Riding To Vanity Fair

Song facts

“Riding To Vanity Fair” is a track from Paul McCartney’s 2005 album “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard“. From an interview of Paul McCartney by Gary Crowley:

How did track 9, Vanity Fair, develop in the studio?

Vanity Fair I originally had as quite an up tempo sort of thing, I had it as quite Plays (Sings) I bit my tongue .  It was like (plays and sings)  It was all kind of staccato and very fast and, came in one evening where things had all kind of laid back a bit more like, and we said, O.K. let’s just (plays and sings) ‘I bit my tongue.’  I sort of swamped it right out (plays) just took it right down which changed the mood completely but this was particularly the one that Nigel didn’t like that, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue…’  It was all these little short phrases so he encouraged me to try and go somewhere else so I ended up with keeping the first line which was what he liked so it was, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue.  I never talked too much….’ And got those run much more smooth. Those next couple of lines and knocked out the ‘Where did it get me? Where did it get me?’  I just knocked that out. Kept the kind of meaning about you’re approaching someone for friendship and they just kind of don’t want to know.  They’re just kind of rejecting you and it’s not about any particular person, it’s about anybody who’s like that which I think we all meet in life, you know, you’re in a great mood with somebody and, ‘Well, I bit my tongue.  I didn’t talk too much,’ and it’s one of those songs where you get your own back on those people by writing a song about them and whoever it applies to, people who are just generally a bit sort of you know a bit yuck and so that was it yeah, and we’d done the backing track but we didn’t like the basic song.  We liked the track.  It was nice and dark and quite moody.  Nigel had messed around with some sort of echoey things, got kind of quite spooky but yeah, we re-worked it here, right here in the studio and kept working at it till we liked all the words and all the tune and finally I said, ‘O.K. Wait a minute.  This is an O.K. song now’. Because it was getting blown off the album.  It wasn’t going to be on and by the time we’d finished working with it it was like , ‘O.K. we like this one now,’ and it made its way back onto the album so it was worth all that work.

Paul McCartney – from 2005 UK promotional-only interview CD, recorded July 2005 at Air Studios in London

There were some tense moments making the album. Nigel wasn’t sycophantic; he said from the off, ‘I warn you, I know what I like.’ There was some heated discussion. There’s a song called Riding To Vanity Fair where we got down to [snarls] ‘I like it!’, ‘I don’t like it!’, ‘Well I like it!’ But then I realised there’s no point in charging him down like that; I should listen. We actuallly moved on to why he didn’t like it – ‘The first line’s good, but after that…’ ‘Oh, how about this then?’.

Paul McCartney

Last updated on January 17, 2021

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