Macca's at it again.....
 

....in this recent interview, the usual Macca modesty and humility shines through:

When it comes to music, enthusiasm is what drives me. And because I'm enjoying myself, I never see anything that I do as a risk, I just see it as a bit of fun. In the Beatles we didn't even think Sgt Peppers was a risk at the time. The newspapers did. One said: "The Beatles have dried up, they've not come out with anything for six months, they're finished!" And we were there, sniggering, thinking "Ha!"
But I like pushing the boundaries a little bit because it keeps things fresh.
The key is that I don't ever think what I'm doing is ever that important. Other people have, and the more you accumulate success, the more doing anything different is a bit of a risk. But I don't view it like that - I view it as having fun, I've got to enjoy myself on stage or in a studio. And I still feel it's a privilege to get in the studio with a guitar and an amp. Some people have got past that and they're a bit jaded - but I still look at the amp in the studio and go "wow".
I do it for myself. It's a little bit indulgent, but I do it for myself.
Being far out is not something I'm known for too much, but I do enjoy that side of things. If you look at things I've done, from Why Don't We Do It in the Road, which is kind of out-there, to Carnival of Light, which is so out there it hasn't even been released, you can see I like experimenting. I don't like this phrase "more than John", though. We grew up as a couple of kids in Liverpool and I think we were both as earnest and experimental as each other.
In the 60s, I happened to have more opportunity to do some of that
stuff because I was living on my own in London, whereas John was in the countryside in Weybridge and married so he was a little bit more pipe and slippers! I was out in the clubs and Wigmore Hall, catching people like Cornelius Cardew. I was into Stockhausen and stuff. So I had more of an opportunity but I don't think that made me more experimental than John. I just possibly did a bit more during that period. And John ended up with Revolution No 9 so, perception wise, he was the most experimental Beatle. But that was something I'd been doing off-piste, as we say in the skiing business. I'd been doing it for a hobby and he was smart enough to bring it into the main event. That was John's courage. But I think we were both equally experimental.
With the Fireman, again, it was just playing around and having fun. It was just me and [Fireman partner] Youth goofing off to a groove. But because we've got into the territory of songs, rather than just hypnotic one-chord music, it was different. We fancied a change and Youth suggested I sang. I said I had no songs, so he said let's try it. I had no idea what would happen - I had to say to the engineer "don't laugh". So I just went up to the mic and goofed around and ad-libbed it. I ended up finding words - I'd been reading poetry books – kept singing all these things at the track and eventually a song came out of it. That's how the Fireman found his voice - through experimentation.
In fact, the whole project was quite like improvisational theatre, which I've never been involved in. But I can now see the excitement of someone like Mike Leigh telling you that you are now a shop assistant called Dennis! So when you get into that Mike Leigh situation, you've got to draw on your resources. I was drawing on my songwriting experience. I'd pull things out at random. We'd sit down and have a chat. And Youth will pass round some poetry books. I'll choose a couple of words at random. So like "Use this approach", you'll take "this approach" and start working on the word approach. But I sourced it from people like Burroughs and Ginsberg, and it was like cut-up technique, Burroughs' technique of the cut-ups, very random but also very liberating.
The thing about experimenting is that it's good fun. It's interesting to do something you don't do normally. It takes you into places you didn't plan to go to. That's quite an interesting aspect. Linda always liked to go for a drive and try and get lost. Most drivers don't want to get lost - but she'd like it. And that idea of losing your bearings, as long as it's not in deepest Africa, is something I like. I've always liked it. Because when you don't always know what's going on, that's when you can really surprise yourself.

Summary: "I WAS THE AVANT-GARDE ONE IN THE BEATLES!"

Hmm. "Frog Chorus", anyone?

So...John had more courage but Paul was doping more of it....I say look at the solo output. Any Wings record vs. Plastic Ono Band.

Exactly, good point my man.

Man I fucking hate Paul McCartney.

I like George Harrison's comment on avant garde music,'avant garde a clue' on the wiki entry,made me chortle.

Revolution no 9 backwards,anyone else heard this?-

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PG0wks...eature=related

McCartney, Band on the Run, Ram...all better than any Lennon solo. Fly by Yoko also beats any Lennon solo.

It's true that Paul was a far greater fan and supporter of the avant-garde than John was, at least in the mid-sixties. John had serious issues regarding his middle class upbringing (hence the fallacy of his song 'Working Class Hero') This led to him self-consciously dismissing the avant-garde quite early on as being 'a bit bourgeois'. The far more solidly working class Paul on the other hand had no such hang ups, and forged direct ties to the Indica Gallery, I.T, the Arts Lab, the UFO club, etc, into which he put his own time and money in order to keep them active, as well as championing their cause to a broader audience on television interviews. The Magical Mystery Tour film, in essence a Macca solo project, explored and attempted to popularise a number of ideas he was being exposed to at places like the Arts Lab. And he's right about working through a lot of these ideas earlier than John's Revolution 9, usually in anonymous collaboration with figures like Miles and John Dunbar. Although a number of these projects may have ended up being quite naive in their outcome, they were definitely quite sincere in their inspiration. There's a chapter in Barry Miles' biography of Macca that goes into his infatuation with the avant-garde during this period in fascinating detail.

John's reservations about the avant-garde only really broke when he met Yoko, but on reflection seems more the result of his infatuation with her (as well as a bid to free himself from the legacy of The Beatles) than with the avant-garde itself. Even when he moved to America and became more involved in their counterculture, his interest was far more focused on its political activism side than it was experimentation in art. As a result, I think its therefore true to say that, from the very beginning, Paul had a far more instinctive interest in the avant-garde than could be said for John. And even when John did begin to embrace it (as Jennthebenn mentions) there's little real evidence of any avant-garde experimention going on within his solo output outside of that provided by Yoko. Plastic Ono Band may have been a far better album than McCartney, or Ram, but was it really any more experimental? On that score you'd have to say that George Harrison's early solo output, like 1968's Wonderwall Music and 1969's Electronic Sound albums eclipse both, and tend to betray the flippancy of his previously mentioned 'avant garde a clue' quote.

What a total load of crap.

Yeah, the only thing that's legit is the number 9 "turn me on dead man" part.

I think Paul at one point was involved in the avant garde back in the sixties, but then he had his flirtation with it and stopped later on. Back in 67 though when the beatles were at the height of their experimenting (physically and mentally) Paul would go down to the UFO club to hear the weird fringe bands. He gave a ringing endorsement for Piper when it came out and thats far from a normal record.

This whole new business is as everyones saying though, Macca seeking to show he was avant garde too,but the truth is he was, so its not some kind of posturing. I am eagerly awaiting to hear this "Carnival of Light" track.

pretty much...for instance...

Before he met Yoko, John was once quoted as saying, "'Avant-garde' is French for 'bullshit'."

Personally, I dislike this inference that the mere act of doing something 'avant-garde' is an end in itself. Paul may well have been more emotionally attached to the 'avant-garde', but maybe John had the confidence because he made 'good' 'avant-garde'. Iincidentally, the only evidence of Paul's avant-stripes I've seen so far has been to mention Stockhausen, AMM, Floyd and no-one else.

This is why I loathe much "improv", especially of the narrow-minded "oh no, they listen to rock and dance!" variety. Merely doing something doesn't make it valid - there has to be some guts and soul in there too. This is why Chris Corsano (for example) is ace, whereas noodling of the Gary Smith variety is not.

Macca was involved in the A.G., as Sir Demonrail rightly points out. If he'd actually released an album of said stuff (either then or now), I would listen to it out of curiosity, if nothing else. I can't help but think though that Sir Thumbsaloft is playing the "experimental" card now though for rather peculiar reasons, and those off-handed digs at Lennon, J are a tad....predictable?

It's easy with hindsight to point to the limitations of Paul's achievements within the avant-garde (just as it's easy to over inflate them). He certainly wasn't any kind of authority on its intricacies, but then again here was a guy in his early-to mid-twenties with a very modest educational background, brought up in an area of Liverpool not exactly known for its cosmopolitanism who was also quite busy at the time maintaining a fairly successful career in pop music. Given all of this he did choose to find out what he could from people that often looked down on him (while quite happy to exploit his fame and fortune). Other people within pop music would eventually exceed Paul's involvement with and knowledge of the avant-garde, but only at a time when it was far more acceptable to do so. McCartney was, after all, coming at it is as a pop musician just a few years after pop had been largely defined around the likes of Elvis, Buddy Holly and Lonnie bloody Donegan (who were hardly seeking inspiration from the Bauhaus, let's face it.) In essence then, I think it's fair to say that Paul was more a supporter of the avant-garde than he was a practitioner, using his wealth and influence to help fund and champion establishments like the Arts Lab at a time when no one else with his kind of profile was exactly rushing to do so.



I'd be the last to deny Macca's capacity for prickery, but given the degree of 'off-handed' digs Paul received from John and Yoko in the years up until Lennon's death (immortalised in the quite horrible, 'How do You Sleep?' song), i'd say that ol' Macca's desire to call into question John's avant-garde credentials are quite mild - if only because they're actually justified.


Ian Peel's book 'The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde' provides loads of examples of more experimental focused singles, albums and eps that he's produced over the years under various pseudonyms. Admittedly, much of this isn't very good and tends to demonstrate his inability not to situate experiments within quite insipid conventional forms (as with his stuff under the Fireman moniker). But in a way, that's something I've always found interesting about McCartney's engagement with the avant-garde: it's never been used as a thing in itself, but rather as a means of opening up his quite traditional brand of songwriting. In that sense, he really can be described as someone who 'used' the avant-garde, rather than simply falling blindly into it in a way that, it could be argued, someone like Lennon did in his collaborations with Yoko.

Interesting points, Sir DR666. Paul M probably did a lot more to help promote the A.G. "behind the scenes", than he would have done as an active member of it. Perhaps he was also mindful of the reputation of the Beatles etc in the public sphere at that time, and may have been seen as a dilettante should he have actually taken active part, in a musical sense.....all speculation, of course.....Isn't it the case too that JL helped fund publication of "OZ", "International Times" etc - perhaps an "avant-garde" response to the more established forms of media at that time?

Fair points Herr Rail, I wouldn't disagree with any of them. I'm more getting at the notion in the popular consciousness that the 'avant-garde' is somehow in opposition to 'pop' forms, or that avant-garde is a term applied to anything which falls outside of the major narrative of 'popular music'. To me, 'avant-garde' has scant accurate application - it certainly doesn't mean some nonsense art student twatting a fan with fish. This is the problem with more music than I'd care to name, its conceptual forebears over-rides whether or not it's worthwhile art. 'Avant-garde' thereby rendered as a list of influences, utterly invalidating its major project of expanding the qualias of sense, inclusivity surrendered to enforced false-alienation.

Apologies if I'm sounding like a Marxist.

I believe he did, yes. But again, this was at a time when it was becoming quite acceptable to do so. The idea of an 'alternative society' of which the underground press had become its unofficial voice had been quite widely established by the time Lennon became actively involved - again, largely around the time he met Yoko. McCartney had also sort of forced his hand a bit, when proclaiming on ITN news that The Beatles took drugs - a disclosure that Lennon went ballisitic about. So in a way, Lennon was being pushed into the underground (so to speak) against his will. Once there however, and faced with an increasingly hostile mainstream press (as well as a police force keen to bust any pop star it could find) the underground press was something he became increasingly relient on, and so it makes sense that he'd eventually have to support it. I'm not saying that Lennon's entire relationship with the Underground was that cynical - his commitment to the various radical movements in the US which threatened to have him expelled from the country demonstrates his passion for such causes. However, his early move into this area was, i think, brought about more by circumstances outside of his control than any real initial empathy towards it.


While i agree with you, there is, as you know, a strand within the avant-garde itself (most notably popularised by Greenberg and Adorno) which sees the tradition very much in this way - as some kind of antidote to 'popular' or 'kitsch' culture. Personally, I think the avant-garde has always been at its strongest when engaging directly with popular culture (as happened with, for example, the surrealists in their commitment to Hollywood cinema) rather than simply rejecting it. What's more, this tactic of engagement between supposedly 'high' and 'low' cultural forms within the avant-garde serves to almost entirely undermine the relevance of a term like postmodernism, which is always handy.

the avant-garde is constantly sliding into the mainstream, and those that were avant-garde one year are the establishment of the next year. No one stays avant-garde, and thos ethat actively try to stay weird and new and cutting edge are the biggest posers of all.....rant over. <<self-friend out>>.

I suppose this very much depends on whether we're synonymising* avant-garde with innovative. I think the latter is a much more important category, and much less inclined toward suckling at the blackened, sour teat of Theodor Prickface. My notion of a 'real' avant-garde is very much like the sort of arguments bandied about during the enlightenment - true and real, so long as no actual particulars get in the way of a good concept. 'Innovative' is almost a cheaper description, in that it can bend contingently, but it also threatens to include Timbaland or Xenomania in the same litany as Ligeti or Part. This is obviously related my general argument about the difference between good postmodernism and bad readers, which I shan't bore the general populace of SYG with.

*Yeah, I said that. So what?

I think this problem of definition is endless. There are probably more attempts at defining the avant-garde than there are actual examples of it. As with your 'innovative', I used to use the term 'experimental' but, as with your observation about someone like Timbaland, such a term can be used far too broadly for it to really mean anything. I mean yes, Timbaland is experimental and innovative, but so is Joyce, and there's clearly a difference between the two. (Aside from the fact that one writes music, the books!) All culture experiments, or innovates to some degree so it must be something else. I think the easiest, if not the most fulfilling, way of thinking about the avant-garde is to look at it strictly as a historical moment, existing primarily within europe and the Soviet Union during the 1920s and early 30s, when it was effectively destroyed by the joint forces of Stalinism and Fascism. There's a strong argument that counters this, suggesting that totalitarianism didn't kill the avant-garde but simply forced it to relocate to America with the enormous amount of emigre artists and intellectuals moving there in the 30s and 40s. But that just complicates things even more.

I suppose that instinctively people know what's being referred to when they say avant-garde, even if they can't fully define it. We sort of know that by asking whether Macca had an interest in the avant-garde we mean if he had an interest in experimental or innovative work being produced outside of the 'mainstream'. And while these are all loaded terms we sort of know what they refer to.

interesting thread

the trouble i get is that when someone describes their own work as 'Avant-Garde' or 'experimental' i get suspicious. Surley if your creating something worthwhile it will come out in whatever form is most honest to you?

By trying tio be avant-garde or experimantal or whatever (in essence, by "trying to be" rather than just "being") doesn't it make the piece invalid?

I think that can be the case. But if someone says they're trying to make, say, a rap record does that make it invalid compared with someone who just starts rapping into a tape recorder? Surely the real test is the end result. The problem with a word like 'avant-garde' I suppose is that it has certain associations with value as much as it does style. To make an avant-garde piece is often perceived as superior to making something, for want of a better description, 'conventional'.

Ultimately though, I think "trying to be" avant-garde is an acceptable method so long as the result is itself "avant-garde" (whatever that may be). Saying that, McCartney has, to my knowledge, never really tried to be avant-garde and nor has anything he's ever done really fit into that category. I think in his case it's more that he was interested in what people working within the avant-garde were doing, and tried to incorporate some of their ideas into his own work. The same could be said of his so-called 'classical' work which, if you listen to it (not that anyone should, on account of its utter shittiness) is far more akin to some of the soundtrack work he did in the sixties with George Martin than it is classical in the usual sense. It seems that here again, Paul was more interested in adopting ideas from another style and adapting them to his own than moving head-first into it.
In that sense I suppose it's more a case of inspiration rather than aspiration.

thats a very good point, theres nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from any/everything

I think there's an interesting parallel to be drawn here between McCartney and Holger Czukay. Both bass players, obviously, but also two musicians who came from opposing musical backgrounds that became inspired by what was happening at opposing ends of their spectrum. What's key for me though is that both had sufficient confidence in their own abilities not to want to completely abandon one style for the other, preferring instead to create a kind of hybrid between the two. I'd have to say that, in their respective pursuit of this, Czukay was without question the more successful of the two, but the parallel still holds some water I think.

Agreed. Bottom line: Pop or Avantegarde, Can's music sounds much better and is still influencial today, both directly and indirectly. While most Wings output is forgettable and listened to mainly for nostalgic purposes.

Well yeah but, to be fair, I was thinking more of McCartney's work with The Beatles than with Wings. Not wishing to undermine the magnificence of a song like 'Jet', it was hardly any kind of union between pop and the avant-garde. But yes, I do think Can were a more successful hybrid than The Beatles - and that even within the Beatles itself, John was probably the more successful at fusing the two currents than Paul was.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008...eman-interview

more macca bollocks

I think he's honest about the Beatles period in that interview. He WAS hanging out with Ginsberg and Burroughs, etc. And Dunbar himself has confirmed that his now lost experimental tape loops did exist at one time.

Regarding his later 'experiments' I have the new Firemen CD and frankly it's rubbish. A sort of lazy, middle of the road new age thing that at times comes close to some of Harrison's electronic solo stuff in the late sixties, but isn't anywhere near as good in my opinion. I think the problem with him working in collaboration with Youth is that he's overawed by the ex-Beatle (despite Maccas claims to the contrary in an interview in The Stool Pigeon, i read recently.) I've always thought that if McCartney were to work with a producer now, it should be Eno. I think there'd be a mutual respect in that partnership that I simply can't think of with any other candidate. If anyone could uncover whether there's any creative juices left in McCartney, it's him.

Although I have to admit that all this is only of any real significance to boring old Maccaphiles like myself. That anyone else would be even the slightest bit interested in McCartney's bid to re-establish himself is slim indeed. I gave up waiting for him to do anything worthwhile along time ago. I just keep buying his stuff, reading his interviews, following his career out of a kind of bizarre, and increasingly masochistic, habit that, frankly, I'd do well to kick.

Oh, and if he did invent electro, then my name is Ralf Hutter.

yeah, sorry. I didn't mean bollocks as in 'lies', i meant bollocks as in 'not that interesting' to most people. I love that he hung out with Ginsberg and Buroughs but i dont expect most people to care!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008...ney-thebeatles

he's at it again. Now he's claiming that he was the political Beatle

Thanks for that. I'll definitely need to pick up the next issue of Prospect to get the full interview.
From that article's account, I think Paul might be overdoing it with words like 'politicised'. He may have been the first to be exposed to what was going on in Vietnam (as much through his contact with Ginsberg as with his meeting with Russell). He may also have been the one who then informed the rest of the band about what was going on. But being aware, and even shocked, by events doesn't necessarily lead to a process of politicisation. To be honest, I'm doubtful as to just how politicised the Beatles ever really were - even in the late sixties: a time when it was a very much a required stance within the 'underground'. They never to my knowledge recorded a particularly pro-Revolution song ('Revolution' is hardly a call to arms in that sense) and songs such as 'All You Need is Love' hardly reflected the more militant, radical turn emerging within the counter-culture at that time. Certainly by around 67-68 it was the Stones, not the Beatles, who were beginning to be seen as the more 'radical' by an increasingly politicised Underground. So while I'd still say that Lennon was the more politically aware Beatle, I think it was Yoko, not Paul, who had the greatest influence on his move in this area - and that this took place largely after he'd left the Beatles (and Britain) altogether.

It raises an interesting point though. Thanks again for the link.