Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full

McCartney’s 21st has all the marks of areally cool Macca album

While the media has spent the last year or two turning his life into a tabloid circus, Paul McCartney has been busy getting back to doing what he does best. His 21st post-Beatles album comes little over a year and a half after his last studio set, Chaos & Creation In The Backyard, and although many artists of his generation would be hard pressed to keep up such a work rate, McCartney is clearly in the middle of a creative roll most of his contemporaries can only dream about.

Significantly, where Chaos & Creation… was very much the result of what was a sometimes fractious sparring partnership between artist and producer Nigel Godrich, Memory Almost Full is very much a Paul McCartney record. His voice is at the centre of everything, and although he is now 64, it is as wistful and powerful as it has been in a long time.

Memory Almost Full is a contemplative collection of songs, many of which look back over his life. Although McCartney often talks about how his writing should not be taken too literally, in light of recent events, it’s pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that he’s trying to tell us (or someone) something on songs such as the melancholy Mister Bellamy, with lines like “I’m not coming down/No matter what you do/I like it up here without you.”

But it’s not all sad news – as with all McCartney’s best records, it’s made up of shining lights and autumnal shades. Where Chaos & Creation… contained more than its fair share of homespun numbers that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on 1970’s McCartney album, Memory Almost Full often harks back to his hi-hi-hi-octane Wings days, particularly on songs That Was Me, Nod Your Head and the glorious number Only Mama Knows.

To some extent, anything McCartney did after The Beatles was inevitably destined to be onto a hiding to nothing. Paul McCartney is a songwriting genius, albeit one whose records don’t sail straight to the top of the charts these days. At this stage of the game, the key is to please himself and his legion of loyal fans, and if that’s the mark of a really cool McCartney album, then Memory Almost Full is right up there with the best of them. As a wise man once sang: “And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make.”

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Reviewed by Jonathan Wingate
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