Mull of Kintyre, the inside track
McCartney tells how he wrote his biggest hit, but never expected ‘Scottish waltz in punk era’ to sell
IT is his biggest song, outselling any of his hits with The Beatles – but Paul McCartney never expected Mull Of Kintyre to do well in the charts when it was released in 1977.
Sir Paul, now about to release a ‘best of’ album, has disclosed that he was simply hoping to write a new Scottish song – because everything he heard north of the Border felt ‘old’.
But his tribute to the Argyll peninsula where he made his home, featuring the Campbeltown Pipe Band, was No1 by Christmas and remained at the top spot for nine weeks.
Now the songwriter has picked Mull Of Kintyre as one of his favourite alltime post-Beatles tracks for an album, Pure McCartney, released on June 10.
Sir Paul, who bought High Park Farm on Kintyre 50 years ago, admitted: ‘That wasn’t me trying to write a hit, really. I just thought there weren’t any new Scottish songs, everything you heard was old. The pipe bands were playing Amazing Grace, which was an old song. So I thought it would be kind of cool if someone wrote a new one. And because I was living in Scotland and I’d been spending a lot of time there, I thought, “Well, that should be me! I should have a go at it.”
‘I didn’t really expect it to be a hit, except that when we recorded it, it was such a special occasion and the guys, particularly the young guys in the pipe band, were all saying, “It’s going to be a hit, this, it’s great!”
‘So I started to believe in it more, but still not really, because I thought there’s no way a Scottish waltz is going to come out during the punk era. But then my daughter, Heather, who was very involved in the punk era, she was there at the right time, she said to me, “I wish you were in the pub the other night with some of my punk friends and they were putting on Mull Of Kintyre”. So I liked that… not really knowing how it works!
‘I’ve never learned a formula of how to write a song and so it makes it special, kind of magical, when you write one – like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.’
The Campbeltown Pipe Band became the most famous pipe band in the world on the back of the release and in 2003 was asked to play at the Isle of Bute wedding of Stella McCartney and Alasdhair Willis. Ironically there was just one request from the organisers – don’t play Mull Of Kintyre!
The record, Sir Paul’s 18th solo single, eventually sold 2.5 million in the UK, with more than 1 in 30 people buying it, and has had global sales of more than six million.
The 21 band members were each paid the standard Musicians’ Union fee, and after the hugeness of the hit, Sir Paul was criticised for being stingy – so he sent off a £200 cheque to each player.
The band’s lead drummer, retired car valeter and former miner Campbell Maloney, once described how they got to play on the record: ‘Paul McCartney had heard us play in the streets in Campbeltown a few years earlier when he was with Jane Asher.
‘It must have stuck with him, for when he wrote Mull Of Kintyre he asked the then band leader, the late Tony Wilson, to come up to his place and he played it to him.
‘We then got back a tape of Paul singing to an acoustic guitar and telling us where he wanted the big breaks of pipes and drums. It was quite a hard thing to do, the way it was arranged. The instructions were chalked on a blackboard in our band hall.
‘But as soon as we heard the recorded song, well, everybody just thought it was a winner. It was a privilege to have been there.’
Describing how he selected the songs from throughout his solo career for the new album, Sir Paul said: ‘Me and my team came up with the idea of putting together a collection of my recordings with nothing else in mind other than having something fun to listen to.
‘It has been more like a musical adventure than a proper job. It pleases me, and often amazes me, that I’ve been involved in the writing and recording of so many songs, each of them so different from the others.’
I just thought there weren’t any new Scottish songs, I should have a go at it