ALBUM OF THE WEEK MUSIC

Paul McCartney McCartney III Out Friday

Last weekend, Paul McCartney re-entered the chart at No 39 with Wonderful Christmastime. It’s not his best song, or even his hundredth-best, but it made a touching sight because at No 40 was John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

Life is what happens, Lennon sang, while you’re making other plans. A year when McCartney was due to headline Glastonbury (again) landed him in Sussex for lockdown with his daughter Mary and her children. Fiddling about in his studio, he made an album without meaning to.

The title places it in a trilogy that spans half a century. McCartney appeared in 1970, as The Beatles broke up; McCartney II in 1980, as Wings wound down. The baby he cradled on the back cover of McCartney was Mary – now the photographer capturing her dad for the back cover of McCartney III.

This album, like those two, is homespun: not so much Band On The Run as Man On The Farm. McCartney recently admitted to envying Bob Dylan, because ‘he doesn’t give a s***’. The irony is that McCartney makes braver musical choices than Dylan, whose artistry all goes into the lyrics.

There’s a reason why we talk about ‘playing’ a song. This is the sound of a great songwriter being playful – using funny voices, making funny noises, showing us the child inside the 78-year-old man. The results are patchy but fully alive. Find My Way tackles today’s anxieties and turns them into fun. Deep Deep Feeling is an eight-minute, electro-gospel hippie trip. Lavatory Lil – reminiscent of Polythene Pam, from Abbey Road – is so gleefully vitriolic that people may wonder who inspired it.

When Winter Comes, an unfinished George Martin production from 1992, is elegantly folksy. Women And Wives exudes weather-beaten wisdom, like Johnny Cash. The Kiss Of Venus and Seize The Day have classic Macca melodies, simultaneously natural and surprising.

He leaves you hoping that there will be a McCartney IV.