Paul McCartney has made his most experimental album in years, so why the pseudonym?
It's not unreasonable to presume that every Beatles story that lives in the memory of their two surviving members has been told. So, when Paul McCartney experiences the Proustian rush of a hitherto forgotten one, you can't help but feel it too.
Adjourning from the restored windmill that is his Sussex studio, 66-year-old Macca remembers: "There used to be this paper in Liverpool called Mersey Beat. And in it you had a column where you could put personal ads. And so John and George and I used to put them in. Just so we could see our words in print, you know? It'd be like: 'Barry! Meet me behind the station at this time.' And then it would come out and we'd be like: 'Yeah! It got in!' Just seeing it there was a little kick."
For once, the word "little" means exactly what it's supposed to mean. More commonly in Macca-world, the word "little" serves a carefully designed purpose. The Beatles were a good little band; this year's Anfield show, at which McCartney sang A Day in the Life to 34,000 fellow Liverpudlians, was "a good little show".
Compacting the details of his world to a manageable size has long been crucial in McCartney's lifelong attempt to convince himself and others that his days really aren't too dissimilar to yours and mine. Admittedly, Sunday's "little" signing event in HMV won't tilt the world off its axis. But it shows how McCartney can turn the dimmer switch of Beatlemania up or down as whim dictates.
The primary beneficiary of Sunday's hubbub will be Electric Arguments, the new album that — as the Fireman — he and the famously "cosmic" producer Youth wrote and recorded in just a fortnight. This isn't the first time the two have collaborated, but, unlike the instrumental electronica of their first two albums, something long believed missing in McCartney has re-emerged. By lurching dramatically from a stoned modern sea-shanty (Travelling Light) to a lysergically progtacular Maori spiritual (Is This Love), it's closer to the Beatles at their most casually inventive than anyone could expect. How perverse, then, that McCartney should stop short of putting his name to it.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5365557.ece
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