"Let me know when we can throw a party every night..."

“Chasing tomorrow - get ready to run...”

/

“On the day that I die, I’d like jokes to be told

And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets

That children have played on

And laid on while listening to stories of old...”

Well, it was 13 years ago this year, Paul McCartney sprung a second album in two years upon us - fresh from critical acclaim far from “Frog Song” mockery of the Eighties and Nineties.

And did so by inviting us to imagine...his dying, albeit in sombrely, richly resigned and inviting tones.

Now, here we are again, a rejuvenated Macca still standing - even in this far more dispiriting of times, splaying McCartney III upon a world in need of, well, any more McCartney.

Paul is live? Paul is loving living, it sounds, happily jamming and drumming and riffing and fiddling in his Sussex studio while others (present company inclusive) might have considered it a major feat to merely manage fixing a hole where the rain gets in.

Not that this is your stereotypically-blithe Fab Wacky Macca Thumbs Aloft. Just as on 2018’s seriously-ranging, alternately-deep-and-daffy Egypt Station, he can’t help but come across as a little more reflective than in the past - now he’s 78.

And yet the melodies keep on simply pouring from Paul.

For an LP he claims he didn’t see coming the subsequent hammering PR campaign has at times felt, not crass, but a little naff - see Saturday night on BBC1, when Idris Elba strolled up saying he didn’t have a plan for the interview he’d been granted and pretty much left McCartney heavy-liftingly interviewing himself.

And yet, and yet - what a delight to just have anything spontaneously new from him at all. The old Eighties/Nineties spurious consensus that John Lennon was the genius, Paul McCartney the softy second-ranker, seems to have flipped the other way these days. And perhaps we were all ready to feel generously towards this new album, no matter how it sounds.

And yet it’s thus even more of a pleasant relief, not surprise, to find how fably it holds together.

The incessantly-spindly acoustic riff that opens up “Long Tailed Winter Bird” says come-hither to the thrum of 1970’s tumbling opener “The Lovely Linda” - and can't help but sinuously over- and under-stay its welcome. Such commitment to that first striking reacquaintance matters. 

Current wife Nancy Shevell was caught in her native New York when the first lockdown was declared in March 2020, Paul unfortunate enough to be stranded across the Atlantic in Sussex. “Hands across the water” made for a singalonga chorus way back when, but even the most feted songwriter on earth must have felt some frustration.

And, while much of this music might have been patched together and built upon from raggedy strands stretching back through dim and distant decades, a listener could be forgiven for seeing and hearing some 2020 pandemic-ish insights.

Not least the many many repetitions of riffs and lyrics, from that opener onwards - almost as if McCartney, clocking on again in his own studio, might just be similarly searching for other solace within bluesy mantras. Groovily enjoying playing with himself, because he knows he comfily can.

Bogey/boogy music.

Comparisons to 1970’s McCartney and ten years’ later’s McCartney II are inevitable, even if a blend of homespun acoustics, bluesy sludges and uber-Beatle-y ballads suggest - after his 1995 “Threetles”-era noodlings - you could also call this Flaming Pie II.

While Egypt Station was a lushly-sprawling double album - even before all the reissue-repackage-repackage extra editions to follow - it had a few duds dragging it down, in such desperate yet doomed attempts at hits: “Come On To Me” and (ugh) “Fuh You”.

Yet for all their more recent critical rehabilitation, McCartney and McCartney II remain mixed bag-isms also - and so this one completes the hat-trick. The hollowed-out stomach-punch/heart-hug of “Maybe I’m Amazed” and winking delicacy of “Every Night”, alongside the kitchen-sink clanking of the first one’s instrumentals. Second time around, the helium-ditzy jitter of “Coming Up” and woozy yet pure nursery-rhyme melodies of “Waterfalls” and “Summer’s Day Song” sprinkled amid new-toy synthesiser squelches. Hey, it’s great, it’s bloody Paul McCartney, shut up...

And this one will sell, in all its editions. For all its (very few) flaws. The punchy “Lavatory Lil”, alas, provides further evidence of how the often-ironic McCartney becomes crushingly less funny the more he tries to amuse - and ends up not only a poor relation to  Abbey Road's “Polythene Pam” but even Off The Ground’s “Biker Like An Icon”.

Preceding track “Women And Wives” risks plodding along a little too clumpily - that croakier “old man McCartney” vocal bound to a clodding beat more reminiscent of 2013’s blandly-glossy New rather than the stately grace of 2005's Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.

Ah, enough carping. There is just so much joy to enjoy elsewhere.The keening, pleading reaching of eight-minute-plus “Deep Deep Feeling”: “Sometimes I wish it could stay, sometimes I wish it would go away - emotion...”

How “Seize The Day” bounces out of a silly first verse (and what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?) into a sun-still-somehow-coming-uplift of a chorus (which nevertheless warning of future days when “the sun won’t come” - though does at least, in the meantime, rhyme “dinosaurs” with “Santa Claus”).

And "The Kiss Of Venus", with its breathless (far too high?) vocal accompanied by filigree finger-picking - all across, of course, a melody that evidently just flows flows flows from somewhere and someone special. Meanwhile, mind, its lyrics could prove both lazy and accidentally-ominous: "And if the world begins to shake, will something have to break? We have to stay awake..."

Or perhaps, justly topping it all off, the brief reprise of that “Winter Bird” riff before bringing in elegiac closer “When Winter Comes” - his deft way across an acoustic coming over beauteously. Never mind any electronica, admirable as is his (check my) machine-ry - torch songs as porch songs in the studio endear all the more.

Album credits for this fine finale nod to the late Sir George Martin, indicating its genesis way back when in the Nineties - an origin made all the more obvious, alas, in the stronger timbre of McCartney’s vocal.

And yet it not only persists but fits, right here and right now - even if we can’t all be like farm-owner and long-keen DIY fan McCartney idly overlooking his estate, wondering what he needs to fix to keep the foxes away from his livestock and promising his wife they can soon “fly away”.

No, he urges himself, his family, his fans, anyone at all to imagine having “found the sun, when winter’s come”. Even in this bleak midwinter, earnestly looking for and indeed glimpsing light.

Here comes the sun? Oh, if only, eh - but he is helping while we’re waiting.

The end of the end? If it is, then, fine - but, actually, encore. McCartney (III) is having a ball for us all.

"Let me know when we can throw a party every night..."?

One, two, three thumbs aloft (and fingers, knees and toes all crossed).