The precociously brilliant McCartney is playing many the instruments (with help from guitar players Dave Spinozza and Dave McCracken and drummer Deny Seiwell and Linda sharing vocals) and he’s great at anything he picks up dealing out guitar licks, bass runs or pastoral acoustics with an ease for his perfect pop voice to fly over with those cascading and exquisite melodies. It’s a deceptively simple almost rustic album that mirrors its felt tipped artwork with farmer Paul wrestling with an, er, ram on the album cover. With the luxury of history the album now sounds like a decades too early precursor to lo fi indie with all the post late sixties bombast stripped away. Maybe its a measure of the times but what people ragged on about Paul at the time was the good bloke/family man/simple things in life/not very rock n roll personae that are now seen as assets and that brings us to Ram.Īt the time the album was buried by the media but now sounds forward thinking and full of that buoyant pop imagination that the supremely talented Mecca seems to effortlessly ooze. George was the most successful (All Things Must Pass is the last Beatles album for me – the only great trick they had left was to make the Beatle George album) and even Ringo was banging some pretty good hits and Paul was off to a stuttering start. Paul copping all the blame for the end of the band – a band he desperately wanted to keep together being the only one who understood their magic and chemistry whilst John was the revolutionary in one of his many shape shifting guises that never really stuck. In the post Beatles fallout Macca was not the ‘cool one’. He lack of cool was a joke that ran on through the decades – who can forget Alan Partridge claiming that ‘Wings are only the band that the Beatles could have been.’ It’s a great line of course but pop music is a bit more insidious than that – it has a habit of slipping and a sliding past your hastily constricted castles of cool and getting under your skin and Ram is an example of that.Īt the time of release it was pelted with insults and put downs by the leather kicked, sunglasses after dark nocturnal rock press who saw Macca as the villain of the peace. Being a fan of Paul McCartney in the seventies was a tricky business – after all he was not cool, he was not complex prog for boys to feel clever appreciating, he was not matinee idol gone glitz like Bowie and Roxy cool, he was not a pretend Che Guevara…he was just himself and his prodigious pop talent. Of course that world has its moments but it’s not the only story in town. A PR stunt in dark sunglasses with darker drugs that somehow got mixed up with a seventies notion of cool. The gunslinger, wife beater, pretend revolutionary cool at the heart of rock n roll was always a con. It blinds the fools and sends the insercure up grubby back alleys of music taste. Defying rock’s dated notion of cool, Macca McFab’s second post Beatles outing really stands the test of time with its melodic, playful and cleverly stripped down songs predating indie lo-fi by decades.Ĭool is the most overrated component of rock roll.
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