PAUL MCCARTNEY – "Pipes Of Peace"

I definitely agree with you Tom re the comparison with ‘Ebony and Ivory’ – this is better and feels like it could have been a whole lot better if Macca had taken more care with the lyrics.
There’s a strange atonal orchestral bit at the start of the video, not sure if it’s on the actual single – reminiscent of the end of ‘A day in the Life’. That and touches like the tabla make it a little out of the ordinary.
I find the video quite affecting and it serves to undercut the sentiment of the lyrics as does the vocal which has a melancholy quality which is present in a lot of McCartney’s ballads (Yesterday; For noone) – as if in his heart of hearts he can’t believe in the power of love no matter how much he professes to do so.

The call for peace reflects a martial theme to several of the song this year, including ‘Love Wars’ and a forthcoming number 1. Cruise Missiles arrived in the UK in November 1983 and Thatcher and Reagan were cranking up the Cold War rhetoric – beware the savage claw…

Magnificent songwriting craft, yes some of the lyrics are a bit iffy, but I love when a song unfolds, and it seems to have so many options, so many parts working so well off each other.

It’s a far sight better than most of the last few number 1s, although I still prefer the Frog Chorus 🙂

A 7 from me.

My chief reaction to the ascendency of this as an eleven year-old was relief at the vanquishing of The Flying Pickets.

It’s very much the sort of single that rises to the top a week or two after Christmas, isn’t it? Everyone who was going to has bought the seasonal records, nothing specificly of the new year has yet replaced them… This old guy has had a pleasant tune around for a few weeks by now – I’ve heard it so many times that its really got into my head.

I think that this might be the first song on Popular where i always remember the video a lot better than the song. You have to admire the care with which its been put together and edited. As with a lot of McCartney’s solo work the display of cheery humility (multiple Maccas but all good sports) can be read as being a different form of egotism if you’re feeling ill-disposed towards him. I don’t think that I’d go that far.

A pity that it couldn’t have been ‘Take It Away’. Or ‘No More Lonely Nights’.

I recently noticed how similar the brilliant horn parts on the outro to “Take It Away” are to Jigsaw’s “Sky High”.

I remember this fondly from childhood so already have some affection for it, but listened to objectively I think it’s pretty good too.
Easily the best of his post-Fab 4 number ones after the musical equivalent of a tin of shortbread and that one with Stevie Wonder
Jeremy and Valerie was it?

This was the B-side of “So Bad” which in the U.S. was the followup to “Say Say Say”. But MTV played this when it came out, and that’s how most McCartney fans in America probably remember it. By the way “So Bad” peaked at #23. As somebody already posted, the video is more memorable than the song, but not a complete washout.

Enjoyed the video a lot at the time. Besides ‘Say Say Say’ this was my introduction to Macca but I can’t remember any sense of ‘oh he used to be in the most famous band ever’ figuring in my thoughts until a few years later (maybe when George Harrison re-surfaced). Funny to think that he was enjoying his last run of huge hits here, never to return to the top 3 of the charts on his own – needed some bloody frogs to help him a year after this. Actually, looking at everyhit, it’s a little strange how many of his later singles peaked between 16 and 25. Even when he dies it’s hard to think of a solo song of his that could return to the top as opposed to the group stuff.

Maybe it’s something pop stars should specify in their will: “In the event of my death, the following songs are to receive promotion…”

I think it would be a bit harsh slamming this one, as it is clearly decent and well-meaning. Obviously it is preferable not to be advocating conflict but rather than to sponsor harmony, even if it is done in such a stomach-churningly cheesy way, it would in all liklihood have had Macca’s assassinated partner in peals of silvery laughter rather than in unspeakable outrage.

i loved ‘pipes of peace’ at the time, but can’t say i’m so fussed these days. it did however mark the start of my Year of Pop. as an eleven-year old (probably about the last age at which you can have a wholly uncomplicated relationship with the charts) it seemed to me in 1984 that all these monster hits represented music that had evolved to reach the point of perfection. looking at what we have to come, i can still see what i meant – to some extent this music is still my ideal of pop music, against which all else is measured. it probably helped that almost everything was at number one for *ages*, and a lot of it’s probably just to do with being that age, but i’ve never felt so connected, both as an individual, and as part of a peer group with what was at the top end of the charts. certainly pop in 1984 was public to a surely unprecedented degree – both in a “oh noes controversy” and a ‘behold this momentous event’ way. but more of all this later no doubt.

(ever so slightly) more relevant to today, myself and some friends once invented a very excellent ‘pipes of peace’ drinking game. the rules were not complex. players stand in a circle passing round booze while singing “play the pipes of peace play the pipes of peace” in a mournful tone until no more booze can be found. for added pop bonus points the game was invented at a party on the infamous FRONTLINE. (though at the rather pleasant herne hill end, disappointingly).

#14 Mull of Kintyre would go back to No1 forever in the event of a McCartney croak. And I know what you’re thinking but come on, Wings is just another name for solo Macca.

Re 20: That’s a great point. I was 8/9 in 73/74 and can vouch that records like See My Baby Jive, Leader Of The Gang, Tiger Feet and Gonna Make You A Star seemed like major events at the time, the most POP pop there had ever been; with records regularly flying in at no.1 (hadn’t happened for 4 years, wouldn’t happen for another 6) it must have felt that way to a lot of pop fans.

But I would say that, wouldn’t I? It felt like the perfect time to be the age I was because it felt like pop was aimed directly at ME and my pre-teen contemporaries. I’d never questioned this before, but maybe I’d have felt the same way if I was 9 in 1960 or 1987, really stinky years for pop.

Mm – I was eleven in 1984 and can report the same thing. Apart from the monumental scale of many of the number ones that year, and their prolonged tenures at the top, I think that there are other factors that encouraged this response in me; it was when I started habitualy listening to the Radio (Radio 1 and Capital) and it was when my interest was such that I started buying pop magazines. And thinking about it, the move from primary to secondary school may also have some bearing on the matter.

when do the massed 9-yr-olds come enough of age that they get a decent chance to say OUR YEAR WAS THIS SHAPE?

aha. they do this at the time, by buying the records that make the year the shape they celebrate, of course. hurrah! or they do in chartopia. the first record i ever bought was released in june 1985…

#24 I was 9 in 1987 and I can confirm that I thought pop music was awesome at the time (maybe not a great year for #1s but a couple of instant classics spring immediately to mind). I’m not sure when I started considering such concepts as ‘a bad year for pop’, probably only since the inception of the “blogosphere” ulp.

inception of the “blogosphere” = bad year for EVERYTHING

this strikes me as the point where the ’60s icons ceased being young and relevant. some would cite the punk era but the pistols weren’t playing the same game as mccartney or the stones, at that point. they wanted to react against mccartney, not compete directly with him. logic would dictate that punk was also the impetus behind “some girls” and “mccartney 2”, ie old bands compelled to learn some new tricks. but by the mid-80s, young and old had at last met each other halfway. the new bands were arguably as commercially-focused as their elders, and the elders had finally run out of new tricks. even up to “tug of war” mccartney was trying some new things or at least actively perfecting his popcraft and updating it for the new decade. this seems to be his first single/album where he has relaxed and lost his ferocious competetive instinct enough to say “i’m paul mccartney and this is what i do. if you’re in the mood for something of this sort, here’s a new album/single”. i think the other ’60s acts were pulling this same move as well. this has been mccartney’s MO ever since. if you want a sandwich, you eat a sandwich. if you want some paul mccartney, you buy his latest. i’ve always loved mccartney, but aside from the odd catchy single or interesting album (“press to play” and “chaos and creation” being the only two i can think of post-’84) he was done and, cheerfully and good-naturedly, admits it for the first time here.

1981 for me – I was 14 mind, but I loved pop for all of 79-82, so 4 Years of Pop, greedy I know….

I suppose 1964 was the year I really thought pop was mine (rather than, say, my 15-year-old sister’s). 1966 remains the greatest year for ‘my’ pop.

Jonathan, that’s a fascinating observation, which makes me think again about McCartney and the “Beatles-nut stage” that Will mentioned at #17, and which lasted for me from 1984-1988. For those of us who weren’t around or old enough in the 1960s or ’70s to enjoy the Beatles first-hand, or even to appreciate the best of their 1970s solo work, there was a real sense in the early-to-mid-’80s of having missed the boat. There were (and still are) two ways of dealing with that: ignore the Beatles altogether, dismissing them as irrelevant to today’s musical concerns (and depending on your musical subgenre of choice, that may largely be true), or immerse yourself completely, as a way of making them part of your world. Our mums and dads might have been there, but they didn’t have Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Recording Sessions to pore over, which I spent much of the summer of ’87-’88 doing; they hadn’t read the same minutiae about the Fabs’ lives in a dozen different doorstop biographies; they hadn’t heard EVERY track; and they’d probably lost interest after Imagine and Band on the Run, if not Let it Be. So we could catch up and overtake them, become more-Beatles-than-thou, just by studying hard – which a certain breed of teen/young adult has both the time and inclination to do.

After Lennon’s death, this was the only way to imagine and immerse oneself into a world where the Beatles themselves still existed, rather than just their legacy; thoughout the 1970s, the Beatles weren’t just history, they were potentially the future, because there was always a chance they might reform. That dream was well over by ’84 – we’d tidied away the Tug of Wars and the “All Those Years Ago”s – and until Lewisohn’s landmark book we didn’t realize that there could and would be a second coming in the form of the Anthologies. All that was left was the past, along with whatever new solo music emerged.

But new solo music carried risks for the nascent Beatles nut. If it was too “now” (1984, 1986) it would break the 1960s and 1970s spell that we were trying so hard to weave over ourselves. If it was too obviously “then” too soon, it would risk coming off as try-hard and inauthentic, which is why Broad Street was such a naff project for McCartney to attempt in 1984. The 1990s were so much more satisfying for the Beatles latecomer: the Anthologies were new, they were now, but they were then as well. They were ours (the young CD-buying public) more than they were theirs (our parents’ generation, apart from the subset who had maintained their fervour for three decades).

McCartney seems to have realised this by the late 1980s, when he recorded his much-heralded Flowers in the Dirt collaboration with Elvis Costello, an attempt to create a sound that built on his 1960s/1970s pop moment, rather than other people’s 1980s pop moments, without being an explicit homage to his past work. If he’d pulled it off it could have been one of his finest hours, but Flowers always felt a bit cold and distant to me (I much preferred Off the Ground, oddly enough). The one who really cracked the formula was George Harrison, tentatively with Cloud Nine and definitively with The Traveling Wilburys – a bunch of 1960s and 1970s rockers coming together as a new band creating new music that was definitely of its time, but which carried all sorts of pleasing connotations for the nostalgically inclined (and for latecomer Beatle-nuts). Mind you, McCartney almost got there first with Rockestra on Back to the Egg, but that pudding was over-egged and under-cooked: too many musicians, on too few tracks, ten years too soon.

Too soon, Paul, too soon. Too soon in 1979 for Rockestra, too soon in 1984 for this “All You Need is Love”-revisited with its mellotrons harking back to Magical Mystery Tour. You had to give us time to study.

It did go to number one, though, so what do I know.

#40. Does anyone listen much to The Beatles’ Anthology albums anymore? The consensus amongst my pop friends seems to be that they can watch the documentaries time and time again, but they never find themselves wanting to listen to the demo versions of songs, although they see no harm in these things being in the public domain. And do we think that we’re going to end up buying the remastered CDs this autumn?

#41. Yes, that’s the crucial other factor. I must be atypical here, because my lone sibling, my sister, is eleven years older than me, so I saw her passing through seventies youth cults through the dim eyes of an infant, and I’m some ways spent my own adolescence either competing with, or rejecting, the memory of this.

rory, you make some fantastic points about growing up a Beatles fan after the fact. i grew up in a beatles-loving household, though my parents were fans but not fanatics. it took me years to fill all the gaps in their collection (nothing between Help! and Sgt Pepper) and correct the misinformation (my dad assured me that ringo sang “back in the ussr”!). like you and jonathan, i eventually surpassed them in beatle fanaticism and they couldn’t care less. all the same, i really believe there are things to be learned from the memories of those who were there at the time. my uncle was a teenager with two older sisters and hated the beatles at the time because for seven years they were inescapable. my father insists to this day that Revolver is a weak album and that no one liked it at the time of its release. it and its accompanying singles sold comparatively poorly and was taken as proof that the fad was ebbing. i find this just as fascinating as anything lewisohn or macdonald has written.

also a word about the rockestra: i think the difference between it and the wilburys is that Rockestra was composed (and in the video “conducted”) solely by mccartney, whereas the wilburys were very much a collaborative project, even down to all five members sitting down to write the lyrics together. if you’re interested in the Wilburys check out “A Conversation with Tom Petty”, a book-length interview in the style of the Shane MacGowan one from a few years back. he talks at great length about the formation and working style of the Wilburys.

one more quick note, and i can’t stress this enough: “Chaos & Creation in the Backyard” from 2005 is fantastic and shows that Macca can turn on that incredible talent anytime he wishes to. I’d rate it with his very best work, and its best songs are more mature and introspective than possibly anything else in his catalog.

i love that version of “And Your Bird Can Sing” on Anthology 2…the laughing is a bit naff but there are bootleg versions available without it and the arrangement is beautiful. i wish they’d left it that way.

Re 47: I remember my dad buying Press To Play for his fancy new compact disc player and thinking there wasn’t a single decent track on it. Lots of widdly guitar rock from memory, which I suppose was in the air by the mid 80s but is a genre that has rarely served McCartney’s songs well. His first truly bad album, I suppose, so no hit singles from it and his career finally lost momentum.

Will #35: I don’t have the figures to hand, but thinking back to Channel 4’s definitive list, seven singles from 1984 are among the top 100 best-selling singles of all time in the UK, but that distinction is shared with 1997, another list headed by a charity behemoth (spring ’78 to spring ’79 is the other massive 12-month period).

Strangely, though, since we’re talking about a momentous year for chart pop and singles sales, the year started very quietly – in fact “Pipes of Peace” set a record for the lowest sales achieved by a single in a week when it was number one: a record which, unless I’m mistaken, stood until it was beaten by Orson’s “No Tomorrow” in 2006.

As a piece of work, this is well-crafted and very listenable, and as someone mentioned above does show the benefit of having had that extra bit of input (it’s not a song at the “Scrambled Egg” stage, as I used to put it re Macca). Good video too – it was a few years later that Blackadder would protest about the Christmas 1914 footy match “And I was never offside!” Funny we should be discussing this song and this video in the week when the last two WWI Tommies died.