Paul McCartney
Singles Box
Extensive Macca singles crate makes for essential digging.
Paul McCartney’s retrospective boxes are beasts, and this collection of seven-inch singles is no exception: 80 of the buggers in a big, limited-to-3,000 wooden crate containing 163 songs, a comprehensive catalogue and exclusive test pressings. You really can feel the weight of the music, and hear it too.
Between 1971’s bright and stunning Another Day and 2020’s Women And Wives there are 10 hours of joy enclosed, far beyond the transitory lark of listening to Macca swiftly evolve over five solo decades: the post-Beatles lo-fi and reggae era; Wings’ tightrope walk between genius and cheese; the brief, inspirational click with new wave and electronica; the slick, synthetic pop 80s and Costello-led return to form; the lush Jeff Lynne Beatledelia of the 90s; and this century’s impressive rise back to relevance. The collection is selective – there’s space for novelties like The Frog Chorus and the retro ragtime Tropic Island Hum as well as showcases of Macca’s operatic endeavours in his Liverpool Oratorio in 1991 and his Christmas jingles, yet his Kanye West collaborations are conspicuously absent.
A sweep through all these singles coheres a previous disjoined impression of McCartney’s solo years – that the stylistic adventuring of The Beatles never left him. Wings alone swung between saccharine balladry, flamenco rock, hay-cart folk, military parades, honky-tonk, motoric glam, disco pop and sodding Mull Of
Kintyre. It seems unfeasible – to take just one run of seven-inchers at random – that within four years the same songwriter was behind With A Little Luck, the Biblical country Deliver Your Children, electro inspiration Temporary Secretary, the proto
Graceland Take It Away and the cinematic ABBA of Tug Of War, then next popped up doing The Girl Is Mine with Michael Jackson.
The B-sides are even more unfettered. 1975’s You Gave Me The Answer is a plush flapper rag that makes good on the promise of Honey Pie; Check My Machine, from 1980, is Gorillaz 20 years early; 1975’s Love In Song is in step with Zeppelin mysticism, 1979’s
Spin It On with post-punk clatter, and 1989’s
Ou Est le Soleil with acid house. Latter singles are backed with avant-garde drone pop
(Growing Up Falling Down), experimental jazz (22) and hallucinogenic sitar tracks that George would be proud of (Riding Into Jaipur). Add the rediscovery of some lesserknown classics (The Back Seat Of My Car, Getting Closer, My Brave Face) and the emergence of some modern Macca beauties (Beautiful Night, Jenny Wren, Ever Present Past, Queenie Eye, Fuh You), and you have an 80-disc portrait of a restless, boundless talent, far from fading yet.