CLASSIC ROCK
McCartney’s Forgotten Masterpiece
What might have been is now but not quite
It’s 1973 and Paul McCartney’s solo career and Wings project had got off to a shaky start critically.
His first solo album, McCartney, was a mixed bag of incredible Beatles-era tracks, lesser songs and Beatles rejects all put together with a ramshackle homemade feel.
He did a little better critically with Ram, but not much. Ahead of its time and now rightly considered a classic, the critics and some fans didn’t get it at the time. He was being compared to his Beatles output and they thought he was falling short.
Things didn’t improve for album 3. His first Wings album, Wild Life, is not great. It’s not bad either but not the standard expected of one of the greatest songwriters in history. Boring, boring, boring wrote one critic.
It didn’t help that Wings’ debut single was the banned Give Ireland Back To The Irish dirge and its follow-up, the execrable Mary Had A Little Lamb.
Many still wrongly base their opinion of Macca’s solo career entirely on this low point.
