9 Paul McCartney Flowers In The Dirt

PARLOPHONE 1989, £13.49

You say: “Feels composed of nothing but singles.” Walter Dunlop, Twitter

Designed to be played on McCartney’s first tour in almost a decade, and recorded over an unusually pernickety 18 months, Flowers In The Dirt ended up very differently from how it began. As the expanded 2017 reissue revealed, preliminary sessions with Paul and Elvis Costello writing together “knee-toknee” in the old Lennon & McCartney tradition yielded many great songs left on the cutting room floor. Nonetheless, the polished result, buffed up by the likes of Mitchell Froom and Trevor Horn, offered the early Beatles of opener My Brave Face (rawer and better on the Costello/McCartney duet demos) and the lovely, snaking melody of Distractions.