“When we listened back to the tapes we realised there was something very special happening in these conversations. They were, in a sense, an oral history of popular music.”
These are the words of the Armagh poet Paul Muldoon, speaking in the trailer for McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, a deliciously intimate podcast culled from interviews he conducted with Paul McCartney for his 2021 book The Lyrics. Turns out he had hours and hours of raw and enthralling audio in his pocket from that project, from interviews with the former Beatle about the origins and craft behind some of his most beloved work. And he’s right: it is something special, a convivial and earnest exchange that makes for an extraordinary audio journey.
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To start with, what a subject for a podcast: one of the greatest songwriters of all time meandering through the creation process for some of the greatest songs of all time. To hear McCartney talk about his dead mother coming to him in a dream and telling him “Let it be”, or to hear him clapping along to Penny Lane or riffing on Harold Pinter’s “wonky” characters – this is brilliant, often revelatory stuff. Each episode homes in on one or two songs – from Eleanor Rigby to Mull of Kintyre to Blackbird to Live and Let Die, in case you needed a reminder of this man’s stylistic range – opening them up through historical context, examining their inspiration, lyrical content and musical layering, taking them apart to see how they work and then offering them up all over again.
The audio varies – here we have tapes of the Pauls’ meandering conversations that are a little distant and fuzzy at times, and without the polish of studio sessions, but there we have Muldoon’s crisp and tightly scripted narration, and songs and news clips are expertly threaded through the episodes.
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There are sounds of The Beach Boys, of the staccato violin from the Psycho music, of Bach’s mathematical formulae, snippets of radio plays and decades-old audio of McCartney asking a young Vladimir Putin if he happened to listen to The Beatles when he was growing up, and the sum of it all is rich and riveting.
Muldoon’s singsong voice and deeply researched delivery form a counterpoint to McCartney’s rambling and colourful remembrances, one as precise and detailed as a jobbing poet can get, the other wide open and expansive, plucking song lines and melodies from all around him and wading through memories like a bargain hunter at a car boot sale, uncovering find after glorious find.
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A Life in Lyrics brings fascinating historical context to McCartney’s work: the 1950s Liverpool McCartney grew up in, still recovering from the devastation of the second World War; the cold-war backdrop; the civil-rights struggles in the United States. And there’s his personal journey from young Liverpool lad to someone who left behind his card-playing, pipe-smoking uncles to look back with a mix of smugness and nostalgia.
It’s melodic storytelling that comes with both hubris and humility, and Muldoon knows how privileged he is to be there, taking it all in, and constructs a careful narrative frame for his subject to fill. The poet can be scholarly and tenacious, but this show is all McCartney, offering listeners insight into the latter’s imaginative process and the opportunity to witness a ready mind meeting all the right conditions for serendipitous creation.
