Paul McCartney: the tunesmith, the entertainer, the safety-first crowd-pleaser. Photograph: Antonio Calanni/AP
Paul McCartney has told Billboard magazine that a long anticipated deal to make the Beatles' music available for digital download is "virtually settled". It would be nice to think the "virtually" was intended as a pun; neatness and drollery are, after all, two of the man's noted attributes.
Now comes an announcement that McCartney's entire official post-Beatles output - from his self-titled solo debut, via the blockbusting 1970s Wings releases, all the way through to the forthcoming Memory Almost Full set - will be sold online. A case of jumping in ahead of the game, perhaps. But if the Beatles' albums constitute the golden motherlode of all back catalogues, then McCartney's own are liable to yield up rich seams of tin.
In less than a decade, McCartney helped to revolutionise not only his chosen field, but the world around it. And then spent the succeeding four decades turning out what amount to remarkably accomplished doodles. You could go so far as to compare it to Picasso's years of cartooning or even Isaac Newton's long and fruitless dalliance with pseudo-science. If such a thing as a major lightweight can exist, the solo McCartney is it.
Had McCartney's only aim over the last 37 years been simply to amuse himself - as no doubt he has done - then you couldn't quibble with that. He'd earned it. But it doesn't take a mind reader to tell that there has remained throughout a powerful craving for affirmation, acclaim and respect. He has played to the gallery with the Beatles-lite of Wings - at the time, the gallery loved it - and courted highbrow esteem with classical works which, while well-received in some quarters, would hardly have garnered much attention but for his name.
It evidently rankles, too, that posterity has settled upon him and John Lennon such fixed and tidy roles within the Beatles: Lennon the rebel, the risk-taker, the provocateur; McCartney the tunesmith, the entertainer, the safety-first crowd-pleaser. It is, you have to suspect, the solo work that has done the damage. Post-Beatles, Lennon indulged his neuroses, convictions (whatever they happened to be that week) and grudges, turning out music that was often stark, fierce and compelling. McCartney, meanwhile, gratified his whims and domestic fancies. Although if he ever penned anything as fatuous or saccharine as Lennon's best-loved song, Imagine, I've yet to hear it.
His implicit approval of Ian Peel's 2002 book, The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde, which uncovered McCartney's pseudonymous excursions into more arcane territory, suggested an attempt to correct a misperception. Alas, when you put your name to the bland, self-satisfied Pipes of Peace, but keep it off your experimental adventures in ambient techno, the outcome is inevitable. And then there's the Frog Chorus...
There is still some cracking stuff to be, at last, legitimately downloaded. Mainly tight rock or white soul numbers such as Jet, Junior's Farm and Maybe I'm Amazed. But only a true devotee will hanker after the bulk of it - the sounds of an astonishing talent, to whom it all came so easily, coasting comfortably year upon year upon year.
