Imagine that Paul McCartney didn't bury himself in hermit-like seclusion in Liverpool after the assassination attempt by Jack Ruby that followed the break-up of the Beatles. Imagine instead that he formed a group with his wife, put out a massively successful string of easy listening albums and singles, became the most prominent of the ex-Beatles and climaxed his career with a tribute to his Scottish home-from-home.*

CREEM: Once they've attained a certain level of popularity, many artists consider it unnecessary to converse with the public through the media...

McCartney: Just do it through their music?

CREEM: Yes. So why do you feel it important to do press interviews?

McCartney: One of the reasons is that I like to meet the people who do interviews and who're slagging me off in the papers. When they're faceless figures, it can drive you a bit mad, so I prefer to meet them face to face.

CREEM: I know for a fact that you follow the music press more than most artists care to admit to.

McCartney: Yeah, but it's fallen off a bit lately...they seemed to be slagging off everything for a few months and it kinda put me off. Except for who was the newest face that week, nobody seemed positive about anything or anyone.

CREEM: But in terms of intense activity, parallels could be drawn with the kind of excitement that was generated during the 60's British beat boom?

McCartney: Oh, sure—get rid of the old and bring on the new. I don't mind that one bit, but what put me off was the way it was done in some of the papers. It just tended to be millions of new groups and nobody seemed to know if they were good or bad.

CREEM: But then that's always bound to happen, every few years, when rock is rejuvenated and the scene experiences a drastic upheaval. Nevertheless, despite the over-enthusiasm of some people and the lack of vision of others, a lot of good music has been made over the last couple of years.

'This deception is purely to soften the blow for any reader who finds the factual Paul McCartney hard to take. Face it, kids, this interview's for real.

/ sometimes feel sorry for writers, but normally I hate'em.

McCartney: Actually, I quite like a lot of the new sounds...I quite like Elvis Costello. I like Nick Lowe because I've known him for a very long time. I really do like what they're doing...being a bit more adventurous. That's what I like most about what they're doing.

CREEM: What's your immediate reaction when suddenly you're confronted with photographs of some of the groups lumped under the power pop hype? Is it like looking at a photograph of yourself when you were 19 and pretty new to the business?

McCartney: Yeah, there are a few of them trying to do the Beatles and you have the Jam doing The Who. I suppose it's quite pleasantl

CREEM: But many of the so-called power poppers wouldn't have stood an earthly chance if they had been in direct competition with the groups they are slavishly emulating?

McCartney: Probably not. But I don't know enough about their music to offer constructive judgement.

CREEM: I'd say most of them are like all those Mersey groups who cut a couple of singles on the strength of Beatlemania and disappeared just as quickly.

McCartney: Could be...but I'm quite sure that if we were all back in the early 60's...all the same age group, I'd have a good go at blowin' them off the stage. 'Cause that's what it was all about back then. Competition was really tough.

CREEM: Trouble is, the New Wave was, to some extent, concerned with getting back to making killer singles, but a lot of bands failed to do that and many of the also-rans were rushed into making albums before they were either ready or had built up a strong enough following.

McCartney: Correct. That's why I particularly like Elvis Costello. He writes and performs good material. There have been a few great records to come out of that whole thing. I like "Pretty Vacant."

CREEM: As an artist, you're in quite a unique situation. Having been tremendously successful twice over...

McCartney: Two bites of the cake and both with the cherry on top!

CREEM: Your past runs concurrent with your present. Stateside, adverts appear in the press for McCartney look-a-likes for the latest Beatlemania stage show whilst at the same time the latest Wings record is topping the charts.

McCartney: I suppose it's funny when you stop to think about it. I just look upon all that kinda thing the same way as everyone else does...that they're re-doing the Beatles...it's just something interesting to read about. So, I'm living with it the same as everyone else.

If anyone asks me what I'm doing now, I talk about Wings. People think I must feel very strange seeing my old life constantly coming back, but it's no different than, say, Diana Dors writing her exposes. To me, the Beatles are just old newspaper clippings. The fact that people still live it out is just a compliment to me.

Actually, I quite like it, there's lotsa great memories and the only time it really offends me is when they take something and try to lay down the exact story of what went on...like trying to do your autobiography on film. People have wanted to do that a couple of times. I don't think I'd enjoy that very much. It'll be OK when I'm dead, but I don't want to see some actor representing me and saying this is what it was really like—because the only person who knows that is me.

CREEM: What has been the biggest crisis you've had to face since forming Wings?

Next time around well go for a bit more sweat.

McCartney: I think just the idea of going back and starting all over again... knowing that inevitably people are gonna compare it with the Beatles, and knowing that there was absolutely no way you could ever be that good. Wings were a new group and people forget the Beatles took ten years to get as good as they got. That kinda situation made me well—paranoid, as to whether it's good enough, are we good enough, should we keep going, or should we even bother in the first place?

I mean, why not just sit back and live off the money we've already got. Sure, there was quite a bit of that kinda thinking goin' around.

CREEM: It seems that you're forever haunted by your past. Whenever you're about to release a new record or announce tour dates, the event has a habit of being slightly overshadowed by "Beatles To Re-Form For Jubilee Concert"-slated press stories. Does this get you down?

McCartney: Never mind how I feel, how do you think Denny feels? Obviously, everybody immediately comes to me like I'm Mick Jagger and Denny is just Bill Wyman. Again, it's just another of those things I've learned to live with—but hopefully time will out. Let's be honest, a speculative "Beatles To Re-Form" story always makes a good headline.

If you're gonna survive, you learn to cope with the press. It can get to be a drag, but then it's an occupational hazard.

CREEM: That's the price of stardom. What I want to know is how you react when someone you don't even know suddenly gets his name in the papers and appears on television offering the Beatles millions of dollars to re-form for a one-off concert?

McCartney: What can you do about it? It's like when Muhammad Ali wanted people to stop calling him Cassius Clay...well, I wish they'd start referring to me as a member of Wings instead of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's new group. You can't get too upset about it. You have to be gracious and try and look upon the good side of it... at least they're still writing about us.

CREEM: Not everyone thinks along those lines. I was in a local record shop when a bunch of young schoolkids came in, picked up a Beatles compilation, recognized you, and I heard one of them inquire who the other three were.

McCartney: Let's be truthful, the really young kids know much more about Wings than the Beatles. We're making records, the Beatles don't. They just look upon the Beatles as being some old group I used to play in!

CREEM: Linda, when you married Paul you came in for a lot of adverse criticism for marrying "public property."

Linda: I thought, here's all these people who I've never met actually writing about me, discussing me in their papers and worse still, most of it was untrue. Things about my childhood... my whole life, and people believed what they read.

McCartney: That whole ludicrous Eastman-Kodak thing. They had her appear like some big Eastman-Kodak heiress...and most people must have thought, hey-hey, that figures, McCartney's got his feet under the table and married her for her money and a few rolls of film!

Linda: It still lingers...I've just had an exhibition of my photographs in L. A. and the critic from one of America's big art magazines wrote something to the effect—"Linda McCartney, even though she is from the EastmanKodak family..."

CREEM: They may have let Linda off the hook, but Paul, how do you feel about recent criticism that you are trying to play the Young Country Squire?

McCartney: Oh, you mean that thing that appeared in People magazine which said "Paul McCartney with his aristocratic posture..."

The country gentleman bit...that's really all down to when I was a kid...as a kid you like the earth, love rolling around on it. Well, when you grow up, you assume that that feeling is gone; but when I bought the farm in Scotland I realized that it hadn't gone. Suddenly I could lay down in a field exactly the same way as when I was a kid, enjoying the same emotions, and that had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to pose as the big country squire. I just wanted a field to lay down in. I'm lucky to be able to afford one and have a good time. What with some of the stuff that's gone down in the past, I could have easily gone under.

CREEM: Such as?

McCartney: The Beatles breaking up!

CREEM: At that time, of the four, you were portrayed as being the villain of the piece. It was Paul McCartney who broke up the Beatles! &

McCartney: Yeah, I was the baddie... but only because I was fighting Allen Klein. And, as I knew Klein was the baddie, and the other three didn't, I had to do anything to fight him.

CREEM: Unlike many artists—especially American—you've never been surrounded by a large entourage of yes-men and hangers-on?

McCartney: Certainly not. I hate all that, but even so, it's very easy to get into. I'll tell you how it happens. If you go working places like Las Vegas or get involved with some big agency or top manager it can start happening without you ever becoming aware of it until it's too late, and suddenly there's dozens of hangers-on that you've never seen before.

I used to have a couple of people living-in but in the end they knew my house better than I did and I felt daft asking them where things like my books were. So I got rid of 'em and one of them sold their story to a mag-, azine for 8,000 pounds and as it turned out it was all lies. Had me having orgies with Julie Felix, when all that happened was that she dropped by one evening to play me her new record... honest!

(On Power Pop:) If we were all back In the early '60s...I'd have a good go at Mowin' them off the stage.

CREEM: But those who write about the aristocratic posture might think otherwise?

McCartney: True. I went up to Liverpool and I was sitting around with some friends having a drink when this young sculptor said I was not working class. I saiid, "Piss-off, I am working class...I've never gone into any other class. I earn a living and if that's not working class, what is?"

CREEM: Have you become immune to criticism?

McCartney: It's just part of the whole game that's the way you're supposed to look at it. But then you read things where someone is doing this big putdown number, claiming I'm snotty rich —that's the kinda thing I don't like. Look, I'm just like anybody else, I don't like being slagged off,.especially in public...

Linda: Especially by someone who can't do what you do...

McCartney: I know that anyone who has to either listeri to or review 16 albums a week isn't gonna end up loving music, now is he? They probably end up hating it. The one little album he does like is therefore gonna get a incredible review. I bet Rumours didn't get unanimous favorable reviews when it was first released. I sometimes .feel sorry for writers but normally I hate 'em, because they're slagging me off. But I am fully aware that they've got a tough job on their hands.

CREEM: In so many interviews you come across as extremely affable but, by the same token, you have a way of talking a lot and saying very little. Is this intentional? Are you that guarded?

McCartney: Yes, I am. You've got to be guarded. You're laying yourself wide open by doing interviews.

CREEM: With your track record, you must be extremely aware of precisely what a large section of the recordbuying public wants to hear and what they will subsequently rush out and buy. Having almost patented this failsafe formula, do you apply it to everything you write?

S Denny: That's taking it a bit too far...

3 CREEM: OK, then...do you feel that | as a songwriter you're still adventurous?

McCartney: If you're just making No. 1 hits, no...

Denny: Paul's only gonna write something that pleases him.

McCartney: Sure, you can write stuff and know, ah, this will get 'em and at the same time secretly think to yourself, yeah, but they're daft to buy this one—it's just pap! But let me tell you, those are the songs that don't work. From the start, you have to be a bit intrigued with the idea or something about it. .or, when you play it to a mate, he has to say, yeah, I like it.

CREEM: But because of who you are, there are not many people who would have the nerve to turn around and tell you that you'd just written a piece of crap.

McCartney: That's true, but on the other hand, you can get too worried about all that stuff and start analyzing the hell outta everything to the point where you're too hung-up to write a note. There is a possibility that if . you're in it just to sell records—which everyone is—when you've been doing it for a long time and become good and very successful at it, I agree, there is a risk that you're not gonna be as adventurous as you could or should be... we've been talking about that very thing quite recently.

CREEM: When you released "Mull Of Kintyre," you must have known at the back of your mind that you'd come in for heavy critical flak?

McCartney: And that's why I nearly didn't put it out—and that's a fact. I knew old folks, Scottish people and the Campbeltown Pipers, liked it...but at that time it seemed that everything was punk. You know, I could almost picture the lay-outs of the single pages in the different papers. Amongst the headings "Crash!! Yuck!! Rodents!! Destroy!!" I could see a cutesy little picture of the three of us. But I checked out "Mull Of Kintyre" with a lotta young kids and they liked it and so we went with it. But you can't not release records because someone is gonna slag it...you just go along with your instincts and hope that you're right.

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CREEM: Except for a couple of cuts, in particular, "Name and Address," the new Wings album is very short on uptempo rock material.

McCartney: That's an Elvisy-type, Sun one and not a screamin' Little Richard-type track. It's held back. But the more rocker side is starting to come out much more since I made that album and maybe that will be the style of the next album. We do keep talking about going into the studio and cutting a no-nonsense rock 'n' roll album, to just get it out of our system. It's primarily just down to what songs you're writing at any particular time and at the time we were preparing "London Town" we didn't seem to be writing any real hard rockers.

CREEM: If anything, there's a subtle psychedelic undercurrent on many cuts. Some of the arrangements can be traced back to Sgt. Pepper and The White Album.

McCartney: I suppose we were going for that kind of feel by doing more complex arrangements but I'm not about to analyze it. Next time around we'll go for a bit more sweat. Really, it's down to writing sweaty numbers and believe me, they're the hardest of the lot to write.

CREEM: How do you feel about the release of The Beatles' Hamburg Tapes, The Hollywood Bowl Concert and the Rock 'n' Roll and Love Songs repackages?

McCartney: The Hamburg Tapes... er, a but numb, really. On a personal level, it's quite nice to have a memory of those days, but other than that, it didn't mean too much to me...it's all right...actually, I don't thing I've even got a copy of it. On a business level, it was all very weird. Nevertheless, I don't think it does any harm.

CREEM: The Hollywood Bowl Concert was over ten years too late in coming out.

McCartney: We never wanted it out. But then about five or six years after we'd split with Capitol Records, they acquired the rights to all that material and didn't bother asking us any more about what should be released. We never used to like the tapes of those two concerts, because we always thought all the songs were played much too fast—see, we always played everything twice its original speed on stage. We also thought it was all out of tune, but I've heard the record and I gotta admit, it sounds pretty good. Screaming's good. Sounds like a bunch of seagulls.

But, like I said, nowadays we can't even say if we like the cover artwork or not; it's got nothing to do with us. Actually, all those old Beatles repackages smell a bit like a rip-off to me, but if people still want to buy it, that's fine. To me, the Beatles were a great group, but unfortunately, they broke up, so what am I gonna do about it...sit around doing nothing for the rest of my life, living in the past, or do I keep playing? Wings is the band I'm now with and thankfully, I've passed through the period of thinking, can I still do it, which I went through directly after the break-up. I spent hours moaning to Linda can I still write... worrying if I'd dry up!

CREEM: Was that just a temporary trauma?

McCartney: We still managed to make albums at the. time, but it was probably just my usual paranbia. I've listened to those albums since and the ones I thought sounded crummy then, sound all right now.

CREEM: The impression one gets from some pf your early solo material is that, following the break-up of the Beatles, you were testing the market.

McCartney: I can't answer that. I was just writing songs and putting out what I felt to be the best at any given time. I never think about doing market tests. I just work on the assumption that there are a lot of people who like my stuff and that's all there is to it. Sure, I sometimes have my doubts about certain songs...like I said, at one point I wasn't going to put out "Mull Of Kintyre" as a single—a Scottish ballad, it's gonna sound ridiculous. At the moment, I've got a punk song, but I daren't do it!

CREEM: Why not?

McCartney: Dunno. I suppose be^ cause if I released it as a single, people will only slag me off and say, "Oh look, McCartney's goin' punk! He's just trying to keep up with the trends."

I don't feel like any one age group myself, I see all age groups. Getting back to my punk song, it's called "Boil Crisis." I saw a headline in a paper that said, "Oil Crisis" and...any way, it goes like this:

One night in the life of a kid named Sid, he scored with a broad in a pyramid/And there's only one thing holding him in cheeky He knew that during the ancient dance, if she should glance at the huge unsightly boil upon his neck, he had a boil crisis! And then the chorus comes in...

Look, I've always had very wide musical tastes. For me, on his own terms, Fred Astaire can be just as heavy as Robert Plant—see, it doesn't matter what era they come from.

CREEM: Suddenly, Wings have gone full circle—the line-up being depleted to that of around the Band On The Run period. You've gone through quite a number of personnel changes in a relatively short time: three drummers, two guitarists.

McCartney: In putting any band together, you're lucky if you can find compatible personalities and it seems that the three of us [Linda and Denny] are really the only ones who've remained compatible. The others just stayed sidemen.

CREEM: Could this have been because they were intimidated by working with an ex-Beatle?

McCartney: Some people have said that and I tend to believe there was a bit of that in it.

Denny: But once they get to know you, then it's purely down to whether or not they want to push themselves and make a positive contribution.

McCartney: From the very beginning, I never intended that Wings should just be me and anyone would do to play back-up. But as to why there have been changes...how can I put it, you reach a point where you realize that you don't need a situation where, if someone is a brilliant player but just being around him gets to be obnoxious...who needs it! I'm not saying that's the reason why we've had so many personnel changes in Wings; all I'm saying is that you've gotta feel right together and enjoy one another's company.

Reprint courtesy of New Musical Express.