The thought of anyone outdoing what The Beatles did would have been unthinkable when they broke up.
No one had ever broken down that many boundaries between what rock and roll was supposed to be, and even if there were moments where their music wasn’t perfect, you could hear them getting more and more experienced by the time they eventually bowed out when making Abbey Road. Paul McCartney certainly knew that the dream was over, but he never would have imagined that one of his solo hits would somehow find a way of displacing what he had done with his old mates.
Then again, thinking that the same guy who made a record like Wild Life was going to become the biggest thing in music all over again would have been downright delusional at the time. That’s not even a diss towards Wings, either. The band were clearly going through those beginning stages that every band goes through, but the fact that Macca could actually find a way to keep himself moving and turn his latest act into a stadium-filling group is almost impossible considering where they started.
Keep in mind that for a long time, Macca was the villain of The Beatles’ story for a lot of people. Since everyone went with the same management, McCartney seemed to be the one willing to go in a different direction and leave everyone else to their own devices, but the minute that Allen Klein proved to be the scumbag that he always was, McCartney could at least revel in the fact that he didn’t have to pay those lawyers that his friends hired.
But he didn’t have to worry about The Beatles’ legacy so long as he was making albums like Venus and Mars. This was him finding peace again with the love of his life right beside him on keyboards, and yet once punk came in, it seemed like everything was over. He wasn’t going to put a safety pin through his nose and make the most hard-edged rock and roll ever made, but ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was the one song that almost seemed destined to fail.
McCartney was always going to follow his muse, but a song that served as a loving ode to his home on a farm didn’t really seem to have the same energy as what the Sex Pistols might have been doing. This would have been a royal mistake if the song had tanked, but it turned out to be one of the biggest songs that McCartney ever made, even managing to break one of The Beatles’ records by spending the most weeks at the top of the charts.
And while Macca was looking to get a good reaction, the fact that everyone managed to resonate with the song was almost uncanny to him, saying, “I automatically assumed that [Wings] could never be anything better than what The Beatles had done. But I actually surprised myself [with] ‘Mull of Kintyre’ that outsold anything The Beatles ever did. So there is hope. You don’t have to take life as black and white, there are no rules. Life has a wonderful way of changing.”
But even if he didn’t need a spiked haircut and a leather jacket, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ did one of the few things that the rest of his albums weren’t able to capture: the spirit of the everyman. Any of The Beatles seem more like gods than actual people half the time anyway, but when you look at the way that McCartney sings about his home, it was the same kind of simple melody that anyone could get behind, no matter where they had come from.
Those massive stadiums may have made him a lot more money than anyone could have imagined, but the reason why ‘Mull of Kintyre’ works is that it put McCartney back in the pubs where his songs had been in the beginning. He could still make music for the everyman, and there was no reason why he couldn’t make something this mellow and then find himself making a tune as uptempo as ‘Junior’s Farm’.
