Interview for Disc And Music Echo

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On April 18, 1970, Disc & Music Echo magazine published an unflattering review of Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, “McCartney“, written by music journalist Penny Valentine:

I don’t know what he was thinking when he planned this album. Perhaps he is laughing at us all. That’s fine, but it’s a pretty cruel way of doing it… almost a betrayal of all the things we’ve come to expect.

Penny Valentine

Paul and Linda McCartney replied to Penny Valentine, by sending a telegram, which was published on the April 25, 1970, edition of Disc & Music Echo:

Peny Valentine C/O Disc 161/166 Fleet Str EC4

Dear Penny hold your hand out you silly girl I am not being cruel or laughing at you. I am merely enjoying myself. You are wrong about the McCartney album. It is an attempt at something slightly different, it is simple, it is good and even at this moment it is growing on you, love. – Paul and Linda McCartney.

In the same edition of Disc And Music Echo, Beatles Press Office Derek Taylor wrote an article, titled “This is why the Beatles left Paul!“.

McCartney aftermath – THIS IS WHY THE BEATLES LEFT PAUL! By Derek Taylor, Beatles Press Office

IF I had given my body and my mind, my heart and my soul and my intellect, my wife and my children, my reasonings, my stumblings and my understanding, my mistakes and my triumphs, my melodies and my harmonies, my prose, my poetry, my doggerel, my truth, my explanations, my excuses, my love and devotion, my words, my music, my light and my shadows and my sunshine and my rain, my life on the line, my head on the block, my courage, my terrors, my fears, my fullness, my strivings, my all… If I had given all this and packaged it and bound it in a slim parcel, called it an album bearing my own bold name in full colour, addressed it, stamped it and mailed it to a pretty girl in East Central London, I should have been very brought down to read a week later a headline “WHAT A BITTER BLOW.”

For “what a bitter blow” ran Penny Valentine’s review of “McCartney” and who is Penny Valentine whom we all love more than most inside her craft and outside of it to say the blow was bitter? Who is she to expect more and lay the blame for less on anyone but herself? If I had given my youth to bring a chance of a brave new life style to the young people who stumble across this planet whipped and insulted and kept ignorant, disparaged, misled, mis-governed, underestimated and lied to by the scarred, warped and ugly old fools who still posture and strut in positions of power, I would be disappointed to find that part of my reward was to be burgled, leered at, booed and besieged in my own home by night and by day by a group of the very children who now, by the boundless guts and brilliance of the Beatles, have for the first time in the history of the world a chance to stand up, shake their fists at their elders and be themselves.

In other words, would critics of art shut their critical mouths and open their boundless ears and look into themselves and would the knot of frustrated little people who hound Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney and their tiny daughters please address themselves to the real issues of life because, for God’s sake, there are issues enough to confront.

Paul sent me an album too. I don’t enjoy it as much as Sgt. Pepper but that’s my hang-up, and neither yet as much as Revolver, but McCartney is a very, very personal art form and it makes me sick this morning, lovely morning though it is, to have to cry out in pain on behalf of this brilliant man who is trying to discover who he is in music.

In days gone by I used to predict “hits” and I was nearly always right but what the hell! I didn’t make the hits. I used to forecast “trends” and sometimes joined them early enough to be identified with the leadership: but who should care? They would have happened anyway.

I used to put down those whom I considered unworthy, imitative, boring, but who was I to judge and tattoo my views on the minds of the young?

So, brothers and sisters, this is the truth about Paul McCartney. He cannot make that Beatle scene any more because what we know as the Beatles and love as the Beatles and prized and valued and changed our lives by, is not what it was. It is a hang-up, it’s a drag and it is a prison for four souls screaming for freedom.

It was once a garden with tangerine trees and marmalade skies and girls with kaleidoscope eyes and cellophane flowers of yellow and green.

Nothing can take that away. As long as all of us are alive we should all be on our knees with our stereo phones on our ears thanking God it happened. I do not ask the four beautiful young men why their eyes are sad or why their beards or why their money or why they make albums that are a bitter blow or why Yoko or why Paul doesn’t stand outside his own front door mouthing Beatle clichés and signing his name on the plaster casts of cripples seeking an instant cure because there is no answer to any of these whys, but only a wherefore and that can only be found in the music.

It was the only dream I ever had that came true. I love them for it. The Beatles. They have done enough for you and you have done enough for them. For every dollar you spend on them they give you a dollar’s worth of themselves. I am sick at heart, Press, public, Beatles, we seek too much of each other.

Paul McCartney has not left the Beatles, nor has Richard Starkey, George Harrison or John Lennon. The Beatles left them at an unrecorded moment in time.

The review of “McCartney” by Penny Valentine in Disc And Music Echo, April 18, 1970

Paul, what a bitter blow!

WHAT a man decides to do with his life is nobody’s business but his own. What he decides to do with his music is — ditto. But when he puts that music on to an album and offers it for sale it’s suddenly everybody’s business.

Paul McCartney is not responsible for the aura that has been built up around him, for what people imagine him to be, for the pedestal he’s been put up on and for a hundred and one other things. He IS responsible for what he contributes — and in the past that contribution has been to music. Providing the modern day musical era with some of the finest and most beautiful things ever written under the heading of “pop” music.

“McCartney” is his first solo album. It is a bitter disappointment. To have to say it’s just “nice” and nothing more should explain everything. Of all the Beatles I’ve always thought McCartney had the most to give musically. His work has always totally appealed to me — and to the world at large. Like that expectant world I too was breathless with anticipation at this first McCartney album. Truly, I thought, it would be magnificent. McCartney has managed to shatter all those hopes and illusions with about the same effort it takes to burst a balloon.

Most of the tracks are not new. Some were written in India, some as early as 1958. That’s all right if they are good. But they’re not. They don’t even sound as if they were worth saving, never mind completing. I don’t claim to know what he was thinking when he planned this album. Perhaps he’s laughing at us all. That’s fine. But it’s a pretty cruel way of doing it. It almost amounts to a betrayal of all the things we’ve thought and, almost childishly, come to expect. Like being let down by Tchaikovsky.

Inside the album Paul proffers a little list of helpful notes to the listener about what he played, how he over-dubbed, and what prompted many of the tracks to be written. Under the song title “Maybe I’m Amazed” he writes: “Written in London, at the piano, with the second verse added slightly later, as if you cared.” The thing is I DO care. We all care in our way. And if McCartney really thinks we don’t that’s the saddest thing of all.

TRACK BY TRACK

THE LOVELY LINDA: Written, obviously, about his wife Linda this is a very short casual track. McCartney points out that this is a “trailer” to a full song to be recorded in the future. He recorded it to test out a new machine in his home studio. He plays guitar, acoustic, bass, vocals and slaps a book.

THAT WOULD BE SOMETHING: Simple bluesy number with a very empty backing and tight top-hat cymbal. Simple lyrics and a fade out end. Written in Scotland in ’69.

VALENTINE DAY: Another track McCartney says was designed simply to “test” his machine (Oh my!) An instrumental made up as he went along. Very short.

EVERY NIGHT: Written on holiday in Greece last year, it features a notable amount of almost Greek-sounding guitar work. Pretty melody line.

HOT AS SUN: An old number — ten years old in fact — almost an instrumental. Some nice South American feel on the guitar. Short vocal passage at the end fades out in about two seconds. Whole thing sounds unfinished.

GLASSES: Almost hidden into the end of the preceding track this is a swift passage of sound made, apparently, by over-dubbing the sound of wine glasses. In fact it’s a rather ethereal suspended sound. Another short piece of vocal before fading out. (This, says Paul is a section of a yet to be completed song called “Suicide”).

JUNK: Mournful little bit of reminiscence that Paul’s voice is usually good at conjuring up. Pretty melody of warm gentleness. One of the nicer tracks.

MAN WE WAS LONELY: Rather jolly singalong thing that doesn’t really get anywhere. Written, says Paul, in bed at home. Sounds like it.

OO YOU: Bluesy number destined to send you to sleep.

MOMMA MISS AMERICA: Another ad-lib instrumental track that sounds like musicians warming up before recording. Paul plays piano, drums, acoustic and electric guitars.

TEDDY BOY: Rather weak vocal but a nice chorus with Linda helping out with harmonies. This was written all over the place, between India, Scotland and London.

SINGALONG JUNK: This is a shorter version of “Junk” on the other side, and so far the best track. A pretty rather drifting piece of “atmosphere” stuff like a continental film score.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED: Definitely THE best track on the entire album. The first that sounds wholly McCartney. The first to make me sit up and smile. Very personalised lyrics about Linda and himself sung with a lot of enthusiasm (for the first time on the album I felt) A good solid energetic track with lovely guitar. I was sorry when it ended.

KREEN-AKRORE: I like the motives behind writing this. Paul explains he and Linda were watching a film about the jungle in Brazil and how the natives were being ruined by the white man. On this track he tries to give the atmosphere of a native hunt. In its own context it’s clever and rather effective. Not a brilliant listening track, but good for your imagination.

From Disc And Music Echo – April 18, 1970 – Paul McCartney would respond to Penny Valentine in the April 25 edition of Disc And Music Echo.