Album reviews: Paul McCartney: Kisses on the Bottom | Ringo Starr: Ringo 2012

By FIONA SHEPHERD
Published on Monday 6 February 2012 00:00

The two surviving Beatles indulge themselves with tracks that at their best manage to sound a bit like the Fab Four, but are in the main plodding pub rock

Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond have written the book on how your everyday musical legend might age with dignity and integrity.

But those guys were born old. What if your music helped to define the very idea of the teenager in the first place? How do you face old age when you wrote the soundtrack for a global youthquake?

The two surviving Beatles, whose latest solo albums have been released only a week apart, are currently perched on either side of 70. Both are feeling nostalgic but they express it in contrasting ways: one settles down with pipe and slippers, while the other indulges in a little late-life crisis.

Paul McCartney, commanding by far the greater public interest, has finally succumbed to his long-percolating desire to record an album of old American standards, “the songs that inspired the songs”. Well, it’s not as if his recent original albums have been anything to shout about. Plus Rod Stewart has amassed a tidy pension doing precisely the same.

But Kisses On The Bottom emerges as more of a labour of love than an easy fallback option. McCartney’s admiration for the Tin Pan Alley songwriters was signposted all the way through The Beatles’ career from their cover of Till There Was You to pastiche originals such as Honey Pie and When I’m 64, written when he was all of 16.

Here he rummages around the songbooks of Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer and Irving Berlin for tunes previously recorded by Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman. Some credit is due for a quirky selection that throws up the unexpected likes of My Very Good Friend The Milkman, Bye Bye Blackbird and Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.

But in the end, McCartney and his band of jazz hands, including Diana Krall on piano, are unable to bring anything fresh to their interpretations. Their tastefully wrought palette of delicate piano tinkling, wistful strings, jazz guitar and descending double bass to finish is still pure lounge bar fodder, no matter how professionally executed.

McCartney is not a remarkable singer and it shows here, though his vocal limitations work to his advantage on More I Cannot Wish You from Guys & Dolls, conveying a vulnerability which suits the lyrics. Likewise, the kids’ nursery rhyme The Inch Worm is invested with a wistful melancholy reminiscent of the music in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

The album also features a couple of McCartney originals, forged in the same spirit. Only Our Hearts is a passable pastiche with Stevie Wonder on harmonica but My Valentine is an undeniably fine love song for new wife Nancy Shevell, with echoes of some of the Beatles’ most affecting minor key moments, and Eric Clapton on dulcet acoustic guitar solo. Presumably songs of this calibre don’t come his way very often these days or we might have had a whole satisfying album of them.

Ringo Starr beat his former bandmate to this nostalgia malarkey by over 40 years with his debut solo album, Sentimental Journey, which also included a version of Bye Bye Blackbird. In this respect alone, he is ahead of the McCartney curve.

His 17th solo album is as uncomplicated and devoid of imagination as its title, which makes a wishful reference to his eponymous album from 1973. Although he musters more originals than McCartney, Ringo 2012 feels short on content. Of its nine songs, two are covers and two are re-recordings of old Starr numbers, and the entire effort clocks in under 30 minutes.

Not to be outdone by Sir Paul, Starr has assembled an impressive cast list, securing cameos by Van Dyke Parks on keyboards, Edgar Winter on organ, Don Was on bass and Joe Walsh on guitar. But there is little they can do in the face of such woeful rhyming couplets as “people are dyin’, there’s no denyin’” from the opening Anthem, a wholesale rip-off of The Beatles’ Birthday.

Of the rest of the new material, Wonderful is one for the wife, Slow Down is his and Walsh’s competent note to selves, while there is possibly a carefree surf pop confection buried somewhere under the hoary Samba. The trite, sentimental In Liverpool, co-written with Dave Stewart, is the third in a Scouse trilogy spread across his most recent albums which is, if anything, worse than George Harrison’s risible When We Was Fab.

The self-covers serve no purpose. Step Lightly, for example, throws out the jazz sashay of his 1973 original to make room for a plodding drumbeat. His clumsy take on Buddy Holly’s Think It Over and a clodhopping pub arrangement of Rock Island Line are no better.

The whole leaden affair sounds like the work of an old rocker who is just keeping his hand in – proof, if it were needed, that the most distinguished veteran efforts come from those musicians who are driven by the need to make music, rather than those who simply want to.

Paul McCartney: Kisses on the Bottom

Hear Music, £12.99

Rating: **

Ringo Starr: Ringo 2012

Universal/UMC, £12.99

Rating: *

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donald marr

Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 10:26 AM

McCartney an unremarkable singer? His voice is not what it was,time takes it's toll. Nevertheless Fiona the man has been remarkable in so many ways of which you seem to be unaware,I fear you are not fit to pass judgement on him.

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