Album review: Paul McCartney: McCartney III

Paul McCartney: McCartney III (Capitol Records) ***

Cloistered comfortably on his farm, Sir Paul McCartney is far from the grassroots arts frontline, where musicians, road crew and venues have struggled to keep body and soul together in 2020. But he does share some common cause – the need to be creative and productive and, as McCartney III attests, to have an outlet through which to communicate.

So when the grandkids ask what did you do during the great pandemic of 2020, Macca can point to his third “all Paul” album, following McCartney and McCartney II, which were released respectively in 1970 and 1980.

A mere 40 years on, the enforced isolation of “rockdown” sent him to his home studio, where he began playing around with unfinished songs. There was no initial thought to create an album but here we are at the end of a year, remarkable for all the wrong reasons, with an engaging curio which weaves between simple, insidious ditties and textured meditations.

The crunch, chime and chug of opening gambit Long Tailed Winter Bird is more a jam than a song, with McCartney absently singing along, before the arrangement spreads its wings.

From here, baroque keyboard chords give way to the cheesy, cheery tune of Find My Way, before McCartney uses his fragile-sounding lower register on unvarnished acoustic track Pretty Boys and philosophises on the relationship between the generations on affecting piano ballad Women and Wives.

Lavatory Lil is a throwaway pen portrait with McCartney providing his own beery male chorus. He layers on pitchshifted backing vocals to Deep Deep Feeling which develops from a slick soulful blues into a weird, woozy proggy mantra for a state of mind, and manoeuvres from the chunky trip of Slidin’ straight into the simple winsome acoustic ballad The Kiss of Venus and onwards to When Winter Comes, the pastoral snapshot which kickstarted this charming solo shindig.

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