, was composed ‘as a salve for [a] late friend’s
children’. The unnamed friend was Ringo's first wife, Maureen who had died aged only 48 from leukaemia in '94 but, with hindsight, the piece reminds us
that his own children would soon also be motherless. Another song introduced by
gentle guitars, it floats on a bed of assorted keyboards and backing vocals and,
in less sensitive hands, may have come over as slightly twee (not that Macca
has ever worried much about that – ‘Very twee, very me’ as he sings in a C21st
song, ‘English Tea’*4).
‘Little Willow’ comes from the same noble, decent
corner of McCartney’s heart as ‘Hey Jude’, in which he reached out to Lennon’s
first son Julian, to offer comfort in song, after the family had been broken
and abandoned for Yoko Ono. The sincerity of the song is transparent, as is its
credibility and the balm it offers to a Willow assailed by ‘hard and cold’ elements
is reassuring but realistic:-
Ringo and Maureen |
Nobody warns you –
Willow hold on tight.
No-one’s
out to break your heart
It
only seems that way.’An empathetic soul, McCartney, it will be recalled was, like Lennon, rendered a motherless teenager and those lines from 'Little Willow' are reminiscent of his old partner's lovely song for his other son, Sean, 'Beautiful Boy' which reflects that 'Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.'
Equally
eloquent is ‘Calico Skies’ – eloquent and elegant, with McCartney playing a
classical figure on an acoustic guitar to accompany a lyric of love at first sight
which revolves around the refrain ‘I’ll hold you for the rest of my life’.
Almost inevitably, in the light of Linda’s fate, the listener is likely to
transpose this as ‘for the rest of your
life’, a shift that renders the song even more poignant than it already sounds.
It was though, actually written back in ’91 when the McCartneys experienced
power-cuts whilst in America as a hurricane struck. Composed in an atmosphere
of candlelight and wood-burning, the song was recorded the following year and
only summoned up several years later to take a starring role on FP.
Perhaps
inspired by skies torn asunder by the hurricane, the last verse is a plea for
peace from those like McCartney himself and so many of his rock star
contemporaries including, of course, the other Beatles, who were born during
the upheavals of WW2. A somewhat abrupt turn in the overall context of the
song, the link between apocalyptic weather and war might have been
interestingly developed, but the song still works wonderfully well despite this
last verse, rather than because of it.
The
languorous ‘Heaven On A Sunday’ which came to McCartney whilst out in a
sailboat on his own, features Linda joining in rather inconspicuously on backing
vocals and their son James, making his recording debut, playing an electric
guitar solo. The pellucid melody perfectly evokes a lazy, hazy day, although
odd glimmers of unease arise in the lyric:-
Paul and Linda |
‘Peaceful,
like heaven on a Sunday,
Wishful,
not thinking what to do.We’ve been calling it love,
But it’s a dream we’re going through.
Restful, like Devon on a Monday,
Cooling my fingers in the bay.
We’ve been learning a song,
But it’s a long and lonely blues.
If
I only had one love,
Yours
would be the one I’d choose. 'That’s pretty much the lyric, with those last lines forming a repeated refrain. Go figure, as they say.
‘Really Love You’, an R
& B jam with Ringo which developed into the first and so far only song
credited to McCartney/Starkey, may be overlong and inconsequential, but they
sound like they’re having a ball with Paul screaming away in joyful abandon.
The title-track is a more substantial effort, distinguished by a nonsense lyric
inspired by John Lennon’s zany explanation in a 1960 issue of the Mersey Beat newspaper of how The Beatles
came by their name: ‘It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and
said unto them, ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’. Only half the
length of ‘Really Love You’, but twice as good, ‘Flaming Pie’ gallops along in
highly entertaining style (apparently the idea came to McCartney on horseback) with
the listener being exhorted to ‘Go ahead, have a vision!’ The words are daft
and fun: ‘Stick my tongue out and lick my nose…Cut my toes off to spite my
feet’ and an exuberant McCartney bashes the whole thing out with his simple but
effective piano and drums.
‘Souvenir’ is an
impressive mid-tempo soul song which again finds the singer in great voice.
It’s another case of him reaching out to comfort someone who is ‘fed up
shedding too many tears’ and offering love ‘like a friend’. If the positive
connotation of the title-word gets a little lost here - ‘Everybody’s got a
handful of fear / But tomorrow it may only be a souvenir’ – then it barely matters
in an effective genre piece which features a horn section as well as a
Beatlesque ascending guitar figure and a nostalgically crackling stylus run-out
groove.
There’s a showstopping
air of ‘Hey Jude’ about ‘Beautiful Night’, which begins with a downbeat Paul at
the piano before Ringo’s drums swing in at the start of the second verse (‘You
and me together / Nothing feels so good’) before George Martin’s orchestra
sweeps across the background. Then the tempo picks up for a terrific coda with
fanfaring trumpets and trombone, guitar solos and Ringo singing the title
phrase in that oddly inimitable way of his. A studio breakdown at the end
creates the impression of a splendid time had by all with either Paul or Ringo
exclaiming ‘Lawdy, lawdy!'
If ‘Beautiful Night’ is
the record’s finale, then ‘Great Day’ follows almost like an afterthought
rather than an encore. Both songs were old ones. ‘Great Day’ sounds like – and
may actually have been around in some form at the sessions for McCartney’s very
first, eponymous solo album in 1970. It shares the lo-fi, minimalistic charm of
that deceptively influential record although, like ‘Calico Skies’ it was
recorded over 20 years later and 3 years before FP began in earnest. A simple little tune that might bring to mind John
Martin, it declares its author’s enduring optimism and features a very present
Linda on harmonies. It also provides an appropriate ending to the last album
McCartney released during his first wife’s lifetime.
* * * * *
The Grammy-nominated FP became a transatlantic #2 on the
charts. McCartney’s pop albums usually go Top 10, often Top 5 – in the UK there
have been 7 #1s and 6 in the US. ‘Young Boy’ (#19), ‘The World Tonight’ (#23),
‘Beautiful Night’ (#25) made brief appearances on the UK singles chart*5.
People expecting more
direct songs about his late wife might have been surprised by McCartney’s next
album, Run Devil Run (1999), a
collection of spirited Rock & Roll covers with a couple of originals
amongst the oldies. His fans may have been actively dismayed by Driving Rain (2001), by which time he had
been involved in a new, high-profile romance with Heather Mills for some time.
Apart from the odd verse here and there which might have been about Linda, the
album mainly featured what were effectively a series of love letters to
Heather. Although the relationship was already rumoured to be tempestuous, a
short and disastrous marriage issued which produced a daughter before a luridly
public and expensive divorce went through the courts.
*1 – As well as the albums credited as McCartney solo albums, there were another 7 with Wings plus 5 classical releases and a further 7 miscellaneous outings, including the ambient electronica projects recorded with Youth under the Fireman alias.
*2 – The Steve Miller Band were a successful American album outfit who started in the late ‘60s. They had several big US hit singles between ’73-81 starting with the transatlantic #1 ‘The Joker’ in ’76.
*3 – Apart from McCartney’s own remarks, the sleeve-note includes commentary credited to a Geoff Baker (who I couldn’t track down) and Mark Lewisohn, the world’s leading authority on The Beatles.
*4 – ‘English Tea’ appears on the album Chaos & Creation In The Back Yard (2005).
*5 – In 2015, ‘FourFive Seconds’ with Kanya West & Rihanna became McCartney’s first UK/US Top 10 hit since the 1980s – unless you count the 2012 Xmas #1 charity version of ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ by The Juice Collective on which he was one of a number of celebrities gathered to raise money for the Hillsborough disaster fund. In 1989, the year of the tragedy, McCartney had also appeared with other pop stars on a version of ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ an earlier fund-raising #1. The hit single with that giant of Rap and egomania, West and Rihanna, was a curiosity on which McCartney didn’t actually sing. The roll-call of songwriters credited on the somewhat slight song – 9 - almost rivalled the number of names on the charity singles…
*6 – DR wasn’t all bad: ‘Heather’, which was played at the wedding, has a lovely roll to it and is certainly better than ‘Here Comes The Bride’, whilst ‘Your Loving Flame’ has strong elements of classic McCartney about it.