(Credits: Far Out / Paul McCartney / V. K. Hietanen /
Finnish Heritage Agency)
Wed 1 April 2026 3:00, UK
It almost seems cliché for anyone to start claiming that Paul McCartney wasn’t as good as he’s made out to be.
Every one of the Beatles’ naysayers might have a point about them not being gods, but since they were never out to make the greatest music on Earth, it’s easy to enjoy their songs as some of the most forward-thinking pop music in the world, while every now and again getting a whimsical ditty from McCartney. But while many people claim that Macca has had many different peaks and valleys throughout his career, he felt that there were some musicians he loved that weren’t exactly perfect, either.
Then again, there’s hardly any chance that McCartney overtly spent time dragging his heroes through the mud. He was the eternal optimist of the group, and even if John Lennon talked about how Elvis Presley became a joke at the end of his career, that didn’t dull McCartney’s enjoyment of going back to songs like ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and reminiscing on when he was first discovering rock and roll.
And you’d be hard-pressed to find a time when Macca wasn’t more than happy to talk about the thrill he had of listening to bands like The Everly Brothers for the first time or hearing the harmonies on those early Buddy Holly records. That’s what started him off, but even if he had come a long way from that kind of sound, it didn’t take long for people to think that he had gone too soft on them.
I mean, when you’ve started making songs like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, it’s not like you’re trying to compete with bands like The Who, but that’s not what McCartney was going for. All of his greatest inspirations had certain periods of their careers, and you wouldn’t necessarily show someone ‘Helter Skelter’ and claim that it’s by one of the most sentimental songwriters of their generation.
You have to remember that McCartney was much more diverse than everyone thought he was, and he wasn’t going to roll over when someone claimed that he wasn’t as good as he was made out to be because of his silly songs. He knew that his hardcore fans would let him have his fun, and when looking at the ridicule that came his way, he couldn’t help but remember back when Chuck Berry was going through the exact same thing.
While McCartney could appreciate the father of rock and roll in all of his forms, he remembered that one of his critics got it all wrong when talking about the song ‘My Ding a Ling’, saying, “I remember a critic saying, ‘The first time I heard Chuck Berry was ‘My Ding a Ling’,’ I said ‘Oh terrific and you’re a critic.’ I mean Chuck did a lot of work before [that]. As far as I’m concerned, that was the end of his career, but they’ve got an opinion.”
And, really, holding Berry to the same standards that he was used to with this song just doesn’t seem right. The whole thing was clearly a novelty song, and if we were using that logic surrounding every other tune in his catalogue, it would be like trying to convince someone that The Beatles were nothing but straight crap and only using ‘Wild Honey Pie’ as a piece of musical evidence.
In this case, you need to see the full picture, but if you look at what MCCartney was saying, it’s not hard to see why ‘My Ding A Ling’ was one of the low lights of Berry’s career. No rock and roll band was destined to last for very long at that point, and while The Beatles were the exception to the rule back then, there was no reason to think that anyone was going to get any smarter listening to this tune.
