Forget anything you may or may not know about The Beatles, Wings or The Frog Chorus. Press to play McCartney II (1980)- it's a flaming pie of a record, a tug of war of chaos and creation in the backyard of Paul McCartney's ram-shackled mind going off the ground (that's enough McCartney jokes- I have to let it be!). But honestly, whenever I listen to this record, I don't hear any George Martin here, I hear Hot Chip,Byrne and Eno, Daft Punk, Bowie's Low, Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle. This is a bold musical statement, the boldest any Beatle made during John Lennon's lifetime (yes, bolder than the blues oriented 'Plastic Ono Band') ripping up the mapwork laid out by the chords jangled through 'She Loves You'. And just as 'McCartney'(1970) proved cathartic to the depraved and depressed erstwhile Beatle, this too proved a reprise following McCartney's disenchancement with an ever revolving Wings, and may have proved a direction would have pursued further if not for the senseless actions of a gunner, leaving McCartney the living custodian of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue, a role he's taken seriously ever since, excluding the odd Fireman project.
McCartney II, so titled as it was his second solo album (Ram was a two piece collab with the lovely Linda ; well sort of, she definitely sang some lead on the record and took photographs, and he spent the rest of the seventies with his band Wings; again, sort of, it was mainly him and Denny Laine), and it is a SOLO album, Macca playing all the synths, samplers, occasional screeching guitar, drums in the toilets (there are photos of this!), with the reliable Linda on her reliable harmony (she did turn into a bloody good backing vocalist - even Michael Jackson insisted he use her on 'Say Say Say', Morrissey wanted her piano playing for 'Frankly Mr.Shankly'- not sure about that one myself!). And this proved fittingly winked at in the 'Coming Up' video, a featurette with McCartney playing every member of the band (he makes a mean Ron Mael and a cute Paul McCartneyesque bass player), a video Lennon laughed was Macca's dream come true; a one man band of himself (Coming Up was also the song that turned Lennon back onto recording himself, or so the legend goes, a fond final memory for McCartney in the years following Lennon's death).
And yet, despite the cohesiveness of the record, it originally didn't start off as one. He spent some down time recording some demoes on his Scotland farm improvising on samplers, recording demoes and placing tracks following the underwhelming 'Back To The Egg' in the summer of 1979. Only after a Japanese arrest in January 1980, which cancelled a planned Japanese Wings tour, did he return back to his twenty track demo to see what came out of them. "It was new technology and I just wanted to see what it was all about" he reflected to The Quietus in 2016. "Because the nice thing for me is, you do an album like that and it informs other stuff. It keeps your brain fresh so that when you go and do something else, a tour or something, you may not be playing that stuff but you've got the feeling of being someone who's not finished yet."
True, 'McCartney II' does sound unfinished-but so did 'The White Album' and so that makes for much of its eccentric appeal, the esoteric 'Frozen Jap' bouncing nicely off the cracking rhythms as the strangely beautiful 'Waterfalls' is a lyrical gem of cerebral key synth quality. Electronics and cracks tackle and whack throughout the record, 'Front Parlour' joins 'Jap' as an expero-instro par excellence, groovy and woozy (is it just me or does Aneka's 'Japanese Boy' bear more than a passing similarity to 'Frozen Jap'? Oh, those one hit wonders!).
Reggae ersatz 'Darkroom' is a bass laden wonder highlighted by finger flying keyboards, eerie shadows of Enoesque Roxy Music, affected by nonsensical high feted Goonish harmonies. 'Temporary Secretary', with the siren raid opening of sampler serendipity, sounds fresh and exciting in 2017 (it was only played live for the first time in 2015).T-Rex romp 'Nobody Knws' attacks with loud screaming guitars, while blues laden 'On The Way' echoes in reverb haven (its primarily a guitar insturmental, some intimate scat vocals thrown in for good measure). 'Check My Machine', with samples of Tweety and Sylvester carton dialogue, is another example of batty ska, samplers playing the melody a la John Cage. 'One Of These Days', perhaps the closest thing here to a traditional McCartney ballad, is the least interesting song here, acoustic and intimate, it proves a template for the excellent 'Tug of War' album, but somewhat out of place in studio giziotronics. And while 'Bogey Music' is a bit naff lyrically, it does have an unsettlingly staid element going for it, an insteresting psych-record of stratospheric effect.
And just as 'Maybe I'm Amazed' proved the jewel of 'McCartney', so too does 'Summer's Day Song' prove this record's zenith. It's beautiful in a way words cannot describe (which makes it hard to critique it, let me tell you!), Vangelis-like in synth orchestration, soft in touch, Bachian in resonance. There is a sense of classical music here, synth in sound, laden in hypnotic keyboards. If 'Maybe I'm Amazed' is McCartney's most accomplished solo song, then 'Summer' may be his most accomplished solo recording; honestly, play it on any movie soundtrack that opines to hypnotise with visceral effect, and 'Summer' would fit in very nicely (personally, I picture the gorgeous ending to French New Wave classic Diva when I hear this).
McCartney II really is the forgotten solo Beatle classic- comparing it either to the similarly released Double Fantasy and Somewhere in England and there's no denying the difference in quality; Lennon and Harrison are playing it cool with safe, maudlin originals while McCartney is really trying to push the boundaries with whatever means he has at hand. There's no denying he could have done more of this (he has been guilty of resting on his Beatle laurels since Give My Regards to Broadstreet), but at least he did leave McCartney II out in the world. Give it a listen- you've got to get it into your life!