(Credits: Far Out / Kurt Schollenberger / ETH Library)
Wed 10 December 2025 16:30, UK
Anyone would have considered themselves lucky to be able to share a passing few minutes with Paul McCartney.
Although the former Beatle probably doesn’t see his status all that differently from most musicians in his field, he knows that his music has done something to the world that is nearly impossible to describe. People have seen him as more than a musician for decades, but if there’s one thing Macca loved the most, it was getting to play among his musical friends.
Then again, that might have to do with the fact that he never wanted to leave a band in the first place. The Beatles were his home for years, and when the whole thing got deconstructed towards the end of the 1960s, it felt like he was truly alone for the first time in his life. Wings may have set itself up nicely for the rest of its career, but even with those silly love songs, it was never going to stop experimenting, either.
A lot of people tend to forget that McCartney was the one considered eccentric for a brief period before John Lennon became the strange Beatle, and on every other album, he has always tried to go in a different direction. Some might try to get with the times and come off as unbelievably saccharine, but that’s what makes records like McCartney II or his works with The Fireman feel like listening to an entirely different artist. He was never afraid to take a risk, and that extended to Wings’ tunes as well.
Venus and Mars might be the stadium rock album that everyone remembers from them, but there was also something like London Town settling on a yacht rock vibe or Back to the Egg, which was the one album that begged the question: how the hell can a punk song, a disco song, and a jazzy ditty end up fitting so well together on one record?
When you have the right songwriter at the helm, anything like that is possible to some degree, but McCartney did have a healthy respect for what was coming out of Jamaica as well. There are a handful of times throughout his career where reggae plays a big factor in his songs, but when listening to some of the reggae-fuelled tunes in the 1980s, McCartney did remember having one regret about never getting to talk to Bob Marley.
The reggae superstar may have had contact off and on with legends like Eric Clapton, but for Macca, he wanted to get down to the nitty gritty with Marley, saying, “I never met [him], unfortunately. I came very close once or twice. One night he was playing in London, and we got halfway there and just changed our minds. It’s stupid really, because it would have been worth it to see him live and then to meet him.”
And of all the former Beatles, McCartney’s sound would have worked surprisingly well had he been shown the ropes. Those perfectionist tendencies may not have been the best course of action when working with Marley, but he knew that there was also a certain energy in many of McCartney’s love songs that would have sounded much better fitting over a reggae beat, so long as it wasn’t a retread of one of his cheesier tunes like ‘Ebony and Ivory’.
But that just goes to show you that even the giants aren’t safe from a few of those missed connections throughout their time on this Earth. Everyone’s time is finite, and even if McCartney only stayed for a little while, he would have been able to see one of the true legends of music carve out a legacy for himself in real time.
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