(Credits: Far Out / Kurt Schollenberger / ETH Library)
Sun 1 March 2026 20:54, UK
If you were tasked with forming a band and they had to share the musical skillset of one singular person collectively, Paul McCartney would be the wise pick.
McCartney isn’t a jack of all trades, master of none. Instead, he’s a one-man band who can do it all with aplomb, and if he were able to clone himself in order to recreate the studio experience in a live environment, we’d all be rushing out to buy a ticket.
While the bass is his preferred weapon of choice, there isn’t a conventional instrument that he cannot play to a professional standard. As he proved with the McCartney trilogy, it’s possible to make classic records without hiring a mass amount of session musicians, while also demonstrating there’s significantly more to his musicianship than meets the eye.
In The Beatles, there was no need for McCartney to do everything himself; otherwise, they wouldn’t be a band. Everybody knew their role within the Fab Four and that their whole was greater than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, this meant that McCartney could not fulfil his artistic desire to play different instruments as much as he would have liked.
After they split, McCartney finally had the chance to flex his creative muscles in a new way on his eponymous debut solo offering. He explained to Rolling Stone at the time of release: “I play all the instruments myself. From very early on, when our bass player died, I have been lumbered with the bass,” he said.
Credit: Alamy
McCartney admitted, “All the time, however, what I really wanted to do was play guitar and play lead, so that’s what I’ve done on the new LP. And I’ve played all those things I’ve always wanted to play. I played bass, drums, guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, organ, bongos, and rhythms and things — there aren’t many more instruments than that. If you ask if I play violins and balalaikas, the answer is nay.”
Although McCartney later formed Wings and began to work democratically once again, he occasionally allowed himself to play other instruments with the band. Most notably, he stepped behind the drum kit for their Band on the Run album, and in doing so, he earned himself a two-word compliment that finally validated him as a proper drummer.
During an interview with Record Collector in 1997, McCartney revealed how Keith Moon made him feel ten feet tall, sharing: “One of my great compliments was from Keith Moon, when he and John and others were going through that manic lost weekend episode. I went out to see them. Keith Moon asked me who drummed on Band on the Run. I said it was me. Keith said, ‘fucking great!’ Coming from Keith, that was high praise for me.”
McCartney’s passion for drumming was evident to all during his tenure with The Beatles. He occasionally deputised for Ringo Starr on the instrument, including on ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Dear Prudence’, and ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, and didn’t sound out of place on those records.
However, Moon wasn’t known for handing out compliments easily, and he would never have done so if he didn’t believe what he was saying wholeheartedly.
Who knows, if he had chosen to follow that path permanently, McCartney might have become one of the most highly-regarded drummers of his generation, but it would have come at an unthinkable waste of his other talents. Thankfully, we live in a world where we are able to enjoy the full range of McCartney’s multi-instrumentalism.