Witnessing the recent imperial progress of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it occurred to me how impossible it is to imagine her ever shedding her current incarnation as world-bestriding, bronze-thighed musical potentate. But of course, she will. The time will come when the hits will dry up and new sorts of eras will beckon: the ‘disappointing sales’ era, the ‘desperate collaboration with younger artists’ era and, ultimately, the ‘Las Vegas residency’ era. It won’t be her fault. It happens to everyone eventually.
Forty years ago this month, Paul McCartney, who had been a global superstar for more than two decades, effectively torpedoed his career with an ill-advised movie project called Give My Regards to Broad Street. Hyperbole? Read on…
By the end of the decade, McCartney was touring for the first time in ages
It’s hard to convey, unless you were around, what an extraordinary figure he seemed in his prime. He stayed in the UK and paid his taxes when most other big stars fled. He sent his kids to the local comprehensive. He insisted on having his beloved wife, Linda, on stage despite the ridicule directed towards him and the vituperative misogyny aimed at her. And between 1963 and 1983 barely a year went by without a chart topper on both sides of the Atlantic from The Beatles or Wings.
That may well have been the reason for his adventure in filmmaking. After pretty much the longest winning streak in entertainment history, perhaps he was feeling invulnerable. Then again, the idea of a movie had long been on his mind. It had morphed over the years from an Isaac Asimov-authored science fiction epic about Wings being kidnapped by aliens (I kid you not), to a Tom Stoppard anti-war epic, to a Willy Russell comedy (topic unknown). None of these made it far past the first draft and there’s a highly revealing moment in the contemporaneous South Bank Show where Paul cheerfully admits that his self-penned script was regularly returned to him by film producers along with enclosed alternatives. Watching this now is like witnessing a man strolling, whistling, towards a cliff edge. You want to yell, ‘Stop! Turn back!’
But, of course, he didn’t turn back. Ringo clambered aboard and is a droll, welcome presence throughout. Commercials director Peter Webb gave the whole thing a sub-Ridley Scott, Hovis advert sheen. Ralph Richardson, in his last screen role, appeared as Paul’s Dad. Linda, Ringo’s wife Barbara Bach and Tracey Ullman also… well, ‘appeared’ is maybe too strong a word. They hung out together in front of the camera. Tellingly, there is no mention of The Beatles. Paul seems to have been a solo artist for his entire career.
A long-standing rule of thumb in the media dictates that when a big star has a dodgy project to push, they’re magically available for interviews with even the most obscure outlets. Until then, one aspect of Paul’s slightly otherworldly aura was the fact that he never appeared on chat shows. But suddenly there seemed to be no interviewer he didn’t want to meet. The energy and forbearance all this must have required is admirable, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of ensuring the entire world was paying full attention when the reviews came in.
These were of that particular species that might best be described as ‘comeuppance’. Critics his own age who had long envied his talent, success and wealth fell upon the movie with knives they had been sharpening for… well, for his whole adult life. Attacked from every quarter, this impossibly lightweight project puckered, sagged and spiralled to the ground.
Noel Coward once astutely advised a colleague, ‘We all have occasional failures, dear boy. But try not to have a famous failure.’ Broad Street, unfortunately, was a famous failure. There was even a sketch on Spitting Image that depicted puppet Paul in a restaurant, being served a can of film by a waiter, who solemnly intoned, ‘Your turkey, sir.’
He didn’t deserve it. As a drama, Broad Street was not, by even the most elastic use of the adjective, ‘good’. But the theme song, ‘No More Lonely Nights’ was gorgeous. And if you want to see what it is to be given the divine gift of effortless musicality, go to YouTube and watch the medley of ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and ‘Wanderlust’. Just him on an acoustic guitar then a piano, still insulated by the easy confidence that all those prior years of success had bestowed.
So, yes, the film was a disaster. But not to worry. The music had still been praised. And this was Paul McCartney we were talking about. He’d survived the disintegration of The Beatles, quickly pulled himself out of depression, and created one of the biggest bands of the 1970s from scratch. He’d bounce back no problem!
Except he didn’t. He worked hard at doing new things on his next album, Press To Play. It contains some magnificent flourishes, but the melodies had suddenly lost their divine immediacy and hardly anyone bought it. By the time of the album after that, Flowers in the Dirt (slaved over by a myriad of producers), he was writing self-consciously Beatle-esque stuff with Elvis Costello. It was solid, sometimes lovely, but the songs didn’t soar any longer. They felt laborious. By the end of the decade, he was touring for the first time in ages. The audiences were vast and deliriously appreciative. And he was terrific: still full throated and indefatigable. But most of the set list derived from the 1960s and 1970s. It had been a painful transition, but he’d finally become a nostalgia act.
In the long years since, there has been more good material than is commonly allowed: sometimes experimental, sometimes whimsical, sometimes surprisingly introspective, always interesting. And, of course, he gave us the ‘Fab Fourmaldehyde’ ventures of ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Now and Then’. But he never wrote another song that stole its way into the public consciousness through numerous cover versions like Bob Dylan did with ‘To Make You Feel My Love’. Mainly, he toured and kept on singing the old stuff.
Why did it happen? My guess is that the shock of an embarrassing solo flop robbed him of something he couldn’t quite get back. Unlike his peers, he’d never really had one of those ‘dry’ spells where the audience turned their backs and when it happened it shook him to his core. This was a man, after all, who had endured several years in the wake of John Lennon’s death of journalists finding it necessary to elevate the memory of his erstwhile friend and collaborator by putting him down as a hack. And he’d often told us in interviews that he was prone to anxiety and insecurity – we just hadn’t been paying attention.
So there it stands… Give My Regards to Broad Street. Meandering. Lo-Fi. Often amateurish. It’s impossible to find on streaming and hard to track down on DVD. There’s no special edition Blu Ray and there probably never will be. But in its own way it’s a consequential work as it demonstrates how a seemingly unstoppable career can come grinding to a halt just when everyone least expects it. Taylor Swift take note.
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