Once fab. Photograph: PA
It's a tricky one. He hasn't done much that is memorable in years, so expectations are low. But then, he wrote and co-wrote some of the best popular music ever, so expectation operates on a unique scale.
The Guardian gave Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, the new album, a buoyant review last week. The Observer Music Monthly was a bit more cautious. But the consensus appears to be that Macca has had a good rummage around his Beatles and early Wings roots (when he was young, and his heart was an open book) and the result is generally pleasant.
Observer blog Beatles correspondent's lip quivers.
... b-b-b-but, Eleanor Rigby! The White Album!
In next week's OMM Sean O'Hagan interviews the man himself about the album, the Beatles, Live8, the weight of expectation that comes with being ex-part of the greatest songwriting team in history. We'll get some of it on the blog first, of course. Meanwhile, as a taster, strictly for the geeks, here is Sir Paul on writing Drive My Car.
In all those sessions when we set down with two acoustics, we never came away without a song. Never. The nearest was 'Drive My Car', when I brought in a pretty lousy lyric,as it happens. It was all about golden rings. Sings: 'I can get you golden rings/ I can get you anything/ cos baby I love you'. I had the chords, the melody, the whole idea, but we just got stuck on the bloody rings.
So we went and had a cup of tea, and one of us said, 'I hate these bloody golden rings'. So we came back and got out a fresh sheet of paper, and suddenly there's this lyric, I don't know where I got it from, about this girl and this chaffeur in a car in LA, and hey, this is it! We're flowing...
Tries to imagine Drive My Car with 'I can get you golden rings' lyric.
All of which raises the question: why didn't someone in the Beatles rewrite the lyrics to Don't Pass Me By?
