Five Essential McCartney Albums

mccartney (1970)
While John Lennon and George Harrison were both on the phone to Phil Spector to produce their solo LPs before you could say "who the **** is George Martin anyway?" - paul mccartney took a different - and arguably far more innovative approach.

Acoustic strumming and a light smattering of percussion was all that accompanied the album's opening track (more of a sentiment than a song): "la-la-la-la-la the lovely Linda with a pretty flower in her hair".

Touching, sweet, personal and - especially in the aftermath of the polished, refined beast that was Abbey Road - more than a little shocking in its spare arrangement - more in keeping with the modern-day purveyors of "lo-fi" than with the mainstream pop scene of the early seventies that birthed Elton John and Abba.

It's an album that continues in much this vein - mccartney handling each of the few instruments himself and writing the kind of unabashed odes to domesticity that would be more at home in a family photo album that in the charts. Contrarily, this is what makes mccartney an artist in the truest possible sense. He writes his feelings unflinchingly and without compromise and places them within a uniquely spun sonic world of his own creation. Make no mistakes, mccartney is no less a personal album than Lennon's Plastic Ono Band released the same year. And if anything, it's mccartney who crafts the more insular record of the two - half the album taken up with melodic instrumentals that don't give a hoot if you listen to them or not. mccartney plays like an aural snapshot of the artist's life at that juncture, never intended for public ears. And that's about as art as art gets.

All of which would amount to an album more interesting than enjoyable if it wasn't for the calibre of mccartney's pop-craft. Which is absolutely spot on here - most of the songs here are ridiculously short and simple, but boast infectious yet subtle hooks that make mccartney a thoroughly charming and pleasing album on every visit. While some tracks, such as the beautifully delicate "Junk" and its more than welcome instrumental companion ("Singalong Junk"), positively soar on their under-stated powers.

mccartney set the tone for what to expect from the former-Beatle. A melodic tour-de-force to the familiar listener, it's an album that nontheless requires a few spins to sink in - and isn't guaranteed to reward a listened unprepared to meet the work on its own terms. However, those willing to do just that will find an album uniquely intriguing - bursting with the kind of effortlessly masterful pop music that, after a few months, you'll be convinced you've known your entire life.

Ram (1971)

mccartney's second album was markedly more confident and ambitious than his debut, while being no less intriguing as a uniquely domestic recording. If the co-billing of wife Linda didn't give this away, the cover-art of paul tending to the titular farmyard critter might just.

The ambitions of Ram pay off huge dividends - while mccartney had boasted strong, assured melodic gracefulness from end to end, Ram boiled the spirit of "pop" right down to its very essence, resulting in an album that delivered a bona-fide sugar-rush of heavenly pop sensibilities from end to end - creating one of the most compulsively listenable albums in the entire pop canon. And all in the then-unheard-of spirit of "lo-fi".

The essence of several different pop stylings make their way into Ram - sometimes within the same song as mccartney's tendency as a pop-composer takes over to construct multi-faceted mini-epic song-suites that jump chapter-to-chapter through the encyclopedia of pop to dazzling, joyous ends. Many of the fixings of pop music get a look in at some point - stunning counter-melodies, humourous call-and-response sections, big, soaring choruses and subtly strummed dream-pop all going into the mix to form an album that stands as a masterpiece of the calibre Brian Wilson was hoping to create with the then-abandoned Smile project.

Like all mccartney albums, Ram does require time to reveal its charms. But once you're on paul's wavelength, it's just a regular roller-coaster of delightful pop fragments and symphonies. A testament to both the power of pop and to the power of music in general.

Red Rose Speedway (1973)

Red Rose Speedway is an album of nooks and crannies. It's finely orchestrated - a first for a mccartney album - and has the immeasurable sense to offer a wide berth of substantiality of the material on offer here. Some of the tracks here are as doggedly insubstantial as they come - album-opener "Big Barn Bed" is a blustering piece of rock that defiantly refuses to develop over the course of its three and a half minutes. "Single Pigeon", on which paul offers sympathy to a a bird turfed out by his missus, has a cute lyric and a keen melody, but that doesn't stop it from making way for the next track after 111 seconds.

Yet these minor moments are too carefully arranged and orchestrated to be mere throwaways, and the emergence of all nine tracks of Band On The Run within the year suggests paul wasn't exactly struggling to come up with the goods. But then, that's the very nature of Red Rose Speedway - for every smooth, delicate fully-realised ode to Linda ("My Love"), there's an instantly forgettable instrumental with a silly name ("Loup (1st Indian On The Moon)"). For every piece of progressive, heart-felt, multi-faceted pop, there's a colourful but inconsequential rocker.

And yet this is not only no flaw, but the album's greatest strength. Because Red Rose Speedway is an album of shades and of texture, an album of scope and of thought. The less substantial numbers are not - on closer inspection - insubstantial at all, they're just modest with their strengths and crafted to be innocuous. And this is the album's masterstroke, allowing its 'big' numbers to stand out in sharp relief from the surrounding numbers as outright epics. And yet exploring the nooks and crannies of the album's remaining tracks reveals enough delightful nuances to keep a listener discovering hidden depths in the mix long after they'd expect.

An album that knows the value not just of variety, but of varied intensity, Red Rose Speedway's initial 'flaws' become its greatest strengths, resulting in one of the most listenable and intriguing albums in mccartney's vast catalogue.

Band On The Run (1973)

mccartney's second album of 1973 - and his fifth in four years - was the one that even most of mccartney's naysayers couldn't deny. Heaped with critical acclaim the likes of which mccartney would never see again - even Lennon called it "a great album" - Band On The Run became synonymous with mccartney to such a degree that the rest of his canon was never going to be accepted on its own terms. Give the people what they want once, and they'll never accept anything else.

Indeed, Band On The Run was mccartney's very own Ziggy Stardust - the album that found him supressing his unique vision as a song-writer to deliver three-to-five minute pop songs for the kids at home. So why do I consider it to be amongst mccartney's essential albums? Because as one of the all-time great composers of pop, even if you disagree with the ethos of giving people what they want, one thing you can't argue with is the results.

And each of the nine sounds to be found on Band On The Run is a real gem, comparable to much of paul's output with The Beatles and - if anything - even more assured and definitely more laid-back. In direct contrast to it's predecessor Red Rose Speedway, the most astounding thing about Band On The Run is its consistency. Any of the tracks would have made a fine lead single - and even more remarkable, not only is the material uniformly very strong but its strengths differ greatly from track to track - whether it's with that punchy vocal hook of "Jet", the swooning sweetness of "Bluebird" or the infectious rhythms of "Mrs. Vandebilt" (which is aching to be realised as an ultimate slacker anthem with its lyrics of "What's the use of worrying? What's the use of hurrying? What's the use of anything?").

Fans of mccartney's insular approach to song-writing (and I'll be the first to admit, we're a rare breed) may miss the personal touch that makes mccartney's solo career so distinctive - but the calibre of the pop on display here is purely and simply first rate. mccartney's knack for combining complex arrangements with the sheer thrill of excellent pop (best evidenced on "Picasso's Last Words (Drink To Me)", which dips in and out of different pop stylings with a breezy ease) is just one of his dazzling talents displayed here in spades.

Just don't let your mccartney collection begin and end on this note, or you're missing out on one of the most unique and influential talents in pop music. But none of that can stop this particular offering of the man's talents being highly recommended.

Venus And Mars (1975)

Almost ten years after mccartney played ring-leader for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the same year as Queen attempted to emulate that album's 'anything goes' ethos with their own collection A Night At The Opera, mccartney had a second stab at his much-praised template with his sixth album in six years, Venus And Mars.

It's not a flattering comparison - mccartney not only had Lennon's help at the time of Sgt. Pepper's but was at the absolute top of his own game too, but taken as its own work, Venus And Mars shines very brightly indeed (not least of all when compared to Lennon's ever-dwindling output of the time). The variety of genres tackled here is impressive, taking in arena-rock, boppy bubble-gum pop, some light blues, some whimsical music-hall, under-stated psychedelia and - of course, a ballad or two. Each track is very distinct and different and mccartney finds and brings out the appeal in each of them.

While the album lacks its own "Bohemian Rhapsody" to seal its reputation, its vast array of different styles are flattering to one another and all boast very strong and memorable melodies. To say it played like a first-rate genre-hopping compilation would be to do the album a disservice, to ignore how naturally such different areas of music are allowed to grow out of one another.

Furthermore, there's a real theatricality to mccartney's lyrics here that offer themselves up to be a lot of fun. True, you have to be pretty in touch with your inner-child to fully "get" the images on offer about super-heroes, hero-worship and soldier-boys kissing girls - but it's there on offer all the same. Surely you can't help but smile at least. Failing that you can at least snicker at the "lonely old people" of whom "nobody asked us to play". You bastards.

Any thoughts on these or other mccartney albums? Have I convinced any of you to give any of the above a chance? C'mon, stand up, let's have a mccartney Pride day.

A fan of Paul, eh?

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"David Gilmour can do more with one note than most guitarists can do with the whole fretboard."

Dave Mustaine (Megadeth)

Paul's done great and I just thought that some needed to be reminded of that. He is too often slagged off these days.

Just to let you know, the Velvet Underground were disgustingly "lo-fi" when Paul was still perfecting Revolver with the Beatles. Though for a distinguished musician to do that as apposed to a bunch of messy smack addicts is notable.

No one would have ever heard of the Velvet underground if it hadn't been for David Bowie championing them, and he only did that because his manager wanted to manage them in the UK. I have heard that in reality he couldn't stand them, and thought as musicians they were a complete joke.

I think these early albums r mccartney's best work, + the ' live and let die ' & ' junior's farm ' singles from the same period;

(...still) what happened to the fantastic innovative beatle paul who produced brilliant cutting edge music like ' eleanor rigby ', ' a day in the life ', & played the fuzz solo on george's ' taxman '?
where r the earthy black sounding tunes like ' get back ' & ' maybe I'm amazed ', - that "whitebread" paul did so well;

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it's so very lonely

you're a hundred light years from home

McCartney's a smug tosser.

He speaks very highly of you?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Jaodra7AY

"Tug Of War" (1982) was Paul's best album since "Band On The Run". Probably still is, although "Flaming Pie" is very very good as well.

Of course they weren't very good musicians, but they were very good at the music they played, and I'd take the Velvets over most punk bands inspired by them. Though the VU was pretty much finished in 1970, and I can't really remember Bowie mentioning the VU around that time period. I know he was "crazy" about Lou Reed and the gang around 1972 and onward, but that stuff about his manager is news to me.

He recorded an unreleased version of Waiting for the man in 1968 and had another song 'little toy soldier' which borrowed the chorus of 'venus in furs'. He had Waiting for the man in his live set in 1970

I've really been trying to get into VU for years now. I bought the first album back in my "early music days", which was 80/81, I have the "Peel Slowly..." box, and the remastered "Live At Max's..." disc, but I still can't get into it. I love Sister Ray and Heroin, but the rest starts to bore me, which bums me out. I REALLY WANT to like this stuff. Really.

I like stuff on all their albums, but I don't go near the live stuff. I don't know what everyone's talking about them sounding so great live, they were best when they perfected their songs in the studio. If this kind of music doesn't work for you, it's nothing to worry about, I've tried to listen to bands like Genesis and Led Zeppelin for a while and I still don't get what's so amazing about them.

What a giveaway... you know, it's not a crime to use capital letters in his surname.

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I do not have to seek you out, I read you day and night
And drink and bathe and share my coat
And droplets spray in rainbows from that distant age
And we will never taste the final drop
Nor turn the final page

If McCartney had on a gallon of makeup and a tight leotard and a pink mullet maybe I could tell the comparison.