Ever since I first became interested in The Beatles, I’ve had to wade through an awful lot of “received wisdom”. You know the sort of thing – someone says something in book or article, someone else repeats it, and before long a particular viewpoint is treated as established fact. Newcomers accept it as such because, well, everyone says it, and others are reluctant to contradict it (even if their eyes, ears or common sense tell them something different) for fear of looking out-of-step or being seen to have bad taste. I guess it’s true of many things in life – we’re all guilty of using other people’s opinions as shorthand for own – but received wisdom certainly abounds when it comes to the Fab Four. You’ll have heard the kinds of thing people with a more casual interest in the band sometimes tend to trot out – that Ringo was a mediocre drummer who got lucky, for example, or that John was the tough, honest, poetic rocker while Paul was the soppy, shallow, showbiz balladeer. Or that the band couldn’t bear to be in the same room during their final years together. Most real fans know this kind of stuff is nonsense, of course, but even within the more devoted music community parts of The Beatles’ collective and individual careers are often viewed through the prism of “everybody knows that…” Thus many people are assured that Ringo’s solo music is of no value whatsoever (usually the same people who haven’t heard 99% of it). And almost as common is the negativity surrounding Paul’s work in the 1980s.
If you sift through books, magazines, blogs, podcasts and forums, the recurring theme goes something like this. Macca’s ‘70s albums are peppered with greatness, especially the first two and Band on the Run, and certainly represent his solo commercial zenith. His latter day period, beginning with 1997’s Flaming Pie and running through to the present day, may not always have hit the same heights in terms of sales, but has yielded some of his best work and the consistent critical acclaim and respect which eluded him earlier in his career. But the ‘80s? Nah. Don’t bother, mate. Because the story here is that, after a quirky, experimental start with McCartney II (1980), he peaked early with 1982’s well-regarded Tug of War (though I increasingly read that even that isn’t as good as everyone thought it was at the time). After that, it was a creative wasteland until Paul’s songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello kick-started a return to form on Flowers in the Dirt (1989). The accepted, oft-echoed view is that 1983’s Pipes of Peace is a schmaltzy, lightweight collection of tunes which weren’t good enough to make Tug of War; Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) a pointless rehash of Beatles and solo material in service of an equally pointless and widely-derided film, and 1986’s Press to Play a disastrous attempt to modernise his sound for contemporary audiences which was dead on arrival. So artistically moribund and bereft of confidence was this part of his career, apparently, that he then spent the next year or two flailing around in the recording studio, working on an album which never saw the light of day, before getting back on track with the sessions for what became Flowers.
Suffice to say, I completely disagree with this broad-brush, simplistic assessment. Now, I do understand that taste in music is completely subjective and all about personal preference. And I do kind of see why some people just don’t like much of Paul’s music from this era – they tend to regard it as too polished or too commercial or too, er, ‘80s. They find the Frog Chorus too cheesy, and the duets with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson too calculated. I do get all that, but it’s just not how I hear it at all. In fact, I’d argue that 1982-90 represents the greatest period of his solo career. For my money, it produced many of his best, most consistently brilliant albums, the finest of his three covers collections, some fantastic standalone singles and possibly his rewarding live album. I’ll set out why I think that next time, but for now I want to explore why that’s such a minority opinion.
Viewpoints do change over time, of course; albums like Ram and (to a lesser extent) McCartney II have undergone major critical rehabilitation since I first became a fan, for example. But general opinion about Paul’s 1980s output seems fairly set in stone, even among some younger fans and critics who didn’t experience it firsthand. They seem to approach it with a set of preconceptions which started to take root at the time the music was first released, and which remained firmly entrenched today. As someone who was around then – indeed, I first ‘discovered’ Paul and The Beatles in the mid-1980s – my feeling is that it all boils down to a handful of key factors.
The sounds of the ‘80s
With the advent of CDs and advancements in recording technology, the 1980s marked a definite shift in the way pop music sounded – broadly speaking, a switch from analogue to digital. Computers came more to the fore, as did drum machines, synthesisers, sequencers and more processed sounds. At the time, as I recall, people just embraced this as what the hi-tech future was supposed to sound like. It was only later in the decade that some began to rail against this and call for a return to more organic, “natural” records, with the emphasis on real instruments rather pre-programmed effects. Over time, this antipathy has mushroomed in some quarters, with some people now unable to bear listening to anything which bears that unmistakable ‘80s sound.
While Paul was actually at the forefront of early forays into techno-pop (albeit in a low-key, do-it-yourself fashion) on McCartney II, his three albums with George Martin from 1982-84 were actually quite traditional affairs, filled with arrangements that wouldn’t have been out of place on Beatles albums. Nonetheless, they do sound cleaner and more polished than his ‘70s work, and have hints of that shiny digital approach that some people so abhor. But it wasn’t until Press to Play that Macca really took the plunge into the musical zeitgeist of the time. Working with Hugh Padgham – the hot-shot engineer/producer behind era-defining records by the likes of Phil Collins, Genesis and The Police – he made an album filled with many of the audio trappings of the time: synths, drum machines, a booming drum sound, heavily reverbed guitars, and so on (he also started turning out umpteen remixes of certain tracks on his singles, another very ‘80s practice). At the time, I don’t think anyone batted an eyelid at this – he was just updating his sound, and most of the usual McCartney elements remained in place (and many of his contemporaries, like the Stones, Bob Dylan, Elton John and David Bowie were following the same tack, though – I would argue – less convincingly). But it does now sound inextricably tied to the time that spawned it, which for some people, it seems, is unforgivable. Many of those same listeners are equally unimpressed with the production on 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, despite its less computerised approach.
I guess that, again, it comes down to personal preference, but – as someone who came of age in the ‘80s – I love pop music from that era, so have no problem with Paul dipping his toes in those waters. I just don’t understand the argument that if he’s not strumming an acoustic guitar or tinkling piano keys, he’s somehow not being authentic (witness the shockwaves of horror in certain corners of Beatles fandom which greeted the release of the uber-modern ‘Fuh You’ in 2018). He’s never been like that, and never will be. One of Macca’s defining qualities is his eagerness to remain relevant and explore new sounds, and churning out the same kind of records he had made ten or 20 years earlier would have been an anathema to him. Lots of Beatle records, group and solo, sound of their time, it’s all part of the rich tapestry of the canon. And at the end of the day great songs are great songs, whatever production trimmings they are adorned with. If Press to Play had been a big hit, of course, it might be viewed differently. However…
Commercial failure
Press to Play peaked at a lowly #30 in the US album charts, the worst-ever showing for a collection of new McCartney music. He’d topped the same charts just four years earlier with Tug of War, but sales had been on the slide Stateside thereafter, with Pipes stalling at #15 and Broad Street reaching just #21. Flowers bucked the trend, to a degree, hitting #21 and hanging around the lower reaches of the chart for almost a year, but it still wasn’t the blockbuster success of yore. In the UK sales held up much better (he actually enjoyed four #1 albums during the decade, and even Press reached #8, though it didn’t hang around for long), but in the world’s biggest music market it was the toughest period of his career and plays into the narrative that what he was producing can’t have been much good.
I guess when you’ve been as commercially successful as The Beatles have, you’re always going to be judged by your chart performance (and I think Paul does this himself, hence his negative view of Press to Play), but I’ve always found it a strange argument that quantity of sales somehow equals quality of product. By that benchmark, Garth Brooks must have been better than The Beatles, and Milli Vanilli one of the greatest acts of the late 20th century. Or, on a more localised level, Wings at the Speed of Sound would be among the best of all Beatles solo albums. My own view, certainly regarding Press, is that Paul’s face just didn’t at that time; in an era of glamour and glitz, Prince and Madonna, and Miami Vice-propelled adult oriented rock (AOR), Macca must’ve seemed very old hat, a throwback to the dreaded 1970s, and he certainly struggled to get the radio airplay that would’ve been a given in earlier times. He wasn’t alone in this – pretty much all of those contemporaries I mentioned earlier who had previously enjoyed untrammeled chart success also struggled to adapt to the MTV-dominated, post-Live Aid landscape. Mind you, Paul perhaps inadvertently set himself up for a fall with some of his career choices…
Mr Thumbs-Aloft
In the first half of the 1980s, Paul had a run of massive hits on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet songs like ‘Ebony and Ivory’ and ‘We All Stand Together’, certainly in the UK, were hugely divisive. Like ‘Mull of Kintyre’ before them, they were loved and loathed in equal measure, and over time became sticks to beat him with – allegedly sappy tunes which critics claimed confirmed his essentially lightweight, frothy nature. After all, why would any serious rocker worth his salt write a song for children sung by a chorus of frogs? Even his collaborations with Michael Jackson – at that point, the hottest star on the planet – seemed to work against him in some quarters. And then there was the Broad Street cinematic debacle. Plenty of other rock stars came a cropper on the silver screen in that decade (including Paul Simon, David Bowie, Prince and Madonna), but Paul put such promotional heft behind his film that the kick-back from critics was all the louder and harsher. It was high profile failure which further tarnished his image at the time.
Let me tell you, becoming a McCartney fan in the mid-1980s was about the most uncool thing you do, this side of buying Cliff Richard records. Smash Hits – the best-selling weekly pop magazine mainly aimed at younger readers but written in a wry, ironic way to appeal to older music fans too – dubbed Paul ‘Mr Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’. It was sort of a term of affection, but also seemed to sum up the way many people saw him at that time: a safe, cosy, family man who lived on a farm with his slightly eccentric wife (who fed their dogs vegetarian biscuits) and smoked dope, a purveyor of pretty but vapid pop tunes, a member of the rock establishment perennially pictured in a chummy, cheery, thumbs-aloft pose. Wings, now very much in the rear-view mirror, were a product of the ‘70s, and so deemed inherently naff; he was no longer touring, so there there was no rock ‘n’ roll edge to his image, and even his regular drug busts were seen more as the indulgences of a millionaire ex-hippy rather than a badge of outlaw credibility. He was a national institution and revered for his past, yes, but was generally seen as being out of touch, with little to offer either younger pop pickers or their older, AOR-loving, CD-clutching counterparts. Thus the ‘80s-makeover on Press to Play was doomed to failure. There was also one other factor which loomed large over public perceptions of him at this time.
The Lennon legacy
Inevitably, in the rush to venerate John after his awful demise, an interpretation of The Beatles’ story which had been favoured by some snooty rock critics in the 1970s (and occasionally propagated by Lennon himself) began to acquire a wider acceptance. This was that John was The Beatles, the true creative genius of the band, and that the others were merely sidekicks who helped facilitate his talent. Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of The Beatles, the best-selling biography which emerged in 1981, set the tone which numerous other books and articles followed. In retrospect, it maybe isn’t quite as biased as it seemed back then, but it undoubtedly cast John as the main man; Norman himself proclaiming, in an interview to promote it, that Lennon was “75% of The Beatles”, as far as he was concerned. And in elevating John’s status and significance to almost mythic proportions, Norman and many others felt the need to denigrate and diminish Paul’s achievements, both in and out of The Beatles.
As a result, anything Macca released after 1980 emerged in the shadow of the new Lennon iconography. The likes of ‘Say Say Say’ and ‘Spies Like Us’ would be compared to ‘Imagine’ and ‘Instant Karma’. Anything which didn’t offer profound meditations on our very existence simply offered up more evidence that McCartney’s own gifts had shrivelled and died without his former partner to sustain them. Oh, he still had hits, sure, but he could always churn out catchy tunes, people said; all the major works had come from Lennon, right? Over time, this portrayal has largely (if not entirely) faded and a more balanced, nuanced view of the Lennon/McCartney axis predominates. But at the time, there’s no question it caused lots of damage to Paul’s reputation and distorted the way his 1980s work was greeted and perceived.
Of course, you may have just listened to Pipes of Peace and/or Press to Play a few times and simply decided they were crap, and that’s cool too. It’s all about personal taste and opinion, as I said earlier. There are those who think Garth Brooks is better than The Beatles, after all. But when I see the same comments bandied about, time after time, I can’t help but feel that there’s an unjustified stigma about Paul’s 1980s music which colours the way some people look back at it or approach it for the first time. Because I think that, if you like Beatle Paul, there is much to enjoy in this phase of his career. In fact, next time, I’ll explain why I think the 1980s finds Macca at the absolute peak of his powers.
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