I left for the toy store
I bought myself a whole situation
Asking the future for you
Wishing the breeze would be mine
Chasing the running stream
Hoping you’d be tall in the grass.
This is the way we put out the candle.
Farewell to childhood.
Deep in the wild wood a fire goes out,
And what are we left with
Now we are grown up?
This is the way we pull up the anchor.
Goodbye to romance.
Out on the ocean a good ship is lost,
And what are we left with
Now we are grown up?
Record Magazine, September 1984
London. In a city where every kid on the street looks like he’s rushing off to audition for Duran Duran, Paul McCartney, dressed for work in a blue-and-white-checked Levi’s shirt, blue cotton jeans and slightly muddy rubber-soled loafers, seems almost … out of place. No matter how you may feel about his recent records, his wife, his bank account, his marijuana busts, his “it’s a drag” response to his ex-partner’s and ex-best friend’s assassination, the man has contributed to more incredible moments of rock history and rock music than almost any other human being on the face of this earth. And Paul carries that weight, even though he bounces into the coffee bar of George Martin’s AIR Studios, where he’s mixing the soundtrack to his first feature film, “Give My Regards to Broad Street” (which features Ringo Starr, Dave Edmunds, Chris Spedding and Led Zep’s John Paul Jones among the musicians, and Sir Ralph Richardson, “Breaker Morant“‘s Bryan Brown and Tracey Ullman among the thespians). Whistling and trying to play it nonchalant, he fires off a few rounds of Asteroids, complains that some engineer or another is threatening his house record, then says hello. As you note his fading semblance to “the cute one” of the Fab Four - his greying hair, crinkling eyes, bit of a tummy - he’s checking you out, too. Are you going to see him as the kid who grew up in a Liverpool housing project, never content to just reach for the brass ring? Like the figure in the logo for his multi-million dollar company, MPL (for which he oversees every aspect, from making albums to picking out photos for his fan club newsletter), Paul McCartney, at age 42, 20 years after the onset of Beatlemania, is still trying to juggle, the sun, moon and Saturn.
Paul McCartney meets Queen Elizabeth II as she visits the Royal Academy of Arts in London, May 23, 2012
Paul McCartney: For many years, I’ve been thinking about doing a rock ‘n’ roll album. It’s something that Lin and I were talking about and she was very keen on the idea. She loved that rock ‘n’ roll. So she loved the idea of me doing some of these songs that I never did with the Beatles. So I started planning it. And what happened was, I started to remember that the early recording session with the Beatles happened a particular way. And a very specific way. What happened is, you’re supposed to get at the studio for ten o’clock. Then you’re supposed to be ready with the guitar in tune or your bass, set up your amp, everything ready to go by 10:30. Then at 10:30, the grown ups would kind of arrive, then they’d say, what are we doing. You’d tell them, and in the next three hours you were expected to do two songs. Then at 1:30, you had 1:30 to 2:30 an hours’ lunch. Then 2:30 to 5:30 you had another three hours, another two songs. And that was the way we worked for quite a while, like Revolver, Rubber Soul, all the early albums. And I remember loving it, ‘cause it was so fast. There was no time for anything but music. Wasn’t indulging, you couldn’t have time. So I thought, it’d be really great to do that again. And I had a kind of like professional nostalgia for that way of working. So I thought, I wonder if it would work these days, you know.
It’s only a matter of hours
Since lurching to left right
Hunched in half light
I dropped from the day night
And sped across fields —
Music for ear drums
Lemon for sore gums
Brambles for bare bums —
Call it a day.
