PAUL McCARTNEY
He’s handed over McCartney III to remixers like Beck, St. Vincent and Damon Albarn. Khruangbin and Idris Elba tell all about their contributions.
“Yeah, and the invisible singer is Paul McCartney!”
LAURA LEE, KHRUANGBIN
DOWN THE years, Paul McCartney has been no stranger to the transformative powers of the remix. His 1993 ambient electronic album Strawberries
Oceans Ships Forest, made as The Fireman in cahoots with Youth, was the result of McCartney letting loose the producer/ Killing Joke bassist on the tapes of his just-released Off The Ground. Then, in 2005, Macca hooked up with mash-up artist Freelance Hellraiser for the radical shapeshifting of tracks from his back catalogue – everything from Maybe I’m Amazed to Temporary Secretary – on Twin Freaks.
Now McCartney has gone further, handing over the masters to his third eponymous solo LP, recorded last year in lockdown, to various artists ranging from Beck and St. Vincent to Anderson .Paak and Damon Albarn. The result is the tellingly-titled McCartney III
Imagined, which sees the original tracks being either remixed in a traditionally dancefloor-minded fashion, or – in the case of Phoebe Bridgers’ dreamy Elliott Smith-ish take on Seize The Day or Josh
Homme’s sleazy rendering of Lavatory Lil – being treated as cover versions.
Texan groove specialists Khruangbin tackled McCartney’s teen pop band commentary Pretty Boys, reworking it into their trademark dub funk style. The band say they were already big Macca fans, with his 1979 Wings electro R&B cut Arrow Through Me in particular being much played on their tour bus. “Oh, that is, like, jam,” says guitarist Mark Speer. “That gets constant play.”
Khruangbin initially experimented with different treatments of Pretty Boys, including one with a Brazilian flavour, before settling on what bassist/singer Laura Lee calls their final “post-punk dance approach”, featuring her French-sung counterpoint to McCartney’s vocal with her coolly intoned refrain of “jolie garçons”. The trio jammed along with the original vocal, collaborating with an invisible singer. “Yeah, and the invisible singer is Paul McCartney!” Lee marvels.
Elsewhere, actor/musician Idris Elba reworked McCartney III’s opener Long Tailed Winter Bird into a folky hip-hop head-nodder, after interviewing Paul for a BBC TV special aired in December 2020. “He didn’t approach me, I sort of approached him,” Elba laughs. “Paul said, ‘It isn’t an obvious one to remix because it’s the one with the least vocals on it. It’s a jam that I just loved. Have a go and do what you want with it.’”
Boldly, Elba wrote an additional melodic hook and invited McCartney to sing it. “He sent me this beautiful text saying, ‘It’s indubitably a hit.’ I was like, ‘Oh… fuck… what?’ A couple of days later he sent me his vocal singing the hook that I wrote for the remix… which was so weird. Then he sent a text saying, ‘We absolutely love it.’”
Both Khruangbin and Idris Elba received calls and messages from McCartney offering positive feedback about their remixes. “He liked my bass line,” reveals Laura Lee. Elba admits, “I just can’t believe it. This is The Beatles; this is one of the pillars of music. There’s not a producer/songwriter that hasn’t been influenced somehow or in some way by the music that man has made!”
McCartney III Imagined is available digitally now. Physical formats follow in July.