THE LYRICS
PAUL MCCARTNEY 1956 TO THE PRESENT
Allen Lane, 874pp, £75
This boxed collection of Sir Paul Mccartney’s lyrics, edited and introduced by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, comes with an epic price tag as befits its coffee-table gloss and bulk. In the Observer, David Hepworth found it revealing of Mccartney’s ambitions. ‘Each song has a commentary drawn from chats with Muldoon, who was presumably the one introducing words such as “epistolary” and “intertextual” into the conversation. Macca rarely resists an upmarket comparison. If one Paul is keen to point out that the intermediary of She Loves You is like the hero of LP Hartley’s The Go
Between, the other Paul is quite happy to agree he may have been influenced by it.’
Like Hepworth, Blake Morrison in the Guardian, enjoyed the pleasurable alchemy created by the conversations of the two Pauls. ‘Fifty hours of them, in 24 sessions between 2015 and 2020, covering 154 songs. On the face of it, the two Pauls have little in common: one a complex poet, the other a pop star. But they share an Irish heritage. And a few of Mccartney’s rhymes (pataphysical/ quizzical, Edison/medicine) wouldn’t look out of place in a Muldoon poem. At any rate the two hit it off. Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding.’ Though Mccartney has been at the top of the tree for half a century and has met everyone, he here talks movingly of his poor Liverpool childhood and in particular the enormous influence on his work of the death of his mother, Mary.
On the arts website Salon, Kenneth Womack was awed by 78-year-old Mccartney’s undimmed energies: ‘As a writer and performer, Mccartney is at home in virtually any style, from rock and country through jazz, R&B, and beyond. In terms of his musicianship, he is simply virtuosic, distinguishing himself time and time again as an inventive, often groundbreaking guitarist and perhaps the most innovative and melodic bass player to ever pick up the instrument.’