A Tribute to Paul McCartney
A few words on the greatest songwriter and musician of the modern era.
Playing to type as someone who is bad at remembering birthdays, and often sends out good will messages a day or so after the event, here’s a piece I wrote about Paul McCartney, whose birthday was yesterday (thinking about it, I could have pretended to have been making a thing about “Yesterday”, couldn’t I?). So, bearing in mind that one of Macca’s greatest songs is titled “Yesterday” and is largely about things that happened the day before the song is being sung (isn’t it?), here is my tribute to the great man.
Happy Birthday, Paul.
For yesterday.
When all your troubles seemed to far away.
This article was originally written in 2022, to mark Sir Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday.
Paul McCartney was my first gig. Earl’s Court, September 14th, 1993. I was fourteen years old, and my dad treated me, presumably to provide some kind of apex to my ongoing Beatles obsession. It worked. The band were in my bloodstream. I had, until my dad bought me a guitar for my thirteenth birthday, spent many an evening after school singing along to Beatles records with my tennis racket standing in for a Rickenbacker (I hit more woooooos with that racket than I ever did tennis balls, no doubt about that).
So, yes, Paul McCartney, in 1993, was my first gig. It’s strange to imagine it now, but for a long time that was not the coolest thing in the fucking world. In the nineties, McCartney’s stock was low amongst a generation of music writers and music makers. That he hadn’t made a decent album in over a decade was the least of his problems. Nobody ever dared diss The Beatles (apart from Jarvis Cocker, I remember, who was once quoted in a music monthly mischievously claiming Sgt Pepper… was the worst album ever made), but the solo work of the surviving members was the music of a different generation to the arbiters of cool who had found and founded their platforms in the indie post-punk revolutions of the 1980s.
And few at the cool table were ever going to forgive McCartney for the frog chorus, a crime many had viewed as usurping “Mull of Kintyre” in the short but potent list of McCartney’s crimes against culture. Also not cool in 1993: vegetarianism. Again, difficult to believe in this day and age, but McCartney’s devotion to animal rights made him the focus of much mockery for decades.