Paul McCartney, McCartney III, review: the whimsical, poppy antidote to a miserable year

“I know there must be other ways of feeling free / But this is what I wanna do, who I wanna be,” yells Sir Paul McCartney over a stew of heavy riffing guitars, grungy bass and thumping drums, all of which he has played himself. A rocking bellow of pure joy, Slidin’ might be McCartney’s statement of purpose, his very raison d’être. Let him loose in a studio with a bunch of instruments, and he’s going to escape into a world of fantasy and imagination. And, lucky us, we can all come along for the ride.

Although McCartney III is essentially the product of the pandemic, it is perhaps the most joyous response to lockdown imaginable. Or “rockdown”, as McCartney refers to it. With Government advice suggesting minimal social contact for people in his age bracket (McCartney is 78), the rock superstar has spent his isolation recording a new album on which he plays all the instruments.

He has done this before in presumably less stressful conditions, so the number III indicates its connection to his post-Beatles solo debut, McCartney (1970), and his first post-Wings offering, McCartney II (1980). What those albums had in common was a sense of whimsy and playfulness, released from the commercial pressures of trying to create high impact pop singles. Of course, you might say McCartney has been released from this particular pressure for 30 years or more. It has been a very long time since he was a chart-busting hit-machine. Nevertheless, the sense of lightness in McCartney III is tangible. It’s an album on which McCartney is trying to please no-one more than himself, with the rather splendid result that it should also please anyone who ever loved his particular way with melody, harmony, rhythm and song.

Opening track, Long-Tailed Winter Bird, is a statement of intent. It is essentially an instrumental built around a rippling folky acoustic guitar riff from the final song, Winter Bird, dragged out for five minutes of investigation and variation, just for the sake of it. Layers are added bit-by-bit with none of the pomp or portentousness of Mike Oldfield’s classic one-man album Tubular Bells. A flurry of tin whistles arrives two minutes in with a ragged cheerfulness suggesting this is not one of the 54 instruments the prodigious musician has actually mastered. It is massively self-indulgent, but delightfully so, with no airs or graces, just a sense of performative pleasure.

McCartney carries a weight of expectation around him heavier than any other popular musician alive, apart, perhaps, from his Sixties contemporary Bob Dylan. As a Beatle, McCartney is part of the godhead of contemporary popular musical culture, whose voice and style influenced everything that followed in his wake. It is a weight that can lead to disappointment, with the quality of later recordings often underestimated simply because they no longer connect to the zeitgeist in the same profound way.

When you hear McCartney’s voice, even thinned out with age, you can’t avoid hearing a ghost of his past glories. On Pretty Boys, that fragile old voice reaches across time to contemplate his younger self, with a folky whimsy that addresses the absurdity of pop stardom: “Meet the pretty boys / A line of bicycles for hire / Objects of desire.” It’s a little slip of a song, but there is a playful wit that suggests McCartney himself feels free of the past. And in that freedom, he has been able to make music to match it.

There is a sequence of songs here as good as anything in his solo catalogue. Deep Deep Feeling is perhaps the standout, a moody and soulful mid-tempo exploration of emotion itself, always McCartney’s driving songwriting impulse. “Sometimes I wish it would stay, sometimes I wish it would go away,” is McCartney’s simple yet wise mantra of the joy and pain alluded to in the title, underpinned by a sonorous piano and stop start beat that expands lusciously across its eight and a half minutes.

Slidin’ is a rocking belter and The Kiss of Venus a delicate treat in which McCartney’s tender falsetto follows his picked guitars. Seize The Day has the swagger of a Seventies anthem, replete with juicy period guitar and keyboard sounds, and a jaunty lyric preaching “it’s still alright to be nice”. It is a typically positive Macca message that doesn’t sound quite as trite as it once might have in our social-media trolling age.  And then comes Deep Down, a simple, soulful groove built up from luscious Hammond organ chords on which he really sings his socks off, allowing himself the freedom to wail with the same abandon once heard on outros to Let It Be and Hey Jude.

There are also a handful of oddities, quirky little ditties that creak around the edges, but that too is part of McCartney’s charm, a willingness to be silly and play around with wafer-thin ideas. The campfire folksiness of Winter Bird is a bit of a damp squib at the end, while the ribald Lavatory Lil is unlikely to go down as an all time classic from the man who gave us Yesterday and Blackbird. It aims for the rude rockiness of Polythene Pam, and all that can be said is it is (mercifully) not quite as bad as the title suggests.

But, like any long serving McCartney fan, I’m ready to put up with the ridiculous when it so often leads onto the sublime. Bearing in mind that critics dismissed his previous solo albums on first release before belatedly pronouncing them classics, I have no hesitation in saying that McCartney III is every bit the equal of its predecessors. It is unadulterated Macca, with a little bit of cheese on the side – the sound of one of the greatest songwriters of our time, having the time of his life.

McCartney III is out via Capitol Records on Friday 18