Mac is back

The Brits have a charming quirk when noting the professions of some of their most beloved icons. In media profiles and so on, they sometimes list their profession as ‘national treasure’. So the Queen, for instance, would be listed as:

The Queen

Profession: Queen/national treasure.

Paul McCartney would be: Musician/national treasure.

But the truth is that the former Beatle and song-writing legend, at78 years old, has transcended even that elevated status. He’s more like a global resource. His music is like cultural oxygen; it belongs to everyone. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world in which his gorgeous melodies don't exist.

McCartney’s legendary Beatles song-writing partner, John Lennon, would have been 80 this year.Although they’d played together since the late 50s, Lennon and McCartney officially formed the Beatles in 1960, which means Paul’s musical career “on the world stage”, as GQ’s Dylan Jones puts it, is 60 years old.

While Lennon’s career was cut tragically short when he was assassinated 40 years ago this December, McCartney has continued to write and perform. His work with Lennon has joined the pantheon of humanity’s all-time great artistic achievements, but over the decades McCartney has evolved, collaborated with others, gone in and out of fashion and, let’s face it, grown old. (Although, you could easily knock 20 years off his age and no one would question it. His voice might be a bit rougher around the edges, but there’s still something enduringly youthful about him.)

Documentation of the seven bright years of the Beatles’ existence, and even the rest of McCartney’s life, is so thorough that it has, as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has it,“reached saturation point”. Everything is so well known,the anecdotes so well travelled, the details so thoroughly researched and archived, it’s impossible to add anything. It’s also impossible, given the volume and hyper-detail of it all, to sum it up.

Perhaps it would suffice to say that Lennon-McCartneywas simply the most successful and important song-writing partnership in history. Together with him, alone or in partnership with others, McCartney has written32 No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot100. No-one has topped that. He’s also had number-one hits with Michel Jackson and Stevie wonder. As recently as 2015, he topped the Billboard charts with a collaboration with megastar rapper Kanye West and Barbadian singer Rihanna, called FourFiveSeconds.The Beatles song Yesterday, which he is reputed to have written in his sleep, is thought to be the most covered song of all time.

The Lennon Wall in Prague is filled with John Lennoninspired graffiti and pieces of lyrics from Beatles songs.

Or, to put it another way, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, McCartney is the world’s richest musician, worth £800m: that’s $1.2bn or R16 508 952 000! (Incidentally, he shared the position with none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber.)

But the reason all eyes are on him at the moment is that during the UK’s first lockdown at home at his farm in East Sussex, McCartney wrote and recorded a new album, which will be out on 11 December. It’s called McCartney III, and is the third of what will be a trilogy of self-titled albums. They stand out from his other work in that all three are almost entirely solo efforts, with Paul recording them himself and playing all the instruments. He did the first one in 1970. It was made during the last days of the Beatles, as the band disintegrated. McCartney II of 1980 was also made alone, in the aftermath of Wings. So McCartney III continues the tradition of albums made alone in times of crisis.

The crisis this time is less personal or artistic. McCartney III was made while safely and comfortably isolating with his daughter Mary and four of his grandchildren. Mary is a renowned photographer, so the making of the project has been beautifully documented, too, showing a spry and energetic-looking McCartney at work for posterity.

The album was made in just nine weeks. “I was just messing around, never suspecting for one second that this was going to be an album,” the star told BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt. The album began, he says, when he dug out an unreleased song from the 90s that he’d never been quite satisfied with and started “tinkering”. The tinkering turned to full-on writing and recording, and a whole lot of new songs were suddenly on the table.

“When I’d done them, I was going ‘Well, what am I going to do with this?’” he told Everitt. “And it suddenly hit me: this is McCartney III. You’ve done it all yourself, like the others, so this qualifies.”

McCartney I and II hardly figure among his most renowned projects. McCartney I was a mixed bag to say the least, with only one really standout example of the Beatles-era songwriting prowess, Maybe I’m Amazed. In retrospect, however, it has come to be understood as a pioneering and highly influential project. While Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with the Beatles almost singlehandedly changed the way music was recorded, reinventing the idea of the studio album and turning recording itself into an artistic element of the music, McCartney I did the opposite. It was made at home with a four track recorder and a microphone, and basically invented the lo-fi trend that followed many years later and became the basis of indie-pop. McCartney II, they say, prefigured contemporary electronic pop’s made at-home-in-your-bedroom aesthetic.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band vinyl record with inner cover photograph of the Beatles

Will McCartney III do the same? Who knows? Probably not… But that’s hardly the point.

While the creative explosion of the Beatles in the 60s – McCartney’s partnership with Lennon – will probably always remain the bedrock of his creative achievement, perhaps the characteristic that best defines McCartney’s output is his prodigious talent – the staggering ability to remain creative, to come up with one wonderful melody after another; almost endlessly, it seems.

The ever-insightful Gopnik argues that, while McCartney had staggering musical talent at his disposal – making the case that his musical abilities far outstripped Lennon’s – Lennon’s vision and ambition stretched that talent beyond mere entertainment to make it into important art.

“John had reach,” he wrote for BBC News a few years ago in a piece marking 50 years since the Beatles first performed. “He instinctively understood that what separates an artist from an entertainer is that an artist seeks to astonish, even shock, his audience. Paul had grasp, above all, of the materials of music, and knew intuitively that astonishing art that fails to entertain is mere avant-gardism.”

He argues that the enduring achievement of the Beatles, however, is the ability of the music to make us feel glad. It is rare for important art to be uplifting. McCartney and the Beatles, however, made happy music. And while McCartney might never again have achieved the same heights of artistic seriousness that he did with Lennon – despite the monster hits both on his own and with other collaborators – his music has continued to have something gladdening about it.

And that, more than anything, is what we need now. •