Thursday 3rd March

I really don’t know what happened in the Eighties, all that golden promise of the Sixties and Seventies dissolved in a mess of synth-heavy overblown production.  It happened to Bowie and Elton and Dylan and almost everyone, maybe Leonard excepted.  It was if these brilliant artists thought that they had to copy all the young guns, they rushed out and hired hip new producers and expensive session players, spent months in the studio and produced really underwhelming records.  Or maybe it was the drugs, as cocaine overtook dope, who knows?  And McCartney was no exception.  He was solo again but couldn’t stop tinkering with a winning formula.  He had collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, never realizing that he didn’t need them, he would have been fine on his own, with a guitar and small backing band.

And the records he made in the eighties were mostly bland and boring, lacking any real spark of creativity.  Co-incidentally this was his most commercially successful period and he had a string of top ten hits.  He made a film “Give My Regards to broad Street”; panned by the critics but I loved it, the soundtrack is my fave Paul record of this period.  He became a feature of what became known as “Rock Royalty”, as once humble pop-stars hobnobbed with Presidents and Princesses.  And after Live Aid, where Paul’s set was marred by microphone problems, there was hardly a charity concert where Paul wasn’t invited to sing a few old Beatles numbers.  He embarked on a few very lucrative World Tours and progressively included more and more Beatles numbers.  I saw him a couple of times, and he was brilliant, but the show, like many in the Eighties, lacked any spontaneity, even the between-numbers banter was well rehearsed, and even if he was an ex-Beatle, it still wasn’t the Fab Four.