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September 30, 2005
Paul McCartney Yay or Nay?
To think this post was inspired because I was trying to write about Elizabeth Rigby but kept calling her Eleanor instead.
All my life I seem to have cultivated this love/cringe relationship with Paul McCartney. Well not in the reciprocal sense of the word but then you’d probably gathered that anyway.
It all began back in 1982, when I trekked off to Woolworths with my hard earned pocket money and came away with ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ it was the first single I ever bought. I had just acquired my mum’s old hand-me-down record player and as I sat there in my bedroom I nearly cried because the lyrics seemed so deep to me. That was it! The man had the answer! All we had to do was live together ‘side by side’ like the keys on a piano and the world would be OK! He was my hero from then on.
I can laugh at my six year old self, because now I’m older and wiser and I know that the world is just a little more complicated than that. Oh and the piano metaphor is just not working for me because doesn’t he know that a piano is an inanimate object without history, emotion, feelings or money and it is OK for the keys to do that buddy buddy thing because, well they can. Sometimes however the idealist in me, tired of all the debating, arguing, whinging, moaning, fighting and apathy, wonders if it was that simple after all, maybe if we were all a little nicer to each other?.... Well it wouldn’t do any harm to try now would it? And besides if you want hard-line politics then didn’t he release a song called ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish.’? Ouch! You don’t get more specific than that.
Mr PE has been going through some of his old vinyl and for the past few days we have been listening to Band on the Run. Now I’m no musician really and so I don’t understand all the terminology but I had forgotten how much that album rocks (well I’ve been tapping my feet along anyway.) It may be a lot more ‘cool’ than his ‘Ebony and Ivory’ period but the lyrics don’t mean anything. I kind of always want ‘Jet’ to turn out to be some feminist anthem but however many times I listen to it I still can’t make head nor tail of the lyrics.
‘I thought the major Was a lady suffragette.’
Let’s face it, he was a serious drug user at the time.
And then there was ‘We All Stand Together.’ The Anti-Paul camp never fails to start humming ‘bom bom-bom’ as if that settles it. As far as I am aware though no-one was ever claiming that this was supposed to be anything more than a Rupert the Bear theme tune. Considering some of the pitiful attempts made to entertain our kids these days (hello Hi-5) can we really send him to Room 101 for a couple of (oh OK maybe quite a few) throwaway songs.
Well what is it I don’t like about him? Well you see it’s his demeanour. He cannot seem to be able to hold a photo shoot without raising at least one of his thumbs aloft, or pulling some sort of ludicrous face. We all like to have a laugh sometimes but Jesus guy have some decorum at least half the time. And then there’s that thing he does with his eyebrows when he sings. We saw him at Glastonbury last year it was the only time I’ve ever seen him live and I had to stand right at the back where I couldn’t even see the screens because I knew that as soon as those eyebrows started moving and his head started shaking from side to side I wouldn‘t be able to be impartial to the music. So due to my positioning I managed to keep an open mind and for anyone who is interested, I was suitably impressed, especially with the bulging Beatles back catalogue he attempted to tackle. Someone did suggest that if I had seen the Beatles perform then I wouldn’t have found Paul’s solo set that extraordinary. Who knows, maybe they were right.
Yet I approve of his choice in female companionship; his first wife invented arguably the best veggie pies ever cooked and his second wife was in the press recently for campaigning against fur. If they are prepared to overlook his irritating eyebrow habits (maybe, horror of horror, they actually find them endearing) then maybe I should too. Oh and more importantly he is a fellow left-hander and we should stick together in these hard times.
Perhaps I should take heed of those wise words sung by the good man himself (or was it Stevie Wonder) when he warbled,
‘We all know that people are the same where ever we go There is good and bad in everyone.’
Gosh I’d never looked at it that way before.
So there you go...
Posted by purple elephant at September 30, 2005 09:46 PM