Classic Album Review: Wings - Wingspan (2001)

I’m breaking some rules by listing yet another compilation as a classic album, but you know – my blog, my rules, no rules, guilty pleasures, etc. 

Sir Paul McCartney has worn many hats over the years. Beatle, Wings commander-in-chief, and prolific solo artist, just for starters. For many he was the outstanding “composer” of the 20th century, and alongside John Lennon, Macca was one half of the most commercially successful songwriting duo of the Rock n Roll era. 

Even today, in 2021, he continues to attract all manner of critical praise for his work on the late 2020 album, McCartney III. I haven’t visited that release as yet, and to be perfectly honest I probably won’t. But I do want to share some love for McCartney and offer some thoughts on one of the very best compilation sets in my entire music collection.

Just as the album title suggests, Wingspan offers a comprehensive overview of McCartney’s post-Beatles career from 1970 through to the turn of the millennium, featuring 40-odd* tracks spread over two discs. So much so, it actually goes a little beyond the music of Wings and includes material from a few of McCartney’s solo efforts. 

(*As I understand it, there’s a slight difference between the UK and US versions of the album, and apparently the Japanese edition features a bonus track). 

I’ve always had something of a massive soft spot for the music of Wings. The band was one of the staples of my childhood - always there or thereabouts in the charts, and always on the radio. 

So I was pleased when Wingspan was released in 2001. Offering a 2-album set that included a number of unheralded gems and album cuts beyond the obvious hits. Which was a lovely bonus at a time when I had no other McCartney compilations in my collection and had long considered buying the far less expansive Wings Greatest (1978) just to tick that box. 

The two discs are quite distinct: one contains the band’s biggest hits, the other contains the less obvious stuff and wider coverage of McCartney’s solo work. 

I can’t really add anything about Paul McCartney’s music that hasn’t already been said, but I would dispute the notion - one I’ve seen punted often - that the Wings period of his career was something of a low ebb for McCartney. Yes, there were some patchy or uneven albums, but the same is true of late-career Beatles work, and certainly true when it comes to assessing the “solo” output of the rest of the fab four. 

I just think the music of Wings deserves a lot more love.

Just a few of Wingspan’s highlights: ‘Listen To What The Man Said’, ‘Band On The Run’, ‘Another Day’, ‘My Love’, ‘Silly Love Songs’, ‘Goodnight Tonight’, ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, ‘With A Little Luck’, ‘The Lovely Linda’, ‘Maybe I'm Amazed’, ‘Every Night’, ‘Junk’, and ‘Take It Away’ …

Classic Album Review: The Beatles - Revolver (1966)

So far as classic albums go, The Beatles’ 1966 effort, Revolver, has to rate right up there with the very best of them. Although often pushed hard by Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road, and the White Album when those ubiquitous “Beatles’ Best” lists are compiled, the general consensus is that Revolver is the one to have best stood the test of time. The one that still resonates most some 50-plus years on, and perhaps even one of the rare few that has improved with age.

Certainly, for my money, it is the most consistent studio set The Beatles ever released, and it does tend to showcase the band at its formidable peak. Rather than go into too much detail here - after all, if you’re reading this you’re unlikely to need an introduction to the band or what it sounds like - I’ll just list the key tracks to be found on Revolver:

‘Taxman’ (the opener), ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, and the feted closer ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Then of course there’s Ringo’s most famous composition, the throwaway studio sing-along, ‘Yellow Submarine’. A little bit of something for everyone there and some terrific stuff from one of the most important bands of all-time. 

Any serious music consumer ought to be ashamed (yep, ashamed!) if they don’t already own a copy of Revolver. Buy it, download it, steal it from your parents, do whatever you need to do, but make sure a copy in some format is never too far from your fingertips. That’s all you really need to know.

Classic Album Review: The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

For the first two decades following its 1967 release, a good number of commentators duly rated Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as not only a landmark work for The Beatles, but as something close to the “greatest album of all-time” … as though it’s actually even possible to evaluate such a thing – see various NME polls and magazine lists across several generations.

But time allows for reassessment, and some 50 years on from its release, we’re afforded a much wider screen perspective on just where Sgt Pepper might sit, and it’s probably fair to say the subsequent couple of decades have seen the album somewhat downgraded from its original untouchable status. 

There is no question that the album is a work of art – musically, conceptually, and within the overall context of its time. I don’t think it’s always fully appreciated how much The Beatles improved as a band after making the decision to stop touring and performing live in 1966. The Sgt Pepper album in many respects captures that new found sense of creativity and freedom, unburdened as the band undoubtedly was from the more immediate and intense pressure of performing before an adoring public on a regular basis.

Not having to worry about how the music would translate on stage or in a live environment threw up a raft of new sonic possibilities for the band. Musical ideas that an equally adventurous (producer) George Martin was also keen to explore further. In a way, the shackles had been released, and the music of The Beatles was evolving way beyond the short sharp three-minute bursts of pop perfection it had relied so heavily on in the past.

Yet, curiously, it’s rarely an album I can play in its entirety without resorting to skipping the odd track. Despite the presence of some real gems, it feels a little patchy, or almost as though there’s actually too much going on in places. A side effect, a downside, or a problematic consequence of that level of experimentation, perhaps. I remain a fan of the album, and I’m not denying it showcases a remarkable amount of sheer genius, but I’m also pretty sure that it’s not even the best Beatles album out there (see Revolver), let alone the greatest of all-time.

Many tracks have endured to become classic rock standards: ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and the masterful ‘A Day In The Life’ (clip below), in particular. But generally the album is fleshed out with quirky novelty cuts – I’ll stop short of calling it “filler” because this is The Beatles after all – with the likes of ‘Lovely Rita’, ‘When I’m Sixty Four’, and ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’ all unlikely to have made much sense beyond the context of this album.

I also think Sgt Pepper could have been improved by the inclusion of ‘Strawberry Fields’, the superb single of the same year, a song that embraced the flower power counter-culture ethos of 1967 quite unlike any other, one that wound up on the less celebrated Magical Mystery Tour release.

Nonetheless it remains an excellent album, a collectable, and a genuine timepiece … even if it’s not quite the unsurpassed piece of work it was once considered to be.

 

 

 

Classic Album Review: The Beatles - Let It Be Naked (2003)

After posting the album review for The Beatles’ Love, it occurred to me that it took some 375 posts before everythingsgonegreen finally got around to covering The Beatles in any detail. Which is a pretty shocking state of affairs when you consider what a monumental pop cultural influence that band has been throughout my lifetime. Even more so when you consider that The Beatles were one of the first bands I truly loved – as a child, before the rather more rebellious teenager, and later, even more cynical adult, came along. Even today though, the band’s Revolver album still rates in any notional all-time top five albums, if I was pressed to name them. With Sgt Pepper not far behind. So, yes, coverage of The Beatles was a long time in coming and definitely overdue. But just like a number 17 bus, you wait an age for one, and then two come along at once. So here’s another one, another classic album review written some time ago. A variation on the same theme – a reconfigured classic album in the form of Let It Be, the 2003 Naked version. Most definitely not a George Martin creation:

*

It always seemed there was a direct correlation between The Beatles’ decision to stop touring/performing live (post-1966), and a distinct improvement in the quality of the band’s studio output/albums - see Revolver ’66, Sgt Pepper ’67, and the White Album ’68.

That’s a fairly strong run, whatever your poison, and those albums were all pivotal in sealing the band’s standing as iconic pioneers of the album format, far removed from the lovable boy band/singles band status of earlier years.

The same can’t be said about the band’s final studio album however, and by the time the original Let It Be album was released in 1970, The Beatles were a band in name only. Any sense of unity, commitment to each other, or indeed, genuine collective inspiration, had long since disappeared.

Let It Be was a swansong, but despite its undoubted historical significance, and one or two truly exceptional moments, it won’t go down as a classic Beatles album. Far from it - in fact, many of the recordings made in 1969 were originally shelved (others being released on Abbey Road), such was the group’s general nonchalance about the project. George Harrison actually threatened to quit the group while the 1969 sessions were still in progress.

Let It Be represented the sound of a band at the end of its tether, and the fact that the post-production reins were handed to Phil Spector suggests they knew as much at the time. Spector, famous for his “wall of sound” style of production, was belatedly called in to tart up the shelved recordings - something that evidently bugged Paul McCartney for the best part of three subsequent decades. Let It Be Naked is the result of McCartney’s attempt to de-Spector-ise (and remix) the original release. For better or for worse.

Essentially what you get on Naked is Let It Be stripped right back to its bare core - the most obvious development being the removal of the strings so beloved of Spector at the time of the original. The result is a marginally improved album, but certainly nothing spectacular, and sceptics will argue that the release of Naked in 2003 was nothing but another cynical attempt to milk the cash cow that The Beatles’ back catalogue has become.

I’m not so sure I agree with that sentiment entirely, and I’ll take the project at face value - as a genuine attempt to right what McCartney and others perceived to be a long-standing wrong. On Naked, aside from stripping back the excessive production - mostly to discard the decoration and gloss provided by Spector - the track-list also gets something of a minor revamp. This probably improves things slightly, placing as it does a raw version of ‘Get Back’ as a barnstorming album opener, and including the much-heralded ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (absent from the original Let It Be, but the B-side on the ‘Get Back’ single release) as a welcome additional track.

As you might expect, the most obvious changes can be picked up on the best known stuff from the original Let It Be; the era-defining title track itself (the album closer), the epic ‘Long And Winding Road’ (a much improved version here), and John Lennon’s brilliant dream-like ‘Across The Universe’. Even after the exercise in revamping the original versions, it is these tracks - plus ‘Get Back’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ - that stand out as the album’s best cuts. Proof surely, if it was needed, that regardless of any enhancement or additional production, you just can’t beat a quality tune.

Naked is a slight improvement on the original, but Let It Be was always an album of extremes (uneven in terms of quality), and it always contained a little too much filler for my liking.

My CD edition came with a bonus disc, which turned out to be a bit of a throwaway item really, containing mostly conversation snippets and short rehearsal extracts from the original recording sessions. In these post-Anthology days, it represents nothing particularly new or exciting, neither is it an especially riveting listen. But hardcore Beatles fans may beg to differ on these points given that it does offer a brief insight (albeit a limited one) into the inner workings of a band very much on the cusp of self-destruction.

Classic Album Review: The Beatles - Love (2006)

Long-time BBC studio guru and renowned producer of The Beatles during their heyday, Sir George Martin, died yesterday, aged 90. I wanted to pay tribute to him in some form, so I’ve re-written an album review I originally wrote for another site a few years back. It relates to the 2006 Beatles compilation album Love, which was surely one of the more ambitious projects of Martin’s semi-retired later years:

It was once something of a default tradition at the everythingsgonegreen mansion. Each Christmas the notoriously “hard to buy for” old man (aka yours truly) got another Beatles CD from the kids.

I was belatedly (and rather forlornly) attempting to replace all of the old Beatles albums from my own childhood – on worn out old LPs/tapes, most of them awol – with a digitalised version, and the ankle-biters had taken it upon themselves to help me out. Bless.

It started with Sgt Pepper, next up came Revolver, then Let It Be (the “Naked” version), and in 2006, it was the (then) new release double CD of Love holding pride of place at the foot of my otherwise rather barren looking Christmas stocking.

It more or less became the “done thing”, but one of the problems with such an exercise was that the ever-expanding Beatles back catalogue just kept getting bigger and bigger with each passing year. One Beatles purchase per year just didn’t cut it, and birthdays had to be targeted lest I ran out of time in my quest to compile the complete collection.

And as my dear old Scottish granny used to say … “it could be later than you think, son” … what a pleasant thought!

As it turned out, a few years later, I wound up downloading the entire Beatles catalogue (every album) in a remastered digital format, which isn’t quite the same, but it ultimately served the same purpose.

Love (aka the Cirque du Soliel album) is a wide-ranging collection of Beatles standards done in an entirely refreshing and not so standard way, with lesser known cuts and old favourites given a fresh coat of gloss by the only master painter truly capable of doing them justice. Legendary producer George Martin and son Giles were able to embrace the then relatively new “mash-up” technology, where stems are separated and songs are blended together to produce a brand new remarkably fresh sounding track.

There is excellent track selection throughout – with especially compelling versions of ‘Strawberry Fields’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Yesterday’, and ‘A Day In The Life’; plus the four George Harrison classics (each one a gem), and the closer ‘All You Need Is Love’ (blatant advertising if ever there was!).

A couple of small complaints – how good would it have been if the bonus Audio DVD had actually been, you know, a video DVD with a compilation of Beatles footage and/or at least a series of classic photo stills to further emphasise the mood of the times? And there’s a transitional bit right at the end of ‘Help!’ … leading into ‘Blackbird/Yesterday’ … where ‘Help!’ is cut in such an abrupt fashion I almost thought the CD was faulty.

Overall though, Love was a more than worthy new/belated addition to the Beatles catalogue.

Sir George Martin R.I.P.