The Pound Is Sinking

Song facts

“The Pound Is Sinking” is a song from 1982 album “Tug Of War“. Like “Dress Me Up As A Robber” on the same album, it was written in 1977. Like many other McCartney’s songs, “The Pound Is Sinking“ was assembled from the fragments of two songs, “The Pound Is Sinking” and “Something That Didn’t Happen” officially released in demo form in 2015.

When you are looking through the papers, you always see headlines saying, ‘The Pound Has Moved A Quarter Of An Inch Today’, and ‘The Mark Has Made A Surprising Move Today In The Money Markets’. I see these pictures of all the hundreds of people on the phones saying, ‘Did it go up? Did it go down?’ But I’ve never really been into that. I’m not a big stocks and shares man, just because it all seems so crazy, it’s just a big gamble to me. I think it’s funny how you see how the pound is sinking, no it isn’t, it’s gone up and against the dollar, it’s 2.000003 or whatever. I think it’s funny how everyone gets serious about something that is obviously just going to keep on altering. The song ‘The Pound Is Sinking’ laughs at how everyone gets so serious about it.

Paul McCartney, from Badman, Keith. The Beatles: The Dream Is Over – Off The Record 2 (p. 303).

From an interview with Club Sandwich, 1982:

Andy Mackay – “The Pound is Sinking”, that’s an interesting song, I am curious about this. Obviously there is sort of pleasure in the words and the rhythms and the idea of it all, the sort of irony.

Paul – For me, it’s just the funny thing about the pundits day to day giving us an update so that all the people who’ve got money can gauge it all, like the weather. There is something which sort of amuses me about this constant update of something that is always going to be different, you are never going to be able to put your finger on it, but it just might help, knowing if there is snow on the M6, but generally they make more mistakes than they make correct predictions, it seems to me. You know, the pound is sinking — panic — and then the pound’s all right now, and everyone gets back into it. It’s a funny idea; I like the idea of all the ants doing what the lead ant tells them, you know, the oracle.

Andy – There is someone whose father is a remarkable man. Anyone in particular?

Paul – It’s not about anyone, no. Sometimes I just get little jumbles of words that sound nice and I haven’t even really got a meaning to them, but I know that they’re words, and that they have a meaning so I don’t really attempt to resolve that…

In this, it’s mainly just the ridiculousness, apparent ridiculousness, of the money market — the ups and downs and then and the indexes and stuff — that little bit there that comes in the middle, it’s the funny little conversation: I always imagine it like a sort of film where there is one character doing this pound is sinking bit, and explaining all the rest, and there is this little inter-cut scene with this other little bit about “your father is an extraordinary man, but you haven’t inherited any of his mannerisms.” It’s just a bunch of words, it just kinda says something that people say all the time…

Last updated on May 9, 2020

Lyrics