Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview
It is Monday in London, two days before the royal wedding, and Soho Square is filled with flowers, sunshine and fresh-faced young tourists. Some loll on the grass, sharing joints. Others peer up expectantly at the etched-glass windows of an art-deco-style town house across the street, where, in an airy third-floor office, Paul McCartney presides over the bustling affairs of MPL Communications, the company that manages the professional projects of the singer and his wife, Linda.
McCartney is in from his country home in Sussex – where he has a brand-new, state-of-the-art recording studio – to promote his latest LP, Press to Play. It is the fifteenth album he has released since he announced the breakup of the Beatles back in 1970, and the years are beginning to tell: his hair is mostly gray these days. But he’s as buoyant as ever, bubbling with enthusiasm. After eight years of largely lackadaisical releases on Columbia, he is back with Capitol – the Beatles’ old label – and he seems serious about rehabilitating his somewhat tattered artistic reputation.
Press to Play features some good new songs and a tough new pop sound, courtesy of Hugh Padgham, who coproduced it. Linda McCartney’s background vocals are the only aural remnant of Paul’s erstwhile band Wings; this time out he’s backed by guitarists Eric Stewart and Carlos Alomar, drummer Rick Marrotta and such drop-in rock-star pals as Pete Townshend and Phil Collins. Pouring tea from a china pot, McCartney talks up his new tunes (one song, “However Absurd,” is a stream-of-consciousness stew of non sequiturs lifted from the works of such poets as W.H. Auden) and his ambitious plans for the future. But he cannot ignore his celebrated past and the persistent tug of its emotional undertow. Will he ever again be seen in as sweet a light as that which illuminated the Beatles twenty years ago? The subject seems open for discussion. Paulie passes the cream.
On your new album, there’s an almost punkish song called “Angry.” That’s not an attitude usually associated with Paul McCartney. What are you angry about?
Well, the same things a lot of us are angry about.
Traffic jams, stuff like that?
Well, there’s that – the day-to-day piss-offs. But I was thinking more about, um, British trade unions withdrawing coal when there’s old ladies dying, and we kind of just go, “Yeah, well, the union’s got a right.” And Britain’s attitude toward apartheid at the moment, which is just so crazy. I mean, still, after all those years of Martin Luther King and everything, they’re still buggerin’ around with black and white. It’s so insane. Couldn’t they just wise up? But there’s Maggie saying, “We don’t need to do sanctions,” while everybody else – all the civil-rights groups – are saying, “But you do.”
Given such views, it’s ironic that a London tabloid, The Sun, recently questioned whether you were a racist after hearing bootleg Beatles outtakes from the Let It Be sessions that feature you referring to Pakistanis – unflatteringly, it seems – in a rendition of “Get Back.”
Sensational journalism – The Sun is not a highly reputable newspaper. What this thing is, I think, is that when we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to “Get Back” which were actually not racist at all – they were antiracist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living sixteen to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of “Get Back,” which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about “too many Pakistanis living in a council flat” – that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis. The Sun wishes to see it as a racist remark. But I’ll tell you, if there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favorite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown. Whenever we came to the States they’d say, “Who’s your favorite artists?” And we’d say, “Well, they’re mainly black, and American – Motown, man. It’s all there, you’ve got it all.” I don’t think the Beatles ever had much of a hang-up with that.
What about sensationalism in rock & roll – the alleged surfeit of sex and violence that many of the music’s critics seem to find these days. Do you worry that your children are being influenced by this sort of thing?
No. I think they’re into pretty good music, actually – Simple Minds, Dire Straits, Tears for Fears, stuff like that. I’ve never tried to favor anything, ’cause I figure I wouldn’t have liked my dad to sort of tell me to like Elvis, you know? It would have put me off it.
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