Search - Paul McCartney :: Liverpool Sound Collage

Paul McCartney's music has long been tainted by fallacious revisionism. Supposedly the Beatles' safe sentimentalist soft-pop underbelly, he's usually been portrayed as the antiseptic flip-side to John Lennon's avant-garde bad boy. It's good to remember that Paul penned "Helter Skelter," John "Julia," and that it was McCartney who was exploring the London avant-garde scene (and composing a "Revolution 9"-like sound collage for a theater project in '67) long before Lennon had even heard of Yoko Ono. Long dormant, that sensibility resurfaced in the '90s as McCartney's ambient alter-ego, the Fireman, and again in this soundtrack to artist/Sgt. Pepper cover designer Peter Blake's On Collage exhibition at Liverpool's Tate Gallery. Utilizing a theme of local Liverpool voices, Paul mixes the familiar (snatches of Beatles' spoken-word and musical outtakes) with the obscure (including field recordings of Liverpool art students and his favorite local chips lady), adds a dash of Liverpool Oratorio and some recent Cavern Club sound checks, and (with the help of Super Furry Animals keyboardist Cian Ciaran and producer/Fireman collaborator Youth) concocts five leisurely, dense aural landscapes. Though hardly the usual fodder of pop criticism, the tracks here often rise above good-natured studio wankery, especially the spare dub mix "Free Now." It's also a track that underscores the ghetto mentality of much modern pop. Once upon a time, McCartney and others felt free to infuse the mainstream with their experimentalism rather than constrain it to side projects. Whatever, this is hardly "safe" stuff. --Jerry McCulley