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McCartney in 1980.
Here, there and everywhere … McCartney in 1980. Photograph: Linda McCartney
Here, there and everywhere … McCartney in 1980. Photograph: Linda McCartney

Ken Dodd, Stockhausen and Psycho: unlocking Paul McCartney’s musical genius

This article is more than 2 years old

When I was asked to collaborate with the former Beatle on a book, I gained a unique insight into the creative process behind the band’s biggest hits

Towards the end of 2016 I had a phone call from an unfamiliar number. The voice, though, was immediately familiar. The newly elected Donald Trump introduced himself quite matter-of-factly. He lost no time in getting to the point: would I be willing to come to Washington to serve as his “Poetry Supremo”?

That Sir Paul McCartney turns out to be such a brilliant mimic shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Like almost all great writers, he’d apprenticed himself to the masters of the trade: Dickens, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll. All apprenticeships are characterised by caricature and impersonation.

The context in which McCartney was exposed to both King Lear and Edward Lear is vital to an understanding of his achievement. Born in 1942, he was among the very first UK citizens to benefit directly from the 1944 Education Act, which allowed many more possibilities for the historically underprivileged. Paul’s parents had both come from immigrant families of Irish extraction and had at once an intrinsically complex relationship to the UK and a sense of belonging to Liverpool’s vast Irish community. More significantly, though, they identified with the newly confident, comparatively optimistic postwar generation.

As McCartney attests, his parents always wanted “greatness” for him and his brother Mike, so the boys were encouraged to go to the best available schools. His father, a cotton salesman, was “very good with words”, and the fact that his mother was a nurse ensured that Paul was “the only boy in school who could spell ‘phlegm’”.

The single greatest influence on young McCartney turned out to be his English teacher, Alan Durband, who had attended Downing College, Cambridge, and been a student of FR Leavis, the doyen of close reading. McCartney’s capacity for textual analysis, of his own work as much as others’, may then be traced directly to Durband’s influence.

To have had such a secure grounding in the world of English literature accounts for only part of McCartney’s success. That he is equally steeped in the popular song tradition – not only Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but the songwriters of the Brill Building and Tin Pan Alley – has given him a remarkably wide musical vocabulary. Among his earliest heroes were Fred Astaire, Hoagy Carmichael, George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. Though he would later be in conversation with such avant garde composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, McCartney’s immediate influences were the Everly Brothers and, preeminently, Buddy Holly. “Elvis wasn’t a writer or a lead guitarist; he was just a singer. Duane Eddy was a guitar player but not a singer. So Buddy had it all.” Buddy Holly wrote his own songs, sang them and played guitar.

In his own songwriting buddy, John Lennon, what McCartney recognised from the outset was John’s equally prodigious ventriloquistic capacities. However groundbreaking their work would turn out to be, the Beatles were constantly in dialogue with their contemporaries, whether the artists associated with Motown, the Beach Boys, or Bob Dylan, or the singers and songwriters of a slightly earlier era. Even now, McCartney will psych himself into a song by channelling Little Richard or Fred Astaire. He may even occasionally channel John Lennon. He acknowledges that the interplay of Lennon and McCartney was “nothing short of miraculous”, describing how they “wrote with two guitars”. “The joy of that was that I was left-handed and he was right-handed, so I was looking in a mirror and he was looking in a mirror.”

The other gift McCartney recognised in Lennon was his willingness not only to improvise but to improve. Together, they were always “on the lookout for the kind of subject that hadn’t really been the stuff of popular song”. They shared the eternal schoolkid’s engagement with nonsense and nursery rhyme, as well as a Byronic lingering over the slightly outrageous rhyme, whether “Edison/medicine” or “Valerie/gallery”. They were blessed to find in George Martin a producer who could keep pace with them – sometimes, indeed, setting the pace. Martin’s suggestions for string arrangements and his openness to the inventiveness of Robert Moog and his newfangled synthesiser allowed the Beatles to be chronically inventive themselves.

Striking a chord … Paul McCartney and John Lennon write I Saw Her Standing There, Liverpool, 1962. Photograph: Mike McCartney

A persistent component in the Beatles’ soundscape that is often overlooked is the impact of radio. McCartney describes Sgt. Pepper as “a big radio programme”. Like the rest of the Beatles, he grew up on a diet of madcap radio comedy such as the Goon Show, which ran from 1951 until 1960 and starred Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. Other radio stars included the Liverpudlian zany Ken Dodd, often considered the last great music hall comedian. The influence of radio underscored McCartney’s fascination with “what’s missing in a piece”, as well as the power of a few well-chosen words to set a scene. The impact of radio drama, including Dylan Thomas’s 1954 masterpiece Under Milk Wood, cannot be overstated. Then there’s the role of stage drama, whether Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock or Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. McCartney may usefully be thought of as a writer of mini-plays. He has the capacity to render a fully rounded character from what might otherwise be merely a thumbnail sketch.

Two other longstanding areas of interest fall under the rubric of the visual arts. The first is painting. McCartney is both literally a painter, having completed hundreds of works in oil, and figuratively a presenter of images. The second is cinema. He is a presenter of the moving image, insisting along the way that “my camera is looking around and sweeping life for clues”.

To think of a song as a shooting script is an angle of entry into the planetary atmosphere of Eleanor Rigby, one of McCartney’s best-known songs, released in 1966. Part of the impact of Eleanor Rigby is its filmic structure, where the two main characters are introduced in the first and second verses and are then brought together in the third. It’s a version of the technique that Alfred Hitchcock used for the shower scene in his 1960 film, Psycho, in which he establishes the image of bloody water flowing down a drain, cuts away from it and then returns to a shot of the same drain with clear water swirling into the vortex. The shower scene in Psycho is also relevant because the frenzied playing of the double string quartet orchestrated by George Martin is reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s “stabbing” film score. Part of the impact of Eleanor Rigby is this all‑but‑invisible subtext of isolation and death.

The death of his own mother when he was 14 – something he’s “never gotten over” – is what hurt McCartney into song. From I Lost My Little Girl to such pieces as Despite Repeated Warnings, McCartney has taken as his subject matter an astonishing array of topics – everything from his relationships with Jane Asher, Linda Eastman and Nancy Shevell, through climate change and racial injustice, to the family dog and car. As he says, “what made the Beatles such a great band was that no two tracks are the same” and throughout his long career with Wings and as a solo artist, he has had an unfailing “aversion to being bored”. For 60 years he has embodied the restlessness we associate with the artist of the first rank. Beyond that, McCartney is remarkable in that he is one of the very few who is not only influenced by his time but whose work has substantially defined that time. He is living proof of his fellow lyricist William Wordsworth’s brilliant dictum that “every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished”.


McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for Hey Jude. Photograph: Julien’s Auctions/PA

I was introduced to Paul McCartney in early 2015. There followed 24 separate meetings over a five-year period, most taking place in New York, and each involving two or three hours of intensive conversation. The process was a little reminiscent of the two- or three-hour writing sessions that were a feature of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, though the tea was green rather than Brooke Bond or PG Tips. For snacks there were bagels with hummus, cheese and pickles, occasionally Marmite. Our times together were universally upbeat, sometimes uproariously so. We were born nine years apart, and part of the reason we got on so well was our shared culture and range of reference. Our birthdays are also separated by just two calendar days, and we were both named Paul for the same reason: the fact that the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul falls on 29 June.

However good he may be at putting people at ease, and however comfortable in his own skin, there’s no getting around the fact that Paul McCartney will always be a 20th-century icon, and I did have to allow myself an occasional starstruck moment. It was a particular delight to have him quite often pick up a guitar to demonstrate a chord sequence and play a few bars of one of his songs. Despite all this to-ing and fro-ing, we did somehow manage to discuss the lyrics of six to eight songs each time we met.

The depth and durability that are the hallmarks of McCartney’s lyrics derive from the combination of two seemingly irreconcilable forces that I characterise as the “physics” and the “chemistry” of the song. The physics has to do with the song’s engineering. One estimate has the Beatles playing nearly 300 times in Germany between 1960 and 1962. That sheer exposure to the business of how songs are constructed lies at the root of the word “poet”, a version of the Greek term for a “maker”. It’s no accident that one Scottish term for a poet or bard is makar.

The chemistry component is reflected in another term for a poet: “troubadour”. The word “troubadour” is related to the French word trouver, “to find”. McCartney often uses some version of the phrase “I came across the chords” to describe how a song begins its mysterious life. It’s the magical combination of two elements – whether musical notes or the components of a simile – that causes a chemical reaction.

Lennon, Ringo Starr, McCartney, George Harrison arrive at JFK Airport, New York, in 1964. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

McCartney often refers to a version of inspiration before which he is all but inert. The element of ventriloquism is one which he continues to valorise, as when he says that “with the Little Richard thing you just have to give yourself over to it”. He remembers his father being “into crossword puzzles” and acknowledges that he has “inherited a love of words and crossword puzzles”. The word he uses of his attitude to the puzzle of a song – the answer to the question only it has raised – is “fascination”. It brings to mind WB Yeats’s insistence that “The fascination of what’s difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins”. Like Yeats, McCartney is committed to the idea of the mask, or persona, reminding us that “starting with myself, the characters who appear in my songs are imagined” and it’s “all about making it up”.

McCartney also has at least a partial regard for what the French philosopher Roland Barthes described as the “death of the author”, the idea by which the act of reading necessarily involves a degree of writing, or even rewriting, the text. In his case, the song becomes what it might most truly be only when it is heard and heralded. The single quality that makes McCartney great, though, is his well-attested humility. He would be on exactly the same page as the perennially wise novelist and short story writer Donald Barthelme, who, in an essay titled Not-Knowing, categorised the writer as “one who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do”. The emotional range and intellectual robustness of his lyrics are testimony to McCartney’s profound selflessness – the implicit acknowledgment that he represents no more or less than what Barthelme calls “the work’s way of getting itself written”.

This is an edited extract from Paul Muldoon’s introduction to The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney, published by Allen Lane on 2 November. Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon will be talking about The Lyrics with Samira Ahmed on 5 November. The live stream is available on demand from 5 to 12 November, tickets £10. See southbankcentre.co.uk

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