Coming up. The strange 1980 McCartney Interview

Here’s an oddity. A fifty minute 1980 interview with Paul McCartney was released in December 1980 as limited edition vinyl record, seven months after the interview was actually conducted.

You can hear it on YouTube, but somehow Macca doesn’t sound quite like Macca. I’m not going to track down the original vinyl to make a proper comparison. You can also hear traffic outside. It all feels rather amateurish.

The interview seems oddly mistimed – providing context and explanation for McCartney II, an album that had been around for six and a half months. It comes too late to serve as puff.

McCartney at one point refers to John Lennon (respectfully) as someone who has retired – perhaps permanently – from showbiz. But by the time the this interview disc was released Double Fantasy was in the charts and Lennon was being interviewed everywhere.

The most interesting feature of the interview consists of Macca talking about the experience of dressing up as “Beatle Paul” (c.1963) for the “Coming Up” video. The video consists (as you will recall) of Paul dressing up as a variety of themed variants to create an eclectic McCartney army. The reaction to dress up as a Beatle seems to have inspired and liberated Paul McCartney in a decisive way. It is as though after a decade of focusing on Wings and wanting to put the past behind him there was something about dressing up in an old suit which encouraged him to embrace his Beatle past. A few years later he would be re-recording Beatles songs for the Give My Regards to Broad Street project.

He speaks freely about song-writing, about Hamburg, and about his beloved Hofner Violin bass.

Wings is nearly at an end, but Macca does not yet know this.

I couldn’t help noticing that towards the beginning of this interview, Paul uses the phrase “it’s a drag”. Five days after this record was released, he would use the same phrase, this time in a glassy-eyed state of severe shock, unable to process the enormity of his loss, and having to deal with interviewers shoving microphones up his nose. I suspect that “it’s a drag” was a phrase he overused. Like everyone else when they are numb and incoherent, he collapsed into what was, for him, a cliche.

He probably hasn’t used the expression much since.