Sweet temptation

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it.

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. In 2005, Paul McCartney put out a record called Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, an unwieldy title for what I thought was the best music he had made in a quarter of a century. I speak as someone who has bought an awful lot of McCartney albums. What are we searching for when we buy a McCartney album? Lovable moptop tunefulness, unaffected by the passing years? Possibly, but I rarely play my Beatles albums any more, while for the last month I have been playing little but Ram from 1971. It’s an incredible record, full of astonishing tunes but constantly teetering on the edge of daftness and self-indulgence. And I think this is what it is about McCartney, as it is with David Bowie. He doesn’t know where the talent comes from. It isn’t tutored and often it isn’t directed. He just does what he does and hopes it’ll come out right. So Ram was followed by Wings Wild Life, which was feeble. We think of McCartney as the Beatles’ hit machine, a Tin Pan Alley man at heart, but the variability of his output actually suggests a talent so completely instinctive that it needs careful handling if it’s going to produce its best work. In other words, he needs a good producer.

With Chaos And Creation, he found one. Nigel Godrich is the only man Radiohead will work with, but he also has the vital knack of producing the best records by lesser talents.