An awful suspicion lingers that Paul McCartney wouldn’t have tried something like this if it hadn’t been for “Imagine” doing so well the year before. Some partnerships and rivalries create reflexes that run way deeper than conscious decision can account for, and anyhow Lennon was – naturally – on the man’s mind as he put the Tug Of War material together. A piano ballad whose simple truth can bring the world together as one? What could possibly go wrong?
Everything about “Ebony And Ivory” is rotten, from the too-splashy electric piano on. There is good and bad in everyone, and here we get the bad, great shameless lashings of it. Each saving grace you could mention gets the rug pulled out from under it. Stevie Wonder’s singing? Of course it’s fine, but the whole duet has a forced quality – as well it might, since there’s nothing to duet about: Stevie has been drafted in because he’s a passing black legend and the song calls for one to say “me too” to Paul’s homilies. McCartney’s ear for melody? Present and correct, naturally, but keeping it school-assembly simple doesn’t do him favours. “Wonderful Christmastime” was similarly desperate to please, but seems to have become a standard despite this: “Ebony And Ivory” mostly lives on as an easy target – a gold standard for triteness.
Score: 1
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not to mention that ebony is a non sustainable wood and ivory is made from elefunts – wrong in so many ways
“Ebony and Ivory/Can’t be justified environmentally” doesn’t have the same ring.
This seemed risible at the time, from the moment that unbelievably weedy fanfare intro announces An Important Statement. But there’s comedy gold in there that could make it worth a 3 at a pinch: Macca’s oddly plummy “side by side on my py-arrrnoh”, Stevie’s horrid “there is good and bad” audible wink to the camera (yes, yes, but you know what I mean). This could also be the first instance of what some term the Bartman vocal effect – on the middle eight (“ebony, ivory, living in per-fect harmony”) it sounds as if the gooey bv’s are literally inside your ear. Michael Jackson would perfect this discomforting sound years later.
There was a record knocking on the no.1 door which was a much more realistic, arms around each other, teardrops in your beer, gritted teeth song about dashed dreams and tentative hopes. With only a wheezing, freezing barrel organ to huddle around compared to Macca’s panoply of instrumentation, stuck at no.2 were Ron’s 22 with This Time we’ll Get It Right. And do I hear the Black Dyke Mills Band at the end, a misty echo of Macca’s more adventurous days at Apple? Oh the humanity.
Don’t know this song other than by the horrified reaction it generates among nearly everyone – I had a brief look on Youtube (aiee) but got distracted fairly quickly by the awesome video to Say Say Say on the related videos list.
Tom, lord! This song is great! Dopey and trite but beautifully put together in a clean, sweet, professional way that reveals the past few clattering rackets of nothingness for what they are. I [i]loved[/i] this at age 12, even sang it solo at karaoke at some sort of school assembly, to no acclaim whatsoever. Not exactly a profound re-examination of race in Britain or whatever but it’s fine.
I do bristle on Paul’s behalf at the idea that Stevie Wonder is just the token black guy…Macca was a huge fan of the guy, and the Braille “We love you” on the jacket of [i]Red Rose Speedway[/i] (nearly a decade before this) was supposedly meant for him.
(I realize I’m largely being an irrational fan defending his idol here…carry on everyone!)
I’m with Dr C. I was six and a half at the time. And I was, for some reason, in love with pianos. As far as I could tell, this was a whole song about pianos! So I loved it: I remember it being one of the first songs I ever got dad to tape off the radio for me, and one of the first I ever learnt all the words to.
As I got a bit older I learnt to groan at the sentiment, but never fell out of love with the sumptuous, enveloping production (associating it in with the clunky bedroom demo sound of Wonderful Christmastime is criminal!). The best moment for me is the little solo, which feels playful and relaxed and utterly oblivious to the very existence of racial discord. 6/10 for me.
pianos are great! you don’t need a reason! if this had been a song about why pianos are great instead of for stupid horrible people to like themselves it would have a masterpiece!
Just watched the video, I’d forgotten that they used SPECIAL EFFECTS to sit Stevie next to Paul at the piano, even though in reality they were on OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC! (Or did they? I have a hazy memory of this being news at the time, and something I was impressed by. And there definitely appears to be a lot of suspicious bluescreening going on…but then towards the end when Paul’s playing his bass, his reflection on the back of Stevie’s synth looks pretty believable).
That is harsh, Tom!
Trite it may be, but if you tune out the rather mawkish sentiments it’s a perfectly pleasant song. The only reason I can think of for a 1 is a slap of Paulie’s wrists for work way below what he was capable of, but from anybody else it would really be not at all bad.
I liked this when I was nine, because of its obvious melodic charms, the effectiveness of the arrangement and the concision of the utopian sentiment. It was also surprisingly popular amongst us kids for a record made by two old men – maybe this was the influence of younger parents.
As a grown man, I obviously find this laughable, but at least in a genuinely funny way… One is a bit harsh, because I am glad that this record exists.
#2 Watch: A week of Bardo’s patently superior ‘One Step Further’, followed by a week of The 1982 England World Cup Squad’s appology in advance ‘This Time (We’ll Get It Right)’.
‘This Time (We’ll go out in the second round after failing to score against West Germany and Spain)’, more like.
Weird that you should have mentioned school assemblies, Tom, because my memories of this record blur with a particular primary school assembly in which our headmaster Mr Clewer delivered a long sermon along similar lines.
Just like Paul, Mr Clewer wanted to point out that in order to play a perfect melody, you needed to play the black and the white notes TOGETHER! – an assembly prompted by a discovery that Mr Clewer had made the previous lunchtime whilst patrolling the school playground. You see, our school being a pretty much half-and-half multiracial school, we would play football and divide the teams according to black kids and white kids.
There was no more sinister motive in this than merely being able to discern which identically-dressed child was on which team. But by the time the news reached our apoplectic head, our self-devised system of team demarcation had turned into APARTHEID! in the SCHOOL PLAYGROUND! We had to promise never to play along race lines again, and from that day on, our lunchtime kickabout became a daily encounter between “England” and “Brazil”. You can probably guess how the teams divided up.
Back to the record – I seem to remember the video being filmed on horrible 80s video stock, the sort whose use didn’t stop Neighbours from becoming a soaraway success a few years later. That seems the perfect visual complement to what, on the record, must rank as one of the most hideous keyboard sounds of the 80s.
I am glad There’s No One Quite Like Grandma exists Billy for the same reason! Comic value is enough to give a 2/10 the notoriety of a 1/10 I reckon.
Well..1, I’m shocked. It is unbelievably trite but I can always find pleasure in McCartney’s melodic gifts. And they don’t desert him here. The production is rich and warm, and although I like “Take It Away” much better, the relaxed looseness of the solo works for me.
An inherent problem with duets is they so often sound forced, as both singers try to reconcile the desire to upstage – and simultaneously respect – the other.
This one is no exception – Stevie sounds like he’s phoned in his contribution. But it’s not quite as sick making as the McCartney-Jackson ‘banter’ we had to endure later in the year.
5, I think.
Number 3 watch. PhD’s “I Won’t Let You Down”, a quite wonderful record of Proustian associations for me …the smell of sweet perfume, to quote a future number 1…
“The Girl Is Mine” really *is* funny.
Re forcedness of the duet (point #5) – this is particularly bad, I think. Because there’s really no need for the song to BE a duet – there’s no dialogue, no point of difference. The only reason it’s a duet is because black people and white people live together in harmony and McCartney needed to rope in a black person to demonstrate this. The fact that the black person in question is a genius he particularly admired isn’t really the point!
There’s actually a very extensive body of music which allows for the idea of different motifs — two and even more than two — being stated as different, even conflicting, before being heard to evolve and develop into a (richer) harmonic unity… it’s pretty much what sonata-form does in classical music (each different sonata by every different composer finding a distinct expression of “difference” in the opposed themes, and moving into a new solution or resolution with each new composition…)
so you don’t have to zizek-on-multiculturalism to be a bit suspicious of a work that STARTS with the harmonised unity and never allows itself to depart from it: macartney and wonder could easily (surely) have worked on a piece in which their different styles and skills and whatever were presented in (pseudo)*conflict, before being polyphonically resolved! honestly every two-bit operetta has a duet showpiece along just these lines — effecting something where the two “motifs” were two pop-starses “voices” would actually be kind of a genuine rock breakthrough (wouldn’t it? or was this deep purple’s concerto for rockband and orchestra?) — better this than all of macca’s fkn oratorii!! (which i admit i have a perverse fascination for…)
*”pseudo” only in the sense that this is art: the actors playing iago and othello don’t have to hate each other in real life for it to be a good play about enmity and envy!
Macca and Stevie on cruise control, this one – you’re thinking, great that two musical giants got together, but couldn’t they have tried a little harder?
And Number 4 watch, “I Love Rock’n’Roll” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts! Meanwhile on its way up to 5 was “We Have A Dream” by the Scotland World Cup Squad with John Gordon Sinclair out of Gregory’s Girl, which was little short of toe-curling: two hugely over-optimistic footy records in the top ten at the same time. Here, as much as I can remember it, is an alternative version of the England song that appeared in the RHC college magazine that month:
“We’re on our way
Here we are, bound for Spain
Hear them laugh
As we get off the plane
This time
Just like all the other times
This time
We’ll play with heart and soul
Maybe even scrape a goal
This time
Bugger it up together
We may be crap
But it’s still quite a lark
We’ll play the French
They’ll get hacked off the park
This time
Just like all the other times
This time
Why even catch the plane?
Soon be flying back again
This time
Luckily Ron’s retiring…”
Sukrat #17 – walk this way!
#9 I think markdowns for the gap between talent and achievement are fair enough though Rosie! This is PAUL MCCARTNEY and STEVIE WONDER – Macca had recently made one of his better solo albums and Wonder had last been seen with “Masterblaster” and “Happy Birthday” so if they weren’t at their absolute peak they were hardly washed up either.
19: haha yes but that doesn’t arrive for a few years yet!
I’m with Tom on the 1/10.
Bill Bailey addressed the same issue with a similar metaphor 15 years later. His ‘Hats Off To The Zebras’ is one of my favourite ever comedy songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIeRw8NZbfs. The part about badgers is my favourite.
I saw Steve Wonder at Earl’s Court around this time which is one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever been to, I came out of it in a happy daze at how fantastic he was, I felt like I’d really witnessed genius. But then he goes and does stuff like this. Interesting fellow, that Stevie. He contains multitudes.
I’ll never forget the NME review of this, by Julie Burchill I think: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony. Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord, why don’t we?” – because we’re not made of wood, stupid.
I always used to sing along to this pronouncing “arrrmony” the way the Wurzels did in “Combine Harvester”.
Isn’t there a “solo Macca” version of this on the 12″?
pianos are great, but if you are going to use them as a metaphor for the essential oneness of humanity you are morally obliged, I think, to find a melody in which the crucial word actually scans properly. ‘Pyaahnoh’, indeed. 1/10 on this basis alone.
yes, but you do get “keyboard/oh lord” following it, which is right up there in the so-facile-its-brilliant stakes with my personal favourite
“Its a mystery – like ancient history, uh huh”
courtesy, The Nolans New Pop gem “Chemistry”.
Re 11 and 18: You’re both a bit harsh on Ron’s 22 – they did go out unbeaten, and stuffed the French (eventual semi finalists). Quite honourable, really. My main memory of this tournament was of Norman Whieside being younger than me and he was PLAYING IN THE WORLD CUP (I was 17 at the time). Mortality was creeping like a tube train up my spine, as Roger Waters might have put it.
Re 6: Agreed, but only because the squelchiness and DIY feel of Wonderful Christmastime was an embarrassment in ’79 but sounds charming and almost Hoxtonian in C21. The keyboard sounds on E&I didn’t raise an eyebrow in ’82 and, yes, the vocals were recorded in different continents. Couldn’t see the joins then but you sure as hell can now.
Maybe this is why excessive praise for Hollywood special effects makes me sniff derisively – give it 15 years, bub!
Re 12 – where was your school located geographically? I am struck by the fact that only yesterday I was remembering a schoolfriend whose name was ‘Clewer’ and whose father was in fact… headmaster at another school.
Wichita #28 – yes, fair play to Ron’s 22, although they peaked after 27 seconds and ran out of steam when they could have done with Kev and Trev being fully fit. It was the World Cup of Big Norm’s Northern Ireland beating Spain and Schumacher flattening Batiston (more about the Germans in the next entry). Also around this time we had the memorable TOTP where Steve Archibald appeared twice, for Scotland’s World Cup song and Spurs’ Cup Final song – good quiz question, that.
Re mortality – the first top-flight player younger than me was Tommy Caton, and he tragically died at 30.
i remember a particularly amusing Saturday Night Live spoof of this song around the time of it’s release. Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy as Sinatra and Wonder, respectively.
Sinatra: You are black
Wonder: and you are whiiite
Sinatra: You are blind as a bat and i have sight!
And we’re both too talented to be singing this shite…
It is said that Irving Berlin played piano predominantly on the black keys. He even owned a mechanical device that would shift the keyboard’s tonality so that he could continue to play that way while hearing himself in a variety of keys.
I seem to recall the one good thing about this tune was that it inspired Alexei Sayle’s “Pop Up Toaster” – which came out almost in time for the Comic Strip’s appearance at the Adelaide Festival Of Arts in 1982…which was just over 27 years ago this week …and during which a goodly bit of “The Young Ones” was written…which I can mention a day or two after French And Saunders Oz tour has sold out…and that’s about as good a thing that I can say about this song.
Re 29 – it was Cottesbrooke Junior School in Birmingham. Mr Clewer was there in the late 70s. He had ginger hair and good intentions, albeit clumsily executed. In that assembly I have a very clear memory of him sarcastically referring to us as the “Small Ball Marvels” (we played with a small ball) and looking a little too pleased with the name he had come up with. And, in a separate “incident”, he once pooh-poohed my contention that the difference between a town and a city was that a city contained a cathedral. Not that I’ve been harbouring any sort of a grudge for 29 YEARS! Feel like I should say something else about Ebony and Ivory to make this post a little less off-topicy, but I’m struggling. Sorry.
are we saving all the BARDO love for the forthcoming entry then?
i will now be singing “this time” for the remainer of the evening.
if this is world cup reminisciences, this was the first one i can remember (and i still think it’s the best england strip), specifically being in a baked potato shop in peebles (possibly even a spudulike) when robson scored after 23 seconds…
It’s not particularly good, and this was even more disappointing, given the promising nature of the previous “McCartney II” project.
I don’t think McCartney was/is so naive that this was not meant to be, on some level, rather tongue in cheek. But, as he has often done throughout his career, he seems to have rather misjudged the whimsy, not making it plain enough that it was not be be taken too earnestly.
I have no doubt we will be speaking further of McCartney’s whimsy in later entries.
Piece of shit. I like how Stevie’s photo was just popped into the Paul-against-a-giant-faux-keyboard shot. Maybe it was because HE HAD AN AFRO IN 198X! (did he? or was that an old shot? didn’t the old lady have her camera in the studio?) Just wondering: did Stevie have a version of this little ditty “minus Paul” on HIS lp?
I vividly remember the mascot for Espana ’82, an orange wearing a football shirt.
NARANJITO call him by his name
The Visitor, at 35 – I suffered the same ignominy! I had an English teacher at School – Mr Essex (Walter, not David, sadly). A pompous idiot of a man who asked us all to write an essay about an English city we had visited.
When I was in my early teens I had a fervent desire to live in the West Country and quaff cider while watching Ian Botham and Viv Richards massacre county bowling attacks at Taunton.
I researched and decided that Taunton wasn’t a beautiful place so I opted to live in Wells. I wrote my essay on Wells, and what a beautiful place it was to live in, with easy access for the cricket. I had never been to Wells, nor anywhere near it. Mr Essex was not impressed – “Wells is not a city, it is a small town, I know it well!”
Such a witty man.
I pointed out it had a cathedral which therefore meant it qualified as a city – to no avail….
37, “McCartney’s whimsy” would make a terrific title for a Macca best-of. it would sell by the bucket load
mccartney’s iron whimsy
This was pleasant enough to not jeopodise your breakfast but it seemed to me that it was very much the case of two major artists combining for a sure fire winner rather than a sincere plea for racial harmony, which I think was much better served by a record called “Black and White” by somebody called Greyhound, which my dad had knocking about the house. The bloke at the end of that record was rather threatening with his demands for peace and love at the fade, rather like when Mr T used to lose his rag with that nutter on the A-Team. The result was that there WOULD be racial harmony or else some fucker would get hurt.
Re 28: That’s just what I thought back in 1982 he was the first famous person who I’d ever known to be younger than me (by about a month)strangely enough there’d been a few near ones years before (Jimmy Osmond and Lena Zavaroni – a couple of years older than me and when you’re 7 or 8 you quite like the idea of nearly being as old as a famous person anyway so it’s a bit different!).
Bit unfortunate with Norman though as even now he’s still the youngest player to appear in the World Cup Finals, even Pele was older in 1958…
I take great delight in pointing out to friend Waldo that he is older than the President of the United States. And about twice his body weight…
I have a favourite memory of this particular song. Back in the early 2000s I used to frequent Impotent Fury at the 333 (run by Fred from Lemon Jelly). At the first one I went to, there was karaoke in the basement, and I saw a grown man dressed as Mr Blobby and a young lady duetting Ebony and Ivory, tunelessly. Happy days.
just shite really…..no excuses from either of them. I don’t think McCartney himself would even want to revisit it. However ‘Take It Away’ I like a lot.
Agreed…never liked this song at all. Tug of War is a good album though. and I love “Take It Away” to bits…there’s nothing innovative about it, just good solid pop.
Critic watch:
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)
Giannis Petridis (Greece) – 2004 of the Best Songs of the Century (2003)
Grammy Awards (USA) – Record of the Year Nominee