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. Travis, for example, made two decent albums: both were produced by Godrich. When they stopped working with him, no one ever heard of them again. He also shaped the inventive, swaggering guitar pop of Can You Still Feel? by Jason Falkner, one of my favourite albums of the past decade. Godrich, in short, brings the best out in people and he brought the best out in McCartney. He rejected songs, he insisted McCartney record it all himself, and he gave the record the loose, slightly crumbling feel of Rick Rubin’s records with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. This was an old bloke, the record said, not in the best of shape, but he can still write great songs. Play Chaos And Creation next to Ram and Band On The Run and it suffers only very slightly by comparison.
I’m not sure, though, that McCartney particularly enjoyed the experience. Godrich was nowhere to be found on the follow-up, 2007’s Memory Almost Full, which was produced by David Kahne, an altogether more corporate figure whose roster includes The Strokes and The Bangles. For over a year I have not bought this album. But I knew I would give in sooner or later, and last week I got fantastically drunk at an awards lunch and saw it in Fopp afterwards for £5. What a strange piece of work it turns out to be. As loud as Chaos And Creation was quiet, Memory Almost Full is the very model of a modern rock record, and therefore the musical equivalent of the not terribly convincing hair colour its creator sports on the inside sleeve. The tunes aren’t as memorable and there are slightly too many lyrics about how odd it is to be Paul McCartney. But what is striking about the album is its immense confidence. Whatever Godrich has done for him, he does seem to have woken McCartney up. And signing for the Starbucks label does suggest a desire to be out there again, in the marketplace, doing what he has always done better than nearly anyone who has ever lived. There really should be a technical term for it: the surprise when you actually like a record you delayed buying because you knew you weren’t going to like it.
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