Album of the week: Paul McCartney – 'The Boys of Dungeon Lane'
On his 18th solo album, 'The Boys of Dungeon Lane', Paul McCartney turns away from Beatles mythology to revisit the Liverpool streets, memories and early friendships that shaped him
Beatles archaeology, hagiography and lore: we, obviously, can’t get enough of it. From Sam Mendes’ in-production quadrilogy of interconnected Fab Four biopics, to the BBC’s also-in-production series Hamburg Days, about the band’s foundational, speed-fuelled, 10,000 hours in the rackety German port, via endless repackages and re-releases of their music, John, Paul, George and Ringo’s past is forever present. From next year, it will even be with us in bricks and mortar: their former Apple HQ at 3 Savile Row will become seven floors of “ticketed experience”.
No one knows that better than Paul McCartney. In 2013, I accompanied him to Japan, a leg of a huge and ongoing, arena-scale world tour that evidenced a fandom as staunch as ever. When I asked him to explain that ceaseless drive to perform, and perform heavily, still, he replied: “It’s something to do with the sort-of-legend being a kind of avalanche coming behind me. I’m running down the hill from this avalanche of fame.”
Well, now, for his 18th solo album, Paul McCartney has decided to turn and face the strange; to let the avalanche wash over him and dig into the formative, rubble-strewn landscape it had covered and concealed.
So, on The Boys of Dungeon Lane he takes us back to Liverpool L24, to the post-war cityscape that formed him and his bandmates, to the terraced houses and birdwatching spots, to the memories of his three closest pals, to the “smoky bars and cheap guitars”.
He sings of the latter on ‘Days We Left Behind’, a simple, beautifully sketched elegy with a glorious melody that, boldly and brilliantly, lets us hear the years – and strains – in McCartney’s voice. There’s similar honest nakedness – of wear’n’tear, and of emotion – in ‘We Two’, a tale of partnership/kinship recorded on a four-track Studer tape machine McCartney rescued from Abbey Road. It revels in the memories, and in the creaky majesty of the basic tech – this is the gear with which they somehow made Sgt. Pepper’s – that The Beatles used to conjure magic: it ends with the squiggly sound of tape being rewound.
Magnificently, McCartney’s facility for the three-minute pop song is undimmed. These 14 songs – produced with hotshot 35-year-old American musician/writer/producer Andrew Watt (Miley Cyrus, Ozzy Osbourne, Lady Gaga) – run to 47 minutes, meaning few of them crest that totemic mark. And when they do, as on the near-five-minute “epic” opener ‘As You Lie There’, he stretches out into a rock’n’roll symphony that plays to the strengths of his own multi-instrumentalist musicianship – he’s listed as playing 22 instruments, although that does include "hand claps".
Yet even those short songs are crammed with detail (of course they are). The skiffley ‘Down South’ is a travelogue recalling he and George Harrison’s fondness for hitchhiking (“it was a good way to get to know you, a fine way to work it out… before we learned to twist and shout”). The stomping ‘Home to Us’, a collaboration with Ringo Starr (with backing vocals by Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri), recalls a city scarred by war and poverty: “the world around us wasn’t safe, the place was falling down”. The mournful mariachi of ‘Salesman Saint’ is a tender tribute to hard-grafting parents in the Liverpool suburbs who, with their wartime baby, “couldn’t take any more, but they had to carry on”.
Here, for once, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a candid, emotional, forensically detailed reflection on McCartney's – and The Beatles’ – roots that makes for a vital record for here and now.
Will we still need him, will we still heed him, when he’s 84, the age he turns this month? Yes, indubitably, remarkably, gratefully, we will.
