Paul McCartney - Press To Play

The first half of the 1980s were something of a roller coaster ride for Sir Paul McCartney. He started the decade by breaking off from his wildly successful second band, Wings, and put out a weird little album he recorded at home, McCartney II. Then came Tug of War, which included the hits "Take It Away" and "Ebony and Ivory," a duet with Stevie Wonder. The album made #1 in the US and UK. He followed it with the less popular but still profitable Pipes of Peace, which featured the duet with Michael Jackson "Say Say Say." Then came Give My Regards to Broad Street, the film Paul penned himself and also starred in. It was panned by the critics, and considered by the public and McCartney himself as a flop.

McCartney decided he needed a change, and wanted to update his sound, apparently. He enlisted the help of Dave Stewart of 10cc and they co-wrote 6 of the songs that ended up on Press to Play. The album was co-produced by Hugh Padgham, who had worked one David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Genesis’ Invisible Touch. The album did worse than any other solo McCartney or Wings album in the US, not reaching gold record status and only making it to 30 on the charts. It was marginally better received in the U.K. Critics’ reviews are mixed; Rolling Stone’s Anthony Decurtis called the album “one of the sturdiest LPs of McCartney’s post-Beatles career” in his 1986 review. I poked around to try and find more recent reviews to see how other people felt this album held up and couldn’t find much of anything – so let me get down to it!

I should disclose that the Beatles have always been my favorite band. I own all of Paul McCartney’s albums in one form or another, and I have had a vinyl copy of Press To Play since I was in 4^th or 5^th grade. I have listened to bits and pieces over the years; mostly it has collected dust. The album is hard to approach, as it sounds so incredibly dated. All the songs have that awful gated drum sound (which Hugh Padgham is credited with creating, at least by Wikipeda!), the corny keyboards. Windchimes abound. If you are able to push past it and listen for the actual music, you come up with a couple interesting songs worth spending some time with. The first song, “Stranglehold,” is a fun rock song with a strong driving acoustic guitar part underneath everything else. This song would’ve been great if it had been arranged and recorded in a more straightforward manner. The next track, “Good Times Comin’/Feel The Sun” would’ve been an enjoyable throwaway track on an album like Venus and Mars or even Back To The Egg, but again, that production takes things down several notches and makes it less fun to listen to. “Footprints” was the initial standout track for me on this album. It is quieter, with some acoustic instruments and the words painting a portrait of a man nearing the end of his life, finding a kind of peace in quiet solitude. This is what McCartney does best, in my opinion – rich and vivid character sketches as in “Eleanor Rigby,” “Another Day,” and the more recent “Mr. Bellamy.”

“Press” was the album’s first and most successful single. A music video was made for the song, featuring Paul riding London’s “tube” system lip-synching the words to the unsuspecting commuters. It’s a cute pop song, catchy and harmless. It overstays its welcome, clocking in at almost five minutes, and has some pretty weird lyrics (what is “Oklahoma was never like this” supposed to mean, anyway?) but overall is an okay track.

Press To Play also contains some of McCartney’s most pretentious and awful songs ever put to tape. “Pretty Little Head” finds Paul singing about hillmen coming down from the lava and Ursas major and minor. Most likely an experiment in obnoxious electronic sounds of the time that was allowed to go waaaaay too far - the song was released as a single and had a music video made for it. The video was added as a part of The McCartney Years DVD set; McCartney says in a commentary track for the video something to the effect of “the song sounds very much of its’ time.” I suppose that’s one way of putting it. The low point of the album and probably my most hated Paul McCartney song of all time is “Talk More Talk.” I would almost advise you to purchase the album just to hear how bad this song is, but I am simply not that cruel. The track is peppered with the speeded up and slowed down voices of Linda and their son, James, talking about grey flannel suits and biodegradable spaceships. The chorus consists of the words “talk more talk, chat more chat” repeated several times. The sound of the song is so obnoxious, everything that is bad about ‘80s production pushed to its’ furthest extreme. Of course, it is the longest song on the album, clocking in at almost 5’30”.

Several guest musicians appear on the album, namely Pete Townshend and Phil Collins playing on the track “Angry.” The song is just O.K., the most interesting thing about it being that the aforementioned musicians are playing on it. As noted in my last entry for Bob Dylan’s Under The Red Sky, it seems like guest musicians are brought in often for their names, to make the liner notes interesting; such is the case here.

Press To Play was an album that sounded pretty good to some upon it’s release; Geoffrey Guliano in his book Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney calls the record a “ten track opus” of “creatively intense soul searching,” and somehow finds it “well constructed and flawlessly produced.” For me without a doubt, the most flawed aspect of this album is the horrendously dated production aesthetic. In most cases the songwriting is not strong enough to hold its own against the grating arrangements, thus making for mostly bad music. I could’ve probably gone on for another thousand words with this entry, as McCartney is one of my top three favorite songwriters, and I can find something to love about each and every one of his tunes. But objectively, I can say this album is not very good. I wouldn’t recommend anyone purchase it unless you are a seriously diehard McCartney fan, in which case you probably already own it. You could download “Stranglehold,” as you will get the best of the songwriting along with a good picture of how the album as a whole sounds, as well as the video edit of “Press” if you can find it. To close, a quote from the man himself, from Guliano’s book: “It didn’t really work out as well as I wanted it to, although we did a couple of nice things. But it wasn’t a very successful album.”

Next up: REM’s 2004 Around The Sun.