WINGS – "Mull Of Kintyre"/"Girls School"

I’m no musician, but am I right in thinking that this is the easiest song to play to get to number one for many years? It’s followed me around a bit, even though I’m too young to remember it at the time; the only tune half-mastered in my best friend’s short-lived guitar lessons, or when I was in a youth theatre devised piece and we wanted to do a flashback memory scene of a character’s Scottish childhood and one of us could only just about play the recorder – “Oh, let’s just make the tune ‘Mull Of Kintyre'”

Whether on the record or performed on any instrument it never does anything more than plod drearily, to these ears.

I always think when I’m watching the promo film of this, and other Wings singles (the family McCartney gather the village together to entertain them around a bonfire, the McCartneys show us a film of their life together on tour, etc) that there’s something a bit decadent about all of this, all of this playing the role of the benevolent prince/ laird, in its way as much detached from the bonds of ordinary human contact as the debauched courts of the Stones or Zeppelin.

Am I right in thinking that this is the easiest song to play to get to number one for many years?

Probably the easiest since “Amazing Grace”, which is a doddle on the old descant recorder.

Being Scottish, I rather liked this when it came out. I don’t think anyone could doubt Paul McCartney’s (and, to a lesser extent, Denny Laine’s) sincerity in writing the song, and , geographical inaccuracies apart, it was a genuine attempt to write a love song to a beautiful place that he had very special feelings for.

It is a simple song, to listen to, and to play (in as far as bagpipes can be easy to play), but that does not make it a bad song. Arriving just before Christmas, it would, of course, attract many thousands of once-a-year record buyers, buying singles for mum/dad/granny etc., etc, and this obviously helped it establish itself initially, but it stayed at number one right through January, so it must have had something.

Maybe it did just strike a chord after the sh***y year we had had, and the arrival of p**k.

I have to admit my own feelings for the song have slightly selfish reasons. At that time, I was regularly told I bore a resemblance to McCartney (although 18 years younger than him!), and, while I obviously protested vehemently, the video to this, with Mccartney in his green combat jacket wandering about, did rather accentuate the likeness (especially in the long shots). This did me no harm at all, and for the next couple of years, probably until after “Coming Up” I certainly played on it whenever I got the opportunity.

This is still the biggest-selling non-charity single in the UK. I din’t think it wat THAT good, but I’d give it a 7.

Almost a full decade has now passed since “Hey Jude,” and what communal singalong is left for its author now? It is 1977, and the Silent Generation have looked in quiescent horror at a subsequent generation to whom they now know there is no talking – think of the unutterable gulf between, say, The Who By Numbers and Never Mind The Bollocks (so the reflext reaction of dismissing the Pistols as Who-lite will not, and never did, wash). So the Silent Generation are left with only one option; to sing for, and to, themselves. In America, over Christmas 1977, that took the form of “You Light Up My Life,” a song Patti Page might have sung a quarter-century previously, and now sung by the nice daughter of that nice, clean Pat Boone.

“Mull Of Kintyre” hardly played in the States, and I doubt it was really meant to. McCartney himself has admitted that to “go punk” in ’77 would have been the saddest thing he could possibly have done; yet he had to do something – Lennon had retired to househusband status, while both George and Ringo didn’t seem to be anywhere much any more; in any case, one of 1977’s best-selling albums was The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl, which, with its ceaseless teen screams right at the front of the mix, burying the actual music, uncannily foresees the likes of the Mary Chain (though the really extreme stuff from that gig, and from the Shea Stadium ’66 farewell, remains the provenance of bootlegs only); and what’s more, selling two million copies of a Scottish bagpipe lullaby waltz was a punk rock gesture in itself – almost broke after the Apple fiasco in the early ’70s, McCartney initially had no choice but to pursue the lo-fi option; thus early solo albums like McCartney and Ram come across as a slightly more determined Ariel Pink. That subtle, thumbs-up-but-fuck-you-really approach seems to have persisted in McCartney’s work since; for every big budget triumph like Band On The Run and every nugget of beyond-AoR genius like “Silly Love Songs,” there are oddities like “Give Ireland Back To The Irish,” which he promptly followed up with “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” just because he could.

Naturally, as it was intended, “Mull Of Kintyre” reached out not only to the Silent Generation, and the legion of lapsed Boomers who had reluctantly joined them, but to the generation which preceded them; at long last, the grannies, who had always viewed McCartney as a nice boy gone slightly wrong, were reassured. Hence its nine-week residency at number one over Christmas – it was, strictly speaking, a double A-side, but “Girls’ School,” one of McCartney’s duff, over-eager rockers, was never played, and with lyrics such as: “She gives them pills in a paper cup/And she knocks them on the head,” you can understand why – and its eventual status as the biggest-selling British single ever, the first to top two million sales (“She Loves You” had previously come closest, at 1.7 million), a total not to be bested for another seven years.

My dad approved of the involvement of the massed pipes and drums of the Campbeltown Pipe Band – they even appeared with Paul, Linda and Denny, performing the song on the Mike Yarwood Christmas Special (!) on Christmas Day – though thought the song to be a ripoff of an unspecified ancient Caledonian refrain (but then that’s McCartney’s inadvertent genius, to write a song which sounds as though it’s been around forever) and blanched visibly at Macca’s Americanised pronunciation (“Oh mist rolling in FRAAAAM the sea”) and his admittedly silly hoedown whooping at the end; McCartney could never resist playing the over-eager scoutmaster.

The song builds up from simple acoustic strumming; and the various other elements – harmonies, rhythm, Campbelltown Pipe Band, more voices on every chorus – are introduced systematically, so it sounds more organic than “Hey Jude”; there is no need for an extended outro, since its build is spread out more generously. The lyrics, though, are solidly backward-looking; instead of the friendly hand upon the next generation’s shoulder, McCartney reminisces about “the days I knew then,” “far have I travelled and much have I seen,” “nights when we sang like a heavenly choir,” “back where my memories remain.” It’s all about surrending any claim to the future (though the vision of “vast painted deserts, the sunsets on fire” seems to belong to Arizona rather than the Hebrides) about settling down, getting into bed with, the past. And although the record’s arrangement is characteristically ingenious – note the evolution from the impromptu slap on the side of his guitar which introduces the first chorus to the massed drum rolls which herald the final chorus – it’s a sentiment with which I could hardly empathise in a year which, for me, revealed so many previously unknowable art of genius, from Television and the Modern Lovers right through to the Buzzcocks and Wire; and so for me “Mull Of Kintyre” is too complacent in its own certainty to work as a meaningful 1977 record. The notion that it represented a decisive backwards glance can be reinforced by the fact that the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band’s straight-faced performance of the “Floral Dance” stayed behind it for six weeks at number two over the same period. But for truly meaningful low-key communal empathy in the music of 1977, you have to go to John Martyn’s wondrous “Small Hours” – recorded across several open Berkshire fields, near a lake and a train line at three in the morning, guitar, echoplex, Moog, birdsong, vocal mumbles, vibes, drum machine, nature and love nurturing each other in a manner of openness and healing which radiates so wonderfully and naturally three decades later.

For a long time my view on this was much the same as Tom’s (and Rosie’s!). And yes, its extended tenure at #1 contributed to my dislike.

But I did a complete 180 on this when I bought the ‘Wingspan’ McCartney CD compilation cheap in the sales a few years ago. Now I think its quite majestic… well up until that “Yeeee-hah!” anyway, which ruins everything that’s preceded.

MC is right to highlight the slow and systematic build in the arrangement. I also really like the use of bagpipes here (whereas I’m no fan of the Royal Scots Dragoons’ “Amazing Grace”), especially the way that the drone anticipates the first key change. In fact isn’t there a double key change, here? Or a key change and then a reversion to the original key? It’s almost as if Macca was deliberately setting out to make the epic-est of pop epics.

There’s a nice running joke in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel (the one about the Krikkit wars), where Arthur Dent ponders that the beautiful songs he hears sung by the Krikkiters are McCartney-esque. He imagines Paul singing one to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking “probably Essex”.

Ha – mind-meld, Jeff!

1: if there is any gianty big popstar i would like to sit down and quiz unmercifully it is mr mccartney
2: and the topic would be THE CRAFT OF MELODY, and how a medodists males choices, what’s their good, what’s their bad, what’s their safe but dull, what’s their wild and risky?

i don’t mind the intention of this song or its success: things i dislike all seem to be technical, a specialist’s snobbery (“specialist” in this case meaning i was a chorister at school, with all kinds of acquired small-bore expertise in the delivery of hymns, and a strong sense — a physical sense — of which hymntunes worked and which didn’t, as someone having to sing them, lots*: this tune is saggy and draggy, and the way the words fall across the tune, which i’d call enjambement if it were poetry, is just weirdly clumsy — “oh mist rolling in from the sea my desire [gasp] is always to there oh mull etc” — in regard to how breathing should structure the sense and etc) (so yes: i’d quiz him on technical matters, cz yes, he’s a master in this dead-centre stuff — except a self-taught and a wildly fallible master)

*”hark! the herald angels sing” can fvck off for example, it has a completely unrealistically wide pitch-range and is exhausting and unpleasant to perform

God I hated this at the time. Listening to the new chart on a Tuesday lunchtime praying that it wouldn’t STILL be Number One, but there it was week after week, this awful dirge that just put my teeth on edge like someone dragging their nails down a blackboard. It was that painful to listen to, especially as it seemed to NEVER GO AWAY.

I don’t mind it now though. Probably because I’m now as old and sentimental as Macca was then.

Indeed, it was finally deposed in the chart announced on Tuesday 31 January 1978, meaning it fell a day short of being the first Christmas number one ever to hold on at the top until the following February. For that mark to be achieved, for the first and only time so far, we had to wait another 15 years, for a song that I’m sure will have annoyed an awful lot of people just as much!

BTW, p*nk lord, the poetry works better than in the Charlton Athletic version:
“Valley, Floyd Road, oh mist rolling in from the Thames,
My desire is only to be here, oh Valley, Floyd Road”
– yet that too was a source of nostalgia during their 7-year exile at Palace and West Ham.

#14 – Speaking as a former chorister myself, I bloody loved singing Hark The Herald! The only way to get round those high bits was to blast them out full throttle, and blast them out we jolly well did.

Conversely, my least favourite piece was “In The Bleak Midwinter”. Moan – stone – snow on snow – zzzzz. A plodding, dreary dirge… just like “Mull Of Kintyre”, then!

I talk a little more about “Small Hours” in this typically misleadingly-titled piece:

http://hemingwoid.blogspot.com/2004/11/years-about-music-1974-c-for-charybdis_19.html

nowt to say here really except FULL SPEED AHEAD because ’78 looks a veritable vintage

Full Speed Ahead indeed; I’ve got my “Year is 1978” Smart Playlist blasting away on shuffle in readiness. Crown Heights Affair! Stiff Little Fingers! Charles Aznavour! XTC! I-AM-YOUR-AUTO-MATIC-LOVER! OK ready let’s do it!

Charles Aznavour – he’s strictly roots.

I really like this song. It became a hideous behemoth because of its run at the top and obviously McCartney’s laziness elsewhere can lead thoughtless types to assume that this is cheap songwriting by the absentee landlaird of his rock star island. But, as has already been observed, there is a special genius in being able to write a tune that simply MUST already exist, must ALWAYS have existed, and Macca has done it at least a dozen times. And why wouldn’t that lead you to complacency? If you turn your hand to any song style and carry off something compelling in it (‘Helter Skelter’, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Paperback Writer’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ AND ‘The Frog Chorus’) wouldn’t you end up being lazy? if it takes no effort to jump the hurdle, why make an effort?

Returning to a motif of the Baccara thread, here’s a song entirely devoid of irony. And it’s this that McCartney would become increasingly pilloried for. While the deeply fucked-up Lennon is prickly, sarcastic, vicious, always getting the piss-take in first, even when it comes to his own songs (but we’ll come to this in good time), McCartney hits his emotions unerringly. He’s done irony, of course, on the Sgt Pepper title track and in Paperback Writer, for example, but by and large his sight is fixed unblinkingly, unsquintingly, on the emotion. Few songwriters of the rock era are so convinced and convincing about the simplicity of love: that it is a good thing, that everyone should feel it, that the more of it there is the better the world would be. When Lennon sang ‘All You Need Is Love’, he HAD to couple the chorus with an ambiguously nihilistic verse. When McCartney sings ‘And I need love, like a garden needs a flower, like a raindrop needs a shower’ (on the above-maligned ‘Waterfalls’) he really believes it and he knows you believe it too. As love songs got more overtly sexualised, or became pastiche, McCartney’s sincerity was an obvious target for mockery – not helped by his teeth-grittingly relentless ordinary-bloke cheeriness (‘the Beatles were just a good little band’). The nearest McCartney gets to irony is pastiche, but even then it seems animated by sheer joy at musicmaking and an unselfconscious preparedness to try anything, whether it be Charleston-era swing in ‘Honey Pie’ or Mull of Kintyre’s near contemporary the orchestral album, Thrillington.

Mind you, if Philip Norman is to be believed, McCartney is a rapacious monster of avarice and deception, whose every thought is guided by cold financial calculation. If so, it is all the more remarkable that in his songwriting he is so elegantly transparent in his emotions. (I’m sure Philip Norman isn’t to be believed. I recall the first plank of his case against McCartney to rest on young Paul’s immediate response to the death of his mother: ‘What will we do with her money?’. That a biographer feels happy about turning the shocked words of a 14-year-old boy, hearing about the unexpected death of his own mother, against him says more about author than subject, I think.)

As an aside, what always seems to me so utterly bizarre about Macca is that someone who’d written the songs he has would, you would think, appreciate that they are great songs and that everyone loves them. But in interviews he always seems to bizarrely needy: I have rarely seen him interviewed without him telling some story of a London taxi driver giving him the thumbs-up and saying ‘Pipes of Peace – top tune!’ But I suppose he really does just need love.

And this song is no different. It is, to me, inconceivable to imagine Lennon trying to write a pastiche Scottish ballad without also wanting to fuck it up in some way. And that made Lennon great, of course (it’s so easy to fall into the trap of feeling you can only defend McCartney by attacking Lennon, and vice versa). McCartney’s love for the Mull of Kintyre is effortless and elegiac and SIMPLE (how many number ones had such a high proportion of single-syllable words? ‘Sweep through the heather like deer in the glen / Carry me back to the days I knew then / Nights when we sang like a heavenly choir / Of the life and the time of the Mull of Kintyre’ only one polysllabic word per line).

My mum who had her teenage in the sixties was always scornful of the Beatles (she was a Stones fan) and held particular scorn for Paul McCartney, who she considered to embody the nonStones-yness of the Beatles. With the result that I first heard this song on Top of the Pops against the background of a chorus of booing. I hid my liking for the song which may also be why I feel rather passionate in my defence of it.

And yes it was also the first song I picked out on the guitar.

re:#34 – there are lots of things on this blog over the years that have got 5,6,7,8,9 or even 10 alongside them which I don’t like, didn’t buy and even turn off when they come on the radio. That’s not because they’re bad, it’s because I just don’t happen to like them, which is not to say that they don’t work on their own terms. This is another one that works on its own terms, be they simplistic, nostalgic, sentimental, emotional or whatever.

From an American McCartney fan perspective, “Mull of Kintyre” is one of the weird, mystery songs that you only hear as curious additions to greatest hits albums or bonus cuts on CD reissues – others include “Hi Hi Hi,” “Give Ireland Back To The Irish,” and “Once Upon A Long Ago.” So it’s hard for me to entirely get inside a world where this song is a relentless pop force of which every man of woman born is nightmarishly sick from birth. To my ears, it’s lovely, certainly a bit simpering but not quite as banal in its phrasing as a postcard sentiment… there are some funny ideas in here, particularly the anthropomorphisation of the whole place (“the life and the times of the Mull of Kintyre”). “Sweep through the heather” is nice too.

I’ve always found this one of McCartney’s easiest tunes to sing, so some items in the above discussion confuse me. But I’ve never had a real singer’s voice as such, and in general I get thrown trying to sing along with McCartney because he just goes too damn high. This goes down easy.

It occurs to me that I think I probably got an acceptance letter from Cambridge Uni while this was at #1, which might dispose me more favourably towards it if a) I hadn’t hated Cambridge and quit quickly and b) this were not a horrible record that I loathed from the start and more and more as it lingered for so long.

1978 has some major good memories for me. I’m not sure whether I connect any of them to hits of the day – we’ll see as we get there, I guess.

THE SLA’S GOT YOUR NUMBER CUNT!

this is the first song i can remember which, considering i was two and a half at the time of its release, seems a little unlikely in retrospect. the thing is i had small toy banjo with a face of a tiger on the big round bit (technical term there) and so would sing “mull of kin-TIGER” whilst pretending to play it.

This was played over and over when I had to work an 8 hour shift for my holiday job at a petrol station on Boxing Day with only a radio to keep me company – the day when I decided to break up with my first girlfriend – so it tends to remind me of that more than anything. I don’t hate it but nor do I much care for it.
John Martyn’s ‘Small hours’ is a different matter. I think I bought ‘One world’ along with Eno’s “Before and after science’ (complete with prints) on the strength of a review by Vivien Goldman in Sounds and was not disappointed.

Incidentally, I don’t think “Girls School” is all that bad, and it falls well on the side of genuine actual “rocker,” in the same vein as “Hi Hi Hi” or “Jet.” The content is stupid but it’s got a good hook (“Ahhhhh, what can the sisters do?”) and a nice twang on the riff. It’s just so blatantly a B-side – what exactly was the idea with having them placed equally? Did they really have no idea what a monster “Mull of Kintyre” was going to be? Or was the idea that “Girls School” would perform well in places outside the UK?

Also – wasn’t there a bit of a tiff over the credit for this? I seem to remember it being one of the major bones of contention between McCartney and Denny Laine over the following few years.

# 49 – I think there’s something in this. But you nevertheless have to have sufficient talent in the first place in order to to “drag out another variation on the theme”, and in any case, this technique is by no means peculiar to McCartney. Quite frankly, one could apply this to just about anyone. Even Mozart.