McCartney (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul McCartney released his debut solo album on the 17th of April 1970, and almost nobody knew it was coming. He had recorded it in secret, mostly at his home in St John's Wood, using a Studer four-track tape recorder, one microphone, and what he later called "nerve". No producer. No band. No studio budget. Just McCartney, a stack of instruments, and a life that had recently fallen apart.

  The album arrived at one of the strangest junctures in music history. The Beatles were quietly unraveling. John Lennon had privately asked for a "divorce" from the band in September 1969 but had not yet said so publicly. McCartney had retreated to his farm in Campbeltown, Scotland, where author Robert Rodriguez describes his state of mind as "brokenhearted, shocked, and dispirited at the loss of the only job he had ever known". The music he was about to make would reflect all of it.

  When the album finally surfaced, accompanied by a provocative self-written press release, it did not just announce a solo career. It ended the Beatles. Critics panned it, fans turned on him, and his former bandmates called it a betrayal. Yet the record would outlast almost every verdict made about it in 1970, eventually being credited as an early template for lo-fi and indie music.

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• 2. A Farm, a Depression, a Studer

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  John Lennon delivered his bombshell at a band meeting on the 20th of September 1969. After that, McCartney went north. He withdrew to High Park, his farm in Campbeltown, Scotland, and largely disappeared from view. The withdrawal was so complete that rumours spread across America that he had died, an escalation of the three-year-old "Paul Is Dead" rumour. Journalists from BBC Radio and Life magazine tracked him down at the farm to prove otherwise.

  The months in Scotland deepened a rift that had already opened over money. The other three Beatles had appointed Allen Klein as business manager in May 1969. McCartney refused to accept Klein and continued to favour Lee Eastman and John Eastman, the father and brother of his wife Linda. He later named Klein's appointment the first "irreconcilable difference" within the band.

  McCartney himself described coming close to a nervous breakdown during this period. Author Howard Sounes, in his book Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, wrote of Linda's perspective: "She had a seven-year-old and a baby to look after, with a husband who was depressed and drunk. She later told friends it was one of the most difficult times in her life." It was Linda who encouraged McCartney to begin writing and finishing songs for what would become his first solo record.

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• 3. One Mic and Nerve

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  McCartney and his family returned to London shortly before Christmas 1969. He began recording at his home in Cavendish Avenue, St John's Wood, on a recently delivered Studer four-track tape recorder, operating without a mixing desk and therefore without VU displays to guide recording levels. He described the setup simply as "Studer, one mic, and nerve".

  He played everything: acoustic and electric guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, and various percussion instruments. Linda supplied backing vocals on some songs. The opening track, "The Lovely Linda", was only 43 seconds long and had been taped purely as a test of the new equipment. McCartney liked the recording enough to keep it, giggle and all.

  Several tracks were written during the Scotland period. "That Would Be Something" and "Valentine Day" were the second and third songs he taped. Three selections, including "Momma Miss America" and "Oo You", were ad-libbed on the spot, McCartney later claimed. The album's loose, unfinished feel was not accidental. According to The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, it was "a one-man-studio-band LP" with "a pronounced homemade quality; it was spare and sounded almost unfinished". Author Robert Rodriguez framed it as McCartney "fulfilling the 'as-nature-intended' theme of the aborted 'Get Back' sessions, albeit as a one-and-a-half man band".

  On the 3rd of January 1970, McCartney briefly interrupted work on the album to take part in what would be the Beatles' final recording session: at EMI Studios, he, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr recorded Harrison's "I Me Mine".

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• 4. Billy Martin in Willesden

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  On the 12th of February 1970, McCartney carried his Studer tapes to Morgan Studios in the north-west London suburb of Willesden. To protect the project's secrecy, he worked under the pseudonym "Billy Martin". His purpose was to copy all the four-track recordings onto eight-track tape so he could add further overdubs.

  At Morgan, he transferred "Junk" and "Teddy Boy", two songs he had begun writing during the Beatles' 1968 visit to India. He also transferred "Glasses", a sound-effects piece featuring what he described as "wineglasses played at random", and "Singalong Junk", an instrumental version of "Junk" to which he now added a Mellotron strings part.

  The most unusual track recorded at Morgan was "Kreen-Akrore", taped on the 15th of February. McCartney described it as a sonic attempt to capture a hunt by the Kreen-Akrore tribespeople of the Brazilian Amazon, after watching an ATV documentary about their way of life. Interspersed with passages of electric guitar, organ, and piano, the track featured McCartney using a bow and arrow he had purchased at the Knightsbridge department store Harrods, according to engineer Robin Black. Linda provided the breathing and animal-like sounds. Black was among the few people who knew at that point that McCartney was recording a solo album at all.

  McCartney moved to the more familiar EMI Studios on the 21st of February, still booked under the name Billy Martin. "Maybe I'm Amazed", a piano-based ballad dedicated to Linda, was recorded on the 15th of February and described by authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter as "the most elaborate instrumental track on the LP". The final new recording for the album, "Man We Was Lonely", was taped on the 25th of February, the same day McCartney composed it.

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• 5. The Letter from Starr

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  McCartney had privately agreed with Apple Records executive Neil Aspinall to release his album on the 17th of April 1970. The schedule created an immediate clash. Ringo Starr's debut solo album, Sentimental Journey, was due out on the 27th of March. The Beatles' Let It Be film and album were also imminent. Harrison and Lennon wrote to McCartney on the 31st of March instructing him to postpone his release until the 4th of June, citing the need to stagger releases in America, where the Hey Jude compilation had just come out on the 26th of February.

  Rather than have a staff member deliver the letter, Starr took it to McCartney personally at Cavendish Avenue. The visit did not go well. McCartney described Starr's message as carrying "the party line", and said: "I told Starr to get out. I had to do something like that in order to assert myself because I was just sinking." Starr recalled that McCartney "went crazy" and threatened: "I'll finish you now. You'll pay!"

  After receiving assurances from Harrison as a director of Apple Records that his album would be released as planned, McCartney held his ground on the 17th of April date. Author Peter Doggett wrote that the confrontation launched what Rodriguez called "a three-against-one war" within the band. On the 25th of March, after discovering that Klein had arranged a postponement without his knowledge, McCartney won the immediate battle over the release date. But the war had just begun.

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• 6. The Press Release That Ended the Beatles

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  On the 9th of April 1970, a week before the album's release, McCartney distributed a self-written Q&A package to the British press. He described the album's theme as "Home, Family, Love", said he did not know whether his "break with the Beatles" was temporary or permanent, and stated plainly that he could not foresee a time when he and Lennon would write together again. When asked whether Allen Klein's company ABKCO would be involved with the album, McCartney replied: "Not if I can help it".

  The document was compiled with the help of Apple executives Derek Taylor and Peter Brown. McCartney later said he was responding to questions put to him; Brown said McCartney wrote all the questions himself, as did Taylor. The same day the press release went out, McCartney called Lennon at the clinic where he was undergoing primal scream therapy with Yoko Ono. He told Lennon he was following Lennon's example and leaving the Beatles, but made no mention of going public.

  The first press response appeared the following day. Don Short of the Daily Mirror ran a piece on the 10th of April titled "PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES". Author Mark Hertsgaard described what followed: "newspaper headlines around the world reduced the story to screaming variations of PAUL BREAKS UP THE BEATLES". Beatles confidant Ray Connolly later recalled that McCartney was "devastated" by the media's interpretation. Author Peter Doggett suggests McCartney's intention may not have been to formally dissolve the band; the press release had a logic of its own.

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• 7. Reception and Reappraisal

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  By the 15th of May 1970, McCartney had sold over one million copies in the United States. From the 23rd of May, it spent three weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, eventually going double platinum. In Britain, it peaked at number 2, held there for three weeks by Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, the best-selling album of 1970.

  The commercial success sat alongside almost universal critical contempt. Richard Williams of Melody Maker found "sheer banality" in every track except "Maybe I'm Amazed" and described "Man We Was Lonely" as "the worst example of his music-hall side". Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian dismissed it as having "no substance" and wrote that McCartney seemed to believe "anything that comes into his head is worth having". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone found the songs "distinctly second rate" relative to McCartney's Beatles output but admitted that, taken on its own terms, the album stood as "a very good, although not astounding, piece of work". He ended his review by comparing the album's press kit to the Trojan Horse: hollow inside and full of hostile warriors.

  George Harrison, when asked for his opinion shortly after release, called "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "That Would Be Something" "great" but said the rest "just don't do much for me". In a December 1970 interview later published as the book Lennon Remembers, John Lennon dismissed the album as "rubbish" and "Engelbert Humperdinck music", and said his own primal therapy-inspired record would "probably scare McCartney into doing something decent".

  Years later, the verdicts shifted. When Neil Young inducted McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, he singled out the album for praise: "I loved that record because it was so simple. And there was so much to see and to hear... There was no attempt made to compete with the things he had already done. And so out he stepped from the shadow of the Beatles." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic named "That Would Be Something", "Every Night", "Teddy Boy", and "Maybe I'm Amazed" as "full-fledged McCartney classics", while acknowledging the record also foreshadowed what Erlewine called "the nagging mediocrity that would plague McCartney's entire solo career". McCartney himself came to regard the album as rock music's first indie record, telling Rolling Stone: "Y'know, it's now what would be called an 'indie' thing. To me, then, it was just... knockin' around experimentin' with some sounds and not worrying how it was gonna turn out."

  For its 50th anniversary, the album received a limited-edition half-speed mastered vinyl pressing for Record Store Day on the 26th of September 2020. McCartney also recorded two successor albums using the same home-recording approach: McCartney II in 1980, and McCartney III in December 2020.

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