Class act? Melody maker's Glass ceiling
Paul McCartney, described as 'the world's most successful songwriter', reveals his own ongoing insecurities as he deals with a minimalist composer but takes solace from a radical poet friend
CLASS, culture and education: the gritty millstones that continue to grind our socio-economic lives. And it’s not just we ordinary folk who live with these everyday frictions. Even Paul McCartney, a crucial pillar in the twentieth-century’s greatest band and still dubbed ‘the world’s most successful songwriter’, has these anxieties to wrestle with, too.
These matters came to the fore in a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, broadcast late last month, which caught the amiable ex-Beatle in the hot seat. It was little coincidence, we must say, that McCartney had just released a lavish collection of his own pop words – The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a luxury box set retailing at a meaty £60.
The equally likeable interviewer John Wilson, not a widely known name outside the esoteric circles of arts broadcasting in the UK, is actually the son of a once well-recognised face in British sports TV – Bob Wilson, who fronted football shows on the box having had an impressive career as the goalkeeper of leading London soccer side Arsenal.
The point of the radio show, available for months to come on the iPlayer archive service, is to explore, with prominent figures in the world of art and entertainment, the significant influences on their lives, specifically the cultural signposts that have directed them on their journey.
McCartney is not an antagonistic individual and he was certainly co-operative here: he was happy to answer the task and even be modest to the point of self-deprecation along the way. Yet it was interesting that two figures from the wider Beat Generation scene proved contrasting guides in this Fab One odyssey. But more of that to come.
One thing that has irritated the Beatles’ bass man over several decades is the fact that Lennon was generally regarded as the rebel and the radical and the experimenter – and he often was – but McCartney was actually quicker to the plate when it came to picking up on left-field and avant-garde influences.
For a start, when the Beatles left their Liverpool home around 1964 and headed to the south-east of England – the capital and its surrounding suburbs – it was only McCartney who took up residence in the city of London itself. This arrangement – he was soon living in the middle-class house of his then girlfriend Jane Asher – exposed him speedily to the musical and theatrical experimentation of that great urban centre.
By the middle of the decade, he became associated with William Burroughs, to whom he lent a flat-cum-recording studio, and soon befriended Allen Ginsberg. Lennon, meanwhile, was living in splendid isolation in stockbroker Surrey in a mock stately home. It was some while before Yoko Ono, influenced by the Fluxus movement, would open the door and his mind to the strangeness of conceptual art, gallery happenings and agitprop posturing.
Let us though move forward and say that, in This Cultural Life, McCartney remains a 79-year-old, thrice-married man with a certain lack of self-confidence or possibly self-belief. Maybe it is the long-lasting residue of living with the dogmatic abrasiveness of Lennon himself that has undermined his sense of certainty. Perhaps this is merely an act to endear us to him.
Surprisingly though, some of these self-admitted signs of the tentative remain in the world of music-making. He always knew that when his compositional ideas required arrangement, in the orchestral sense, he would need a George Martin – on 1967’s ‘Penny Lane’, for example – or a Carl Davis – on his large-scale Liverpool Oratorio, a fully-fledged, 90-minute symphony he unveiled in Merseyside’s Anglican Cathedral in 1991.
When McCartney was interrogated at the time about that ambitious orchestral piece, again by the BBC, he had an uncomfortable encounter. John Wilson comments: ‘You say you were feeling daunted during an interview by a rather posh Radio 4 arts programme. Do you feel there is a kind of snobbery? Do you think some of the critics looking at you are going “He’s a pop writer?”’ McCartney is typically disarming: ‘Yes there is [snobbery]. I don’t blame them.’
He candidly gives further shape to these perceived artistic deficiencies, drawing attention to a book he has been reading on the US minimalist composer Philip Glass, a giant of the modern school, confirming his deep feeling of uncertainty, almost inadequacy, when he reads up on that American artist’s work.
He explains: ‘When I listen to his music, I go, oh yeah, that’s like A minor, that’s C and that’s E minor, oh, and then it’s A minor again and, oh, it’s C again, oh, it’s E minor. I kind of break it down like that. But, in the book, he is studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. God in heaven, he’s taking years to get to where he got to. No wonder there’s a snobbery, you know: he can say “I did all that".
‘Anyway, at first it’s a little bit disturbing, because you think I would love to be able to orchestrate at a really great level. There’s no way I can do that. You then think, wait a minute, these people may be able to orchestrate, they may have the snobbery and all the background, the Boulanger background, but can they write a good tune? Which one of their tunes can you whistle?
‘So I end up saying, that’s my thing, my level, I can do the melodies, I can do the words, but I need to get someone in like George Martin all, you know Carl Davis in the oratorio’s case to help me with that.’
And then John Wilson moves the conversation on and points out that while McCartney might be best known as the melody man, what about the words he has written? ‘Do you think the lyrics have been overlooked over the course of the years?’ he enquires of his guest.
McCartney comes back: ‘No, I mean people know me for melody more than they know me for lyrics but, like I used to know Allen Ginsberg – I’m dropping names like it’s going out of style here – and Allen said to me, “Wow that ‘Eleanor Rigby’, that’s a great poem”, so I’ve done stuff like that and have also done stuff that is throwaway […] that’s not quite “She’s Leaving Home” [but] I love having the ability to go through a variety of styles […] but there are a lyric or two that aren’t bad there.’
In the light of the songwriter’s own minor credibility crisis, it’s worth remembering that Glass and Ginsberg did collaborate on New York a 1990 stage production called Hydrogen Jukebox, a chamber opera inspired in part by that very phrase from the poet’s signature creation ‘Howl’ but one which drew on other verse examples in the theatrical version.
Furthermore, both Glass and McCartney participated on the 1995 Ginsberg venture ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’, a musical recording of an acerbic, if comic, political poem which eventually saw poet and rocker deliver a memorable live version at the Albert Hall. I wonder if the composer, for whom the Liverpudlian still feels awe-filled respect, ever met during that late project in the poet’s life.
So, issues of class – McCartney jokes later in the broadcast that his socialite American wife likes him to exaggerate his original Scouse accent – culture – condescension from the elite of each towards the popular scene haunts even this individual of stellar creative attainment – and education – our musician had relatively little formal tuition and seems to somewhat intimidated by the power of Glass’ lofty resumé – all persist, affecting this one-time Beatle’s outlook, over half a century after his legendary combo headed into the end-of-the-Sixties sunset.