Hello, hello and hello again folks. This one has been a long time coming, and oh my God, where the heck have I been!? Well, that my friends is something I have gone into far too much depressing detail on my podcast and on this blog already, so lets just press on with another Paul McCartney Article or ‘McArticle’ as it were…

I have already recorded my episode on McCartney II and I am phenomenally excited to be releasing it in a few weeks time after this blog, and other bonus episodes distract me to no end! But just like my experience with Red Rose Speedway, I can’t help but feel that I would rather live in one of the many multiverses where McCartney II was a double album. This is only made worse by the fact that McCartney hasn’t even bothered to try and expunge the McCartney II bonus tracks from history like he did with Red Rose Speedway. No, the McCartney II re-release features all the songs in their fully realised glory, but instead of being place in any artistic order they are just slapped on the end like a…well like a temporary secretary really…

The result of all those songs being so fully produced and present on a release so many years later feels like a bit of slap in the face from a big elephant penis as even Red Rose Speedway had the excuse that some of the songs weren’t finished or only recorded live, there is no excuse other than the record company simply ‘not-getting-it’ and McCartney caving to pressure. And I’m not mad because I dislike Paul or this album, I’m mad because many the songs that didn’t make the cut, songs that we will be talking about very soon, were some of his best, most experimentally outrageous and delightfully weird.

Again, like Red Rose Speedway, this was supposed to be a double album and history snatched it out of existence as it is want to do, and instead we were given a much slimmer, much more commercially viable version of McCartney II. Commercially viable in the sense that if it doesn’t sell at least you only loose the cost of a million discs than the cost of two million. Yes I know that if I lived in the multi-verse with the double album I would be writing an article about reducing it to a single album, but remember folks, if I have taught you anything it is that quantity is far than quality when it comes to content!

Look, you all know how this shit all goes by now, I take one of McCarney’s album, and through a mixture of musical analysis, ego and migraines I will change the track listing, track order, and length of the album to create an entirely new product. This product, hereby named “McCartney II 2” for the purposes of this article, will be an attempt at rewriting history, at giving McCartney’s material the best possible package to be delivered to listeners, and to allow Macca to avoid some of his most hindsight obvious faults in his discography.

For this album “fixer-upper” article however, I am going to be less heretical than you might assume (especially if you have read other previous posts). No, with McCartney II I consider the ground I am treading to be rather holy and I don’t want to spoil the party if I can help it. And whilst this may simply look like a crude tactic to avoid writing about the song order has changed, the truth is that I genuinely think that McCartney got a whole lot right about the order of tracks on this album. So more of less I will, despite adding a whole extra discs worth of additional material, will be altering the original track-listing as little as humanly possible.

Hopefully, somehow, I am going to turn one of my favourite, highly rated, most beloved album, and break it down into a thousand pieces…I really hope I can put it back together again….let’s see….

“SIDE 1”

“Coming Up” – (3:53)



“Temporary Secretary” – (3:14)

“Blue Sway [with the Richard Niles Orchestra]” – (4:35)

So here we have our first new edition to the McCartney II canon, and I struggle to think up an example of a more undeservedly underexposed Paul McCartney song, because I don’t think there is a more underexposed Paul McCartney song. I only recently came cross this song and I have become addicted to its tranquil, enriching atmosphere.

This song is essentially the spiritual, McCartney II, sequel to ‘Live and Let Die’ as this song has “Bond Epic” written all over it in bold felt tip pen. Along with Kasabian’s “Lets Roll Just Like We Used To” this is my top choice for a hypothetical James Bond theme tune, and why? Well it just have everything you would expect from such a song. The production of this song is very easily some of the most lush and majestically harmonious in his entire ouvre of work, the chorus is catchy and simple, and there is this very mysterious, alluring, almost beguiling quality about the song that has all the underlying sexuality of all the best Bond tunes.

The best part of this track is that it is just so different to something like ‘Live and Let Die’, and instead we have a wholly more subdued and oddly calming. Almost too calming, like we are being lulled into a false sense of security, a trap!!! Again that rich string section is wielded masterfully to create those nourishing rising sections, and then they come in again later where their strings are plucked to create this effortlessly interwoven countermelody that is so overwhelmingly awesome that you can’t believe this song wasn’t snapped up by someone, somewhere, for something.

For those of you still in the dark, the bracketed mentioning of the Richard Niles Orchestra refers to the fact that there are, in fact, two versions of this song, of which the Richard Niles version is the more recent of the two recordings, being reworked many, many years later. The reason I’m choosing this version over the original is many fold. Number one the original version has no lyrics which constantly hampers the song immensely, then you have the fact that Richard Nile’s Bond-esque orchestral accompaniment helps raise the song to truly transcendent levels and without it the song flops like a dead trout, and finally the original version is tacked onto the horrendously grating and annoyingly silly ‘All You Horse Riders’ and that song was never going to make the cut. So you can see why this version is the only choice.

But Sam, I hear you say, you can’t pick this version because it didn’t exist at the time that McCartney II was released. Well, you know what I say to that? I say, I like the song, it’s my blog, and I’m already warping the multiverse by this point so what stick to linear time either?

“On The Way” – (3:38)

“SIDE 2”

“Secret Friend” – (10:31)

If I’m going to start saying “I recently discovered this song” for every song to which it applies to, it’s going to have the joint effect of both revealing how spontaneous this article has been in relation to my recording of McCartney II, and greatly reducing the variance in my sentence structure, so this will be the last time, honest.

‘Secret Friend’ is a song that when I first heard McCartney II made question why Macca even allowed the song to be released to the public, even after all these years. However upon deciding whether I would in fact include these bonus McCartney II songs on the podcast episode I heard this tune again and like so many times before with Macca, this blog and this podcast, something simply clicked and I was a convert.

Again, with side 2 things are pretty much another day at the office, accept this time we begin the second round of proceedings with the first of the major extended psychedelic jams This is no longer the final side, meaning it has more room to experiment and breath, and therefore the perfect place for something as potentially divisive as “Secret Friend”, and boy oh boy is this a change of pace.

I had always felt that the movement from On the Way to Waterfalls was a bit of a misstep on McCartney’s part as it meant that we had to songs in a row that felt distinctly un-McCartney II and it takes the album a little while to right itself before once again going all Phillip K. Dick meets Kraftwork. So here now, instead we are helping to maintain the continuity and integrity of this album by upping the dose of insanity much earlier on. Perhaps McCartney wanted to let us cool off after ‘Coming Up’ and ‘Temporary Secretary’, but I say that is far to conservative and with an album as experimental and potentially alienating album as this we should just toss everyone in the fucking deep end and only the strong will survive it.

“Waterfalls” – (4:44)

“Nobody Knows” – (2:53)

“Front Parlour” – (3:33)

“SIDE 3”

“Summers Day Song” – (3:25)

Mr H Atom/You Know I’ll Get You Baby (5:55)

First and foremost, I had to include this song on the album, because how can you possibly have a Paul McCartney album without a needlessly stitched together, conjoined twin of a track, and now the album has one, allowing it to tick off another Macca-ism off the list. Though in the case of ‘Mr H Atom/You Know I’ll Get You Baby’ what we get is possibly one of the most poorly blended together separate songs in Macca’s discography, and it is so blatant and so egregious that it has to be intentional. This is the man who create the Abbey Road Medley and Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey after all, so the only explanation is that there was no way to effectively blend to songs and McCartney simply saw a spiritual connection between the tracks and gave them new life.

The second major factor that I chose this/these song/s is more out of a sense of injecting a smattering of Joker-esuqe, Loki-esque chaos into this album, as ‘Mr H Atom/You Know I’ll Get You Baby’ is another song in the vein of Temporary Secretary that has the chance to be mind-bendingly annoying and buckets of silly fun at the same time. And I hope some of those alternate dimension listeners really hate this one. Though I am a merciful God in many ways too, as ‘All You Horse Riders’ remains on the cutting room floor.

Personally, I feel that a homogeneous McCartney II is going against the point of the entire album. This is a cult classic, and not meant to be Band on the Run, so I intend to keep that manic sense of unpredictability alive and well. Yes, songs like Coming Up bring in the kids, Waterfalls bring in the grannies, and then we subject them to the oddest, most off-the-wall concepts a bored genius can come up with.

“Frozen Jap” – (3:40)

“Darkroom [11 minute cut]” – (11:??)

Now the exact length of this version so we will have to keep it somewhat vague, but I don’t think we are desperate for spare seconds on this side of the disc so I guess we can make it as long as we like. And, I’m not really sure it’s impossible to get bored of Darkroom so its good that someone made the call

Paul was very fond of this little ditty and he was rather sad to cut the song down to size in order to fit the woefully shorter version onto the original release. Well Paulie, there’s no need to worry anymore

“SIDE 4”

“Wonderful Christmastime” – (3:48)

Now I can already hear some of you rolling our eyes at my inclusion of this song on this album as many of you will simply perceive this songs inclusion on the special edition as purely a bonus track that was recorded in the same sessions. But you only have to listen to this song for a couple of seconds to realise that sonically, this is drenched in the realm of the Mad McCartney II Professor. Regardless of my obvious soft spot for this Christmas classic it seems a shame that this song was never officially affiliated with this album and its overall sound.

The reason this song opens side four was to counter act the very intense and capricious ‘Dark Room’, and what way to shake off that foreboding mood with the most shamelessly bright faced and cheesy Christmas hit that Paul McCartney could ever come up with. We are starting the last leg of this double album, energy may be ebbing, especially after enduring ‘Darkroom’, and we need to put some smiles on some faces, and allow the audience to recoup somewhat before the onslaught of ‘Check My Machine’.

I mentioned the following point in the podcast episode when referring as to why McCartney would have decided to include country/folky type songs on such an experimentally techy album like McCartney II, and the explanation I came up with was that, sometimes, the most off the wall thing to do for Macca to do is go against his own machinations and plop a completely inappropriate song in the middle of the album just to disorientate you. And on an album as already weird as McCartney II, what could be more insane than a Christmas song. Now this is pure McCartney folks!

“Check My Machine” – (8:43)

Anyone who listens to the podcast, or read even a quarter of these shambolic articles will not be surprised at all by my inclusion of McCartney’s most underrated (non-Wings) B-side. It was a favourite of mine since day one, and it is essentially the first Macca track which I actually felt like I discovered for myself, and now the song can get some better exposure than simply being the B-side of ‘Waterfalls’. I mean I couldn’t think of a worse pairing of songs, but I have to move on lest I start a very long rant.

I know thematically a song like ‘Check My Machine’ should start off the album, and in my first draft of this article it was. It actually got to a point where I was about to commit to an article where I make McCartney II into a concept album, but this is tricky enough as it is so I moved on, but in my defence Paul very recently put ‘We’re Open Tonight’, a song that couldn’t be more of an opening song if it tried, in third place. So I think I can let this one slide. The reason I kept it as far back as disc 4 is that in my construction of the first three discs I had left the rearguard disc completely bereft of silly synthy tencho-isms, which left ‘Check My Machine’ to carry that weight alone, which, in my opinion, it does very comfortably.

Nestled amongst a Christmas tune, an emotional acoustic number and a live rocker, ‘Check My Machine’ now defiantly stands proud as one of, if not, the greatest collages of and monuments to, McCartney’s brilliant, fantastic oddness. This song is like what if Jazz Street took mescaline with poppers and then jacked into the Matrix, and is a great final send off for this extremely creative period that Paul went through whilst he was holed up like a hermit up in Scotland. This song is the strangest, the most delightful and has the greatest ability to really take you into a fractal, ethereal 4th-dimension

“One of These Days” – (3:35)

“Coming Up [live]” – (4:09)

Sure, I know I said I was going to try to be less heretical than normal, but I tried, and I failed. For here I have done something I thought I would never do. I have snatched away the serene ending from McCartney II that ‘One of These Days’ provides, and I love ‘One of These Days’, I absolutely love it. But….I do have a habit of bookending things if I can, and to some degree so does McCartney himself. Not that McCartney II is some rock opera with an overarching narrative, no I just like the idea that the song that put McCartney on the map is also the song

The placement of this song replaces the solemn, emotional note instead with a more positive ‘I’m back baby’ kind of vibe. If anything I am doing this as a short term gain for Macca. Lets not forget that this album is Paul’s return to going solo, and the song itself was a huge hit across the world, particularly in America, so to establish Paul as a potential live act here, without Wings, may have lead to a world where it didn’t take him another eight years to start touring again. And, on top of that, you know my disdain for non-album singles in general so this was a natural fit for me.

In addition to the fact that this song helps solidify McCartney as a rock act, I also think its just the perfect “RAM vs Lennon” type jibe whereby the song that would help a solo McCartney do this would be one of the last things he ever recorded with a pop band that he unsuccessfully tried to to turn into a rock band for nine years. It’s not exactly flipping the band the bird, but it shows his intentions much more clearly, and may have avoided some of the uncertainties surrounding the recording of Tug of War.

In all honestly my friends, another major factor behind this track was an issue of ‘the lesser of two evils’. Rather in the same way that many Americans reluctantly voted for Hilary to resist Trump, I have to vote for “Coming Up (live)” to make sure that ‘Bogey Music, ‘All You Horse Riders’ and ‘Bogey Wobble’ do not make it onto the album.

“Conclusion”

So, there we are folks, that is what a double album of McCartney II is supposed to look like, according to me anyway. I’ve tried more so than ever to preserve what I like so much about the original release, but, with the freedoms offered from the double disc format I have been able to craft something I feel is personable to me and what I personally feel McCartney II “is about”, whilst still retaining a definite, unpredictably McCartney-esque feel to the track listing.

Before we start to wrap things up fully I guess we should acknowledge and pay homage to the defeated, to the songs that were either dropped like dead weight or those who simply didn’t make the cut the second time around. These songs would have, with some trimming here and there across all the songs, would have fit onto the double album format of this album, but I have been able to do what Paul so rarely does when presented with all the possibilities of a double album. I have to remain strong, and kill his darlings for him. I am going to take those darlings down to the creek and go all ‘Of Mice and Men’ on their ass.

Obviously from the album we had “Bogey Music”, that made me feel absolutely no emotion when I struck it from the list. Normally I would at least feel joy at the prospect of removing such filth, but in all honesty the song is so offensively sloppy and poorly thought out that I can’t even take sadistic pleasure when I get rid of it.

Then moving from one nostril to another we have ‘Bogey Wobble’ which does what I thought to be the impossible, but somehow it managed to make a song almost as annoying as ‘Bogey Music’. Man, am I glad Paul moved onto the Rupert the Bear schtick quickly after this cus all this bogey talk is really starting to bring me down.

And finally we have ‘All You Horse Riders/Blue Sway’, and the most obvious reason it was not included is that even if the ‘All You Horse Riders’ segment was not a completely turgid piece of ear-scraping keyboard farts, the second half of this song is a painful reminder that ‘Blue Sway’ was anything other than the wonderfully realised Richard Niles extravaganza that it is. So yeah, lets erase the past with this one. Erasing, rather than learning from, the past is always the best thing to do right?

Now that you’ve had time to digest my own reinterpretation of history, its time for you to get in on the action! Leave a comment down below or drop us an email at paulmccartneypod@gmail.com and let me know what I got right and wrong about “McCartney II 2“. What songs would you have kept, or removed? Would you have changed the track listing or would you had been more faithful? But most importantly of all…did this even deserve to be turned back into a double album, or should I have just let it be?

Again drop us an email at paulmccartneypod@gmail.com, or leave a comment below!

And, there we have it folks, I am indeed back, I have gone for oh so long, I can only apologise, and throw myself at your mercy! I will be explaining my lack of content and general poor treatment of you, my wonderful audience members in my podcast, and in an upcoming article titled ‘The Top 11 Paul McCartney Breakup Songs”. If you can’t guess it by now…you’ll just have to wait.

But, in all seriousness whether you are a returning reader after all these months, or if this is your first time here, thank you. Thank you for reading this article, I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. You are all the lifeblood of this blog, and your constant support is always appreciated.

Peace and love, peace and love.

If you found this article interesting you can, of course, find all of our other blog posts here on the site, and you can check them out at your leisure!!! Which you totally should by the way.

BUT, if you would like hours of free, exclusive McCartney content then check out the podcast that started this whole thing off. Find “Paul or Nothing” on any iTunes, Podbean, YouTube and all reliable podcast sources. FOR FREE.

On “Paul or Nothing” we review every album from Paul McCartney after the release of the Beatles, movie reviews, gig reviews, as well as interviews from scholars, musicians, and authors. The show is always growing, and trying to find ever weirder and specific elements of McCartney’s incredible life and turn it into ear food.