McCartney Times

Following the recording of the mellow Both Sides, a labour of love by which he’d written, sung and played every note himself, singer-songwriter Phil Collins felt unable to return to the Labyrinthian Genesis to perform through the band’s more progressive palette with the truth. So too did songwriting bassist Paul McCartney come to change, but in a polar opposite direction to the conventional balladry Collins adopted.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, the release proved as much a pivotal moment in McCartney’s career as his 1970 debut did. For now, in his intent, he’d returned to writing albums for and about himself. With the death of one John Lennon robbing McCartney’s desire to tour the world, it was to no one’s surprise that McCartney would not return to his second band. For now, his second solo album cobbled the rustic aesthetic of its spiritual predecessor but with an instrumental sheen decidedly more contemporary and chic. Without resorting to cross-word swearing, McCartney reclaimed the title of avant-gardist at a time when Lennon was writing about watching wheels in a fifties doo-wop beat. “I don’t know what it is,” McCartney recalled in 2011, “maybe being Gemini, but I definitely have different sides to my character. So I can love Nat King Cole singing a ballad, and I can want to do that kind of thing myself, and then the next day I can wake up and I want to do ‘Check My Machine’,” he added.

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Source: ‘McCartney II’ the experimental second Paul McCartney album