Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture) 9783030790998, 3030790991

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice The Beatles and Beyond Phillip McIntyre · Paul Thompson

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series Editors ˘ Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Department of Psychology and Counselling, Webster University Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Brady Wagoner , Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been considered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects, and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different understanding, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cultural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about creativity and cultural phenomena.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14640

Phillip McIntyre · Paul Thompson

Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice The Beatles and Beyond

Phillip McIntyre School of Creative Industries University of Newcastle Australia Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Paul Thompson Leeds Beckett University Leeds, UK

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-79099-8 ISBN 978-3-030-79100-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Mary Margaret Hogan and the eternal memory of Dermot Finbarr Dinan.

Acknowledgments

Just like any creative endeavour, writing a book is a collective process and there are a number of people who’ve helped us in bringing the final manuscript to print. Paul Thompson I’d first and foremost like to thank my co-writer and friend Phillip McIntyre for his energy and passion in driving this project forward. Your stewardship, encouragement, expertise, advice and generosity over the years has not only contributed to this book, but shaped so many of my academic endeavours—Thank You. I’d like to thank Leeds Beckett University and all my colleagues (past and present) in Leeds School of Arts and all my Undergraduate and Postgraduate students over the years who have contributed so much through their passionate engagement and debate. Thank you too to members of the Association for the Art of Record Production and the Audio Engineering Society and a special thanks must go to Ken Scott and Dave Harries for contributing their recollections to this book. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to

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thank my family who continue to inspire and encourage me. Mum, Dad, Claire, Martin, Paul, Hannah, John, Gemma, Jake and little Chloe this book is for you. YNWA, Ellesmere Port, Merseyside, UK Phillip McIntyre A huge thank you to my comrade in arms Paul Thompson. His unfailing cheer, his passion for his work and his dedication to this project, and many others, have been the perfect foil for me. Zoom was very handy, but it was a dream to meet together in a New York café to swap notes on our project like the worldly writers we’ve become. Paul, you’ve kept me going and are already moving us towards the next big endeavour. What a team! I must thank the folks at Palgrave Macmillan for their faith in us across the years and the level of professionalism each and every one of them continues to exhibit. It’s also important to acknowledge the support the University of Newcastle has given me. My colleagues and firm friends there are very precious to me, as are the hordes of students I’ve interacted with over the years. They’ve taught me an incredible amount. My entire family has been a steady source of humour and love. I put my arms around them all as there are really no words to express how much I love them. My children and grandchildren are the reason for my existence but it is Julie who knows me more than anyone else on the planet. She has been my rock, my port in a storm and with me each step along the way. Newcastle, Australia This book is based, in part, on some previously published work. We would like to thank the various publishers for permission to use portions of these articles. These include: McIntyre, P. (2006). ‘Paul McCartney and the Creation of ‘Yesterday’: The Systems Model in Operation’, Popular Music, 25/2, pp. 201–219. McIntyre, P. (2011). ‘Systemic Creativity: The Partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’, Musicology Australia, 33/2, pp. 241– 254. McIntyre, P. (2021). ‘Songwriting Practice and Production: The Past, Present and Future’, The Songwriting Studies Journal (forthcoming), pp. 5–26.

Praise for Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice

“Two leading researchers on the creative process in popular music focus their theoretical apparatus on one of music’s most prolific creators. McIntyre and Thompson lead readers through an illuminating, multifaceted exploration of McCartney’s long and winding career as musician, songwriter, record producer, and collaborator. A fascinating read and a model for research. Highly recommended.” —Albin Zak, musicologist, composer, songwriter, and record producer and author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (2001), and I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (2010) “Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice is a valuable case study for any researcher (in any field), who is interested in the creative process. For students, it illustrates how theoretical frameworks help us to understand and explain real world phenomena. For musical practitioners and McCartney fans, it offers new perspective on the artistry and contributions of a creative giant.” —Nyssim Lefford, Music Producer, Cognitive Scientist and Lecturer in Audio Production at Luleå University of Technology ix

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Praise for Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice

“In this holistic exploration of the creative process of Paul McCartney, McIntyre and Thompson have not only illuminated the work of one of the world’s greatest songwriters, but also made a significant intervention in the study of songwriting and creative practice. This superb contribution allows the reader to appreciate McCartney’s extraordinary creativity as a performer, songwriter and producer as a result of his immersion in a complex musical ecosystem.” —Simon Barber, Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham City University, Songwriting Studies Network Lead and one half of the Sodajerker podcast

Contents

1 2

Background to the Study: The Systems Approach to Creativity Paul McCartney as a Performing Musician

3 Paul McCartney and the Creation of ‘Yesterday’ 4

1 45 73

Paul McCartney and the Creation of ‘Paperback Writer’: Examining the Flow of Ideas and Knowledge Between Scalable Creative Systems

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5 Paul McCartney’s Major Creative Collaborators: John Lennon and the Creative System

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6 Paul McCartney as Record Producer: Complete Immersion in the Creative System

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7 Paul McCartney’s Multiple Creative and Business Ventures

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

A re-presentation of Pierre Bourdieu’s complex approach to cultural production (from McIntyre, 2021, pp. 5–26) Re-conceptualising the systems model of creativity as a creative system in action (from McIntyre, 2021, pp. 5–26) The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of lyric writing The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of the collaborative songwriting dyad The systems model of creativity scaled to the group level and song arrangement The systems model of creativity scaled to the creative collective level The systems model of creativity scaled to the institutional level The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of the broader music scene

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22 116 120 123 127 131 135

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Fig. 4.7

The systems model of creativity operating at the sociocultural level The holarchy of scaled systems that produced ‘Paperback Writer’

Fig. 4.8

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1 Background to the Study: The Systems Approach to Creativity

It’s impossible to write about Paul McCartney without writing about The Beatles. Indeed, as a professional musician with a lifetime of creative achievements behind him, he has an inextricable link to his Liverpool bandmates. But Michael Brocken argues that many accounts of those halcyon days have been ‘in danger of becoming a metanarrative form in which we read more of the person making the inquiry than we do of the Beatles, or indeed their environment’ (Brocken, 2016, p. 9). And so to avoid these issues of metanarrative, Brocken suggests that ‘all popular music historians should attempt to maintain a conversation within the broader cultural field that has given such creativity shape’ (ibid.). While we are not writing history per se, it is certainly our intention to place Paul McCartney’s story and his own creative actions inside a broad cultural domain and social field. In the same way as all creative people, McCartney has been entwined within a very specific set of contexts and cultural interactions. In looking at these interactions we will be locating his long-term musical activity, one that has taken many forms, including songwriting, record production and live performance, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_1

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against the evidence-based research about creativity. After all, as scholarly researchers looking at creative practice, the accumulated research about creativity is of central concern to us. Instead of being ‘unreceptive to theory’ (ibid., p. 10), we will be critically eschewing the commonsense assumptions, myths and beliefs held in the West about creativity, as well as analysing Paul McCartney’s creative work against the accumulated empirically driven, well-reasoned research about creativity. In this case we need to invoke this growing body of research literature. Before we do that, however, we want to place the central concept of creativity within the context of various cultural ideas about it and then proceed from there to the evidence-based research. Firstly, we are not using this term, creativity, based on various common-sense assumptions about what it might be and how it is thought to work, as we believe that these commonly used understandings are likely to be based on specific culturally located beliefs about this phenomenon. As Keith Sawyer, author of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2006, 2012) out, we need to ‘look critically at our own cultural assumptions about how creativity works, and scientific studies of creativity fail to support our most cherished beliefs about creativity’ (2006, p. 33). He reinforces this assertion by also saying that: European conceptions of creativity have changed over the centuries. And once you leave Europe, you’ll find an even wider range of conceptions of creativity cross culturally…The scientific explanation of creativity has found that many of our beliefs about creativity are inaccurate or misleading. That’s why I call them creativity myths (Weisberg, 1986). These creativity myths are so widely believed that they sometimes seem obvious, common sense. (Sawyer, 2006, p. 18)

In their paper ‘The Philosophical Roots of Western and Eastern Conceptions of Creativity’ (2006), Wehai Niu and Robert Sternberg set out the varying conceptions and origins of creativity within Eastern societies and compare these to Western views, for example,

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A review of contemporary research has shown that people from the East and West hold similar, yet not identical conceptions of creativity. In general, Easterners are more likely to view creativity as having social and moral values, and as making a connection between the new and the old. Their Western counterparts focus more on some special individual characteristics in understanding the concept of creativity. (2006, p. 18)

Girishwar Misra, Ashok Srivastava and Indiwar Misra point out something similar for South Asian communities. In their paper ‘Culture and Facets of Creativity: The Indian Experience’ (2006) they present evidence for a socially located understanding of creativity that runs in a seeming countervailing way to the predominantly psychologically reductionist account of creativity from the West (Simonton, 2003, p. 304). Misra et al. assert that for Indians, ‘creativity is rooted in the surroundings. It is continuous with the environment and seeks relationship’ (2006, p. 432). Creative practitioners with this mindset readily accept that ‘creativity is a general characteristic found in every normal human being [and] the expression of creativity takes place in a sociocultural environment that may help or hinder an individual’ (Misra et al., 2006, p. 447). Cognitive psychologist Margaret Boden extends our cultural gaze further and argues in her book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (2004), that the common beliefs surrounding creativity in the West: …are believed by many to be literally true. But they are rarely critically examined. They are not theories, so much as myths: imaginative constructions, whose function is to express the values, assuage the fears, and endorse the practices of the community that celebrates them. (Boden, 2004, p. 14)

These common conceptions have dominated thinking about creativity in the public imagination in the West for some time and they have fed directly into early research about creativity. What can be called the ‘Inspirationist’ view is one, and ‘Romanticism’ is another, although both are related. Plato’s idealist perceptions from the classical tradition, coupled with the Greek mythology surrounding the muse, for example formed the basis of the Inspirationist approach. For Plato, poets, and by extension all creative practitioners, are subject to the dictates of the Muse, ‘for

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a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him’ (Plato, 1971, p. 292). In other words, creativity can be viewed as a gift from the gods and, at best, creators can only ever be the inspired conduits of divine powers. Romanticism developed as an outgrowth of this Inpsirationist view. Romanticism forms the bedrock of the idea that creativity is centred on free-willed, self-expressive, metaphysically intuitive, and, at the extreme end, tortured artists who produce creative work beyond the constraints that mere mortal figures are bound to. Immanuel Kant for example declared that many artists were involved in: a unique and spontaneous act that introduces a leap in ordinary natural processes... [The] creation of art is not only independent of prior procedures or rules, but it is independent of all conditions other than spontaneous activity made possible through faculties in the creator’s consciousness. (Rothenberg & Housman, 1976, p. 29)

At this point of thinking the locus of creativity moved away from the gods and became somewhat anthropocentric giving rise to ideas such as the artist’s inner voice (Watson, 2005, pp. 589–623). We also see the idea that creativity is grounded in an artist’s torment really begin to take hold. This is a seductive proposition that merges with the idea that artists are more in tune with the truth of existence, the sublime, through the supposed sensitivities needed to experience these intense emotional experiences. These Romantic philosophies of creativity also have their roots in those ideas that were travelling back to the European centres of power as they moved their empires out into the world. For Peter Watson ‘the most obvious and virile link was between Indic studies and German Romanticism’ (2005, p. 603). As Sawyer explains, Romanticism is largely characterised by ‘the belief that creativity bubbles up from an irrational unconscious and that rational deliberation interferes with the creative process’ (2006, p. 15). This form of Romanticism ‘championed art as individual expression, inhabiting it as a form of rebellion against oppressive social and political structures and exalting it as a kind of magical or divine activity’ (Davies & Sigthorsson, 2013, p. 37). The idea of ‘the

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artist as rebel and outsider was an innovation that gained lasting cultural influence’ (Davies & Sigthorsson, 2013, p. 37) and it didn’t take too long before artists were seen in the popular imagination as ‘a kind of being elevated above the rest of mankind, alienated from the world and answerable in thought and deed only to his [sic] own genius’ (Wittkower in Paton, 2008, p. 22). Michael Howe explains that originally a person’s genius was somewhat like a muse, a mythic figure ‘envisaged as a partly external spirit that gave a helping hand. Not until the eighteenth century did the practice of referring to a person as a genius become common’ (1999, p. 11). Robert Albert and Mark Runco further report that: By the end of the eighteenth century, it was concluded that whereas many persons may have talent of one sort or another and that this talent would be responsive to education, original genius was truly exceptional and by definition was to be exempt from the rules, customs and obligations that applied to the talented. (in Sternberg, 1999, p. 21)

Robert Weisberg, the author of The Myth of Genius (1993), points out that: the literature on creativity was until recently dominated by what one could call the ‘genius’ view of creativity, which also pervades our society. This view, which has many sources, ranging from Plato to Koestler to Osborn to psychometric theorists such as Guildford, assumes that truly creative acts involve extraordinary individuals carrying out extraordinary thought processes. These individuals are called geniuses, and the psychological characteristics they possess - cognitive and personality characteristics - make up what is called genius. (in Sternberg, 1999, p. 148)

This idea of genius is an intriguing and truly seductive one. However, while there are certainly people who are recognised as doing extraordinary things, this way of explaining them may not be the best approach to take (Howe, 1999), nor is it comprehensive enough to describe the ways in which these extraordinary things are achieved. Uncritically accepting these ideas steered some researchers to attempt to understand what made these figures, instead of their work, different to all other individuals.

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Trying to explain the supposed difference between these god-like human creatures and other mere mortals led eventually to concepts such as big C and little c creativity, that is, extraordinary versus ordinary creativity. The early assumptions were that if genius was extraordinary then it was also deviant and this gave genii a link to the most deviant form of behaviour which was, of course, insanity. Genius-oriented studies were typified by early researchers like Cesare Lombroso and Sir Francis Galton (1869/1950). But they eventually led down a blind alley as Michel Howe concludes in Genius Explained (1999). Around the same time as these ideas were developing, a rational scientific world-view was growing out of the intellectual foment of the Enlightenment. It has often been contrasted with, and may indeed have instigated, the supposedly opposing view of Romanticism. Both of these ways of seeing the world, what we could call rationalism on the one hand and its alleged antithesis, romanticism, served to set in motion ‘the rival ways of looking at the world – the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist’ (Watson, 2005, p. 610). This couplet or binary conception constitutes what Peter Watson calls ‘the modern incoherence’ (ibid.) where art and science are seen to be incompatible instead of complementary. Nonetheless, while many artists in the West tend to accept the Romantic belief that creativity is largely mysterious, sacred and untouchable (and the related ideas of genius as true with little critical evaluation), the world of science, in its broadest sense, continued to seek more rational explanations about creativity. This research has been located in a variety of disciplines (for extensive summaries see Alexander, 2003; McIntyre et al., 2018; Negus & Pickering, 2004; Pope, 2005; Sawyer, 2006, 2012). These disciplines include philosophy (e.g. Paul & Kaufman, 2014), education (e.g. Bailin, 1988; Craft, 2001, 2011; Harris, 2016; Lucas, 2001; Lucas et al. , 2013; Vygotsky, 1962, 1967), communication and cultural studies (e.g. Kerrigan, 2013, 2016; Meany, 2016; McIntyre, 2008, 2012; McIntyre et al. , 2016; McRobbie, 2016; Negus & Pickering, 2004; Petrie, 1991) as well engineering (e.g. Cropley, 2015) and design (e.g. Williams et al. , 2010). Sociologists have contributed a large body of work to this endeavour as well (e.g.

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Alexander, 2003; Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, 1993, 1996; Peterson, 1982, 1985, 1997; Wolff, 1981, 1993). However, it is psychologists investigating creativity who have undoubtedly produced the most significant body of work in this area (for example see Amabile, 1983, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1999, 2014; Gl˘aveanu, 2014; Guilford, 1950, 1954, 1970; Karkhurin & Motalleebi, 2008; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010; Lebuda & Gl˘aveanu, 2019; Lubart, 2010; Montuori, 2011; Mpofu et al. , 2004; Runco & Pritzker, 1999; Sawyer, 2006, 2012; Simonton, 2003; Sternberg, 1988, 1999; Weisberg, 1993). Fundamentally, many of these researchers have tended to make little distinction between creativity as it applies to art or creativity as it applies to science. Following Freud (1959), whom Duncan Petrie (1991) claims accepted uncritically a largely Romantic view of creativity, the psychodynamic school of thought concentrated its efforts on understanding the individual psyches of creative people, and the assumed tensions they believed existed between conscious and subconscious drives, in the hope that this would help explain most forms of artistic activity. After an address by Guilford (1950) to the American Psychological Association (APA), the psychometricians, veering ever closer to reductionist positivism, attempted to quantitatively measure individual traits of creativity while cognitive psychologists began to explain creativity in terms of thinking styles (Weisberg, 1993; Zolberg, 1990). The behaviourists tried to uncover the patterns of thinking operating for them at a subconscious level that were thought to determine creative behaviour (Bergquist, 2006). Some psychologists like Robert Weisberg (1993) attempted to gather evidence that creativity occurred primarily through ordinary thought processes common to all people. Of course, arguments and debates occurred within this discipline around the operational definitions of creativity (e.g. see Stein, 1953, 1974). These definitions eventually coalesced around two binaries; the first involved the distinction between what has become known as big C and little c creativity (which was itself premised on the distinction being made between genius figures and ordinary folk). The second debate was around whether creativity related to divergent or convergent thinking (once again premised on the idea that creative thinking was somehow

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different to ordinary thinking styles). As this definitional precision was being debated, questions were also raised around what the best focus was for creativity research. Was it on the person, the product or the process? A fourth P was added, that of place, when it was realised that the spatiotemporal and sociocultural environment that one worked within was just as crucial a driver of creativity as the other three Ps (Kozbelt et al., 2010). In the meantime neuropsychology, concentrating on the actions of neurochemical processes thought to underpin creative action (e.g. Bekhtereva et al., 2001), eventually realised they were looking at a nested process where the actions of neurotransmitters were linked to a set of scaled interconnections between the external environment and the biopsychological apparatus they were predominantly investigating (Greenfield, 2008). The social-personality approach, also operating alongside all of the other subdisciplines in psychology, presented evidence to suggest personality variables such as motivation were also deeply linked to the sociocultural environment creative people existed in (Amabile, 1983, 1996). In The Social Psychology of Creativity and Growing Up Creative (1983) Teresa Amabile had argued for what she termed the ‘intrinsic motivation principle’. She suggested that creative people would be ‘motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself (intrinsic motivation), and not by external pressure (extrinsic motivation)’ (Amabile & Tighe, 1993, p. 16). She accounted for the social context of creativity but saw it largely as a source of pressure on individuals who would be overwhelmed by such things as ‘external evaluation, surveillance, contracted-for reward, competition and restricted choice’ (ibid.). However, not seeing these things also as enablers and motivators proved problematic for this work. Eisenberger and Shannock (2003) argued, for example, that seeing extrinsic motivation as a negative process was likely grounded in a Romantic view of creativity. The question of personality also proved to be a vexed one and looking for a set of characteristics to accurately pinpoint what constitutes a creative personality has proved difficult. Many were looking for specific personality traits that would ‘distinguish creative people from ordinary people, to develop a test that could identify exceptional talent early in life, and to design educational techniques that could improve a student’s creativity’ (Sawyer,

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2006, p. 55). One of the causes of the failure to really identify what distinguished one person as creative and another as not, was that personality researchers, at least according to Keith Sawyer, ‘were too willing to accept our creativity myths; personality psychologists weren’t aware that their own conceptions of creativity were socially and historically unique’ (ibid.). At this point grasping the importance of the social aspects of creativity and what these contributed to creativity, not only negatively but also positively, became of critical importance. Dean Keith Simonton had instigated the social psychology of creativity (see Lebuda & Gl˘aveanu, 2019, p. 13) and bought a study of history into the realm of psychology (2003) using what he labelled a historiometric approach, expanding understanding of the way civilisations enact creativity (e.g. Simonton, 2003). Others had begun arguing strongly for what has been recently called social creativity research (e.g. Gl˘aveanu, 2014; Montuori & Purser, 1996) while others argued for a cultural approach (Gl˘aveanu, 2014). As Montuori and Purser (1999) attempted to explain, many of those engaged in these endeavours were judged as being socially deterministic when they were, instead, suggesting an inclusive approach to understanding the relationship between individuals and the social and cultural worlds they were part and parcel of. At the same time Keith Sawyer (2006) developed what he termed the sociocultural approach which was embedded in what was essentially the bio-psycho-sociocultural approach of the systems view of creativity. In developing this systems approach Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had long called for an amalgam of psychology and sociology (1988, p. 336), suggesting that: some readers used to the person-centered perspective on creativity might begin to feel that the argument I am developing is a betrayal of psychology in favor of historical or sociological approaches. This is surely not my intention. It seems to me that an understanding of the complex context in which people operate must certainly enrich our understanding of who the individual is and what the individual does. But to do so we need to abandon the Ptolemaic view of creativity, in which the person is at the center of everything, for a more Copernican model in which the person is part of a system of mutual influences and information. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p. 336)

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While many psychologists had largely concentrated at the individual level, as Simonton had also suggested (2003), with an increasing number expanding their concerns to the social and cultural, as summarised above and also briefly by Hennessey (2017), they generally made little distinction, at the fundamental level, between artistic creativity and scientific creativity. Surprisingly, the sociologists took a slightly different approach. In sociology the concentration of research appears to be focused mainly on artistic creativity. This group of researchers generally assumed that, ‘like other social phenomena, art cannot be fully understood divorced from its social context’ (Zolberg, 1990, p. 9). For example, with Marx having declared that all art is a social product, or more precisely that ‘the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history’ (Marx, 1980, p. 353), sociologists like Janet Wolff used these ideas to argue that all creative activity takes place inside a compendium of pre-existing conditions (1981, p. 9). She argued that: Everything we do is located in, and therefore affected by, social structures. It does not follow from this that in order to be free agents we somehow have to liberate ourselves from social structures and act outside them. On the contrary, the existence of these structures and institutions enables any activity on our part, and this applies equally to acts of conformity and acts of rebellion…All action, including creative and innovative action, arises in the complex conjunction of numerous structural determinants and conditions. Any concept of ‘creativity’ which denies this is metaphysical and cannot be sustained. (Wolff, 1993, p. 9)

Coming from a more functionalist and less conflict-oriented tradition of sociology, Richard Peterson (1976, 1982, 1985) was nonetheless largely in agreement. With his ‘production of culture’ approach he provided evidence to confirm that a set of what he labelled constraints provided the limiting conditions for the way creative action, in particular, was produced. Peterson contended that ‘the nature and content of symbolic products are shaped by the social, legal and economic milieu in which they are created, edited, manufactured, marketed, purchased and evaluated’ (1985, p. 46). For him this series of constraints formed a complex network of influence of structures that have an effect on creative action (ibid., p. 45). Of course others had argued that constraints could also be

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enablers. For example Anthony Giddens declared that ‘structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling’ (1984, p. 25). Cognitive psychologist Margaret Boden supports this idea arguing that what are often called constraints, ‘far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible’ (2004, p. 79). Howard Becker (1982), who sat inside the more social actionoriented symbolic interactionist sociological tradition, also presented wide-ranging evidence to support the idea that all art comes about due to a set of collective practices. For Becker these happened inside what he called an ‘art world’. These worlds could be recognised by identifying the people who perform the work in them, with this work bound by conventions and rules that those people who do the work adhere to, even if those are naturalised to the point they can no longer see them as rules or conventions, similar in effect to the notion of doxa (McIntyre, 2013). For Becker, works therefore occur inside what existing formal institutions or informal schools can assimilate. He argued that art practice must accommodate itself to the technical and financial limits of the world it occurs within and was convinced that looking solely at individuals did not help to explain creative action at all. This was a significant problem for those who adhered to the romantic genius model, which Becker believed was an inherently flawed way to understand art practice. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the field and space of works, as well as his work on cultural, symbolic, social and economic capital, and the central idea of habitus and its relation to agency (an ability to make choices), have all constituted a major part of his thinking on cultural production. In fact his entire oeuvre is premised on the question of the relationship between agency and structure, and how artists/producers, texts, consumers/audiences and the contexts they all exist in, all interact together to produce practice. He realised that if we are to ever understand how this works we must engage with ‘all these things at the same time’ (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 9 [italics in original]). These ideas will be dealt with more fully shortly but for now we can say that Bourdieu’s idea of the field has been compared to Becker’s notion of art worlds. Bourdieu himself suggested that this comparison may not be as straightforward as this suggests, writing that:

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without entering into a methodological expose of everything that separates this vision of the ‘world of art’ from the theory of the literary or artistic field, I will merely remark that the latter is not reducible to a population [italics in original], that is to say, to the sum of individual agents linked by simple relations of interaction, or more precisely, of cooperation: what is lacking, among other things, from this purely descriptive and enumerative evocation are the objective relations which are constitutive of the structure of the field and which orient the struggles aiming to conserve or transform it. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 205)

In his book Rules of Art (1996) Bourdieu developed these ideas further and talked directly about notions of creativity, building on his earlier ethnographic work set out in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The Field of Cultural Production (1993). While he bluntly stated that ‘those who think in simple alternatives need to be reminded that in these matters absolute freedom, exalted by the defenders of creative spontaneity, belongs only to the naïve and the ignorant’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 235), for the moment we will simply acknowledge that Bourdieu, like Becker, contributed to understandings of creativity and cultural production from a sociological perspective rather than a psychological one. We will return to him more fully shortly. In the meantime, noting all of the above developments in research into creativity, Dean Keith Simonton suggested that: Psychologists have tended to view creativity as an individual-level phenomenon. That is, they have tended to concentrate on the cognitive processes, personality traits, and developmental antecedents associated with individual creators. This focus follows naturally from the very nature of psychology as a scientific enterprise dedicated to understanding individual mind and behavior. Yet this tradition of “psychological reductionism” has also inspired an antithetical conception of creativity as an exclusively societal-level event. In the extreme form, that of a complete “sociocultural reductionism,” the individual becomes a mere epiphenomenon without any causal significance whatsoever. (Simonton, 2003, p. 304)

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In 2010 Beth Hennessey and Teresa Amabile completed a meta-analysis of the literature on creativity to summarise where creativity researchers had got to by this point for the Review of Psychology (2010). In their analysis they noted that most researchers around the world that were specifically investigating creativity had reached a general consensus on a definition for creativity. They now largely agreed that this phenomenon can be best seen as the bringing into being of novel objects or processes that are valued in at least one social setting (2010, p. 572). With a common definition now in place, and with only some detractors (e.g Weisberg, 1993), Hennessey and Amabile then concluded that what was needed was more ‘interdisciplinary research, based on a systems view of creativity that recognizes a variety of interrelated forces operating at multiple levels’ (2010, p. 571). Beth Hennessey later brought this 2010 study up to date with an overview published in the Journal of Creative Behaviour in 2017. In it Hennessey noted that: There have long been at least a few voices calling for the reconceptualization of creativity from a systems perspective. But in 2010 when we published our review, this perspective was largely overshadowed by a decontextualized, even reductionist, approach. Researchers and theorists were doing all that they could to break down questions of creativity into the absolutely smallest components they could control and measure. An exploration of the most recent literature reveals that this situation may, in fact, be changing. A growing number of publications are now reflecting a systems perspective. (Hennessey, 2017, p. 342)

Hennessey argued that ‘only with the adoption of a truly integrated systems perspective can researchers hope to ever understand the complexities of the creative process’ (ibid.). She also noted the early work of researchers like Alfonso Montuori (2011) and in particular Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1997, 2014) in helping researchers move towards a systems-based approach. While Montuori had been suggesting that a systems approach was appropriate, Stacy DeZutter (2011) and Vlad Gl˘aveanu (2014) had both also posited what they call ‘distributed creativity’, an approach which also challenges ‘the standard view that creativity comes only from within the mind of any one person and advocating instead for an extension of the research lens’ (Hennessey, 2017,

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p. 343). When Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter published a paper in 2009 entitled ‘Distributed Creativity: How Collective Creations Emerge from ‘Collaboration’ they argued that: distributed creativity is a theoretical approach informed by sociocultural perspectives on human thinking and learning which questions the separability of individual cognition from the social processes in which it is embedded. Making analogy to a branch of sociocultural theory known as ‘distributed cognition’, our work views creative collaborative groups not as collections of individual creators but as creative cognitive systems. We thereby find ourselves working in an intellectual space carved out by Csikszentmihalyi (2014) who, with his explication of the systems model of creativity, established the value of understanding creative activity as a process located in interactions among multiple agents. (DeZutter, 2016, p. 157)

Vlad Gl˘aveanu recognised that DeZutter and Sawyer had ‘emphasised primarily social distribution within networks of collaborations’ (2014, p. 9) and in his own account of distributed creativity, he emphasised that the interactive nature and relational aspects of creativity were also essential to an understanding of this phenomenon. Importantly though, he warned that ‘it would be an easy mistake to assume that a distributed perspective does away with the individual or downplays his/her role in creative production’ (2014, p. 9). He went on to say he is against ‘individualism, not the individual ’ (ibid. [italics in original]) arguing that: Instead of losing the individual in the act of distributing creativity what we actually do is give it a new status and value. Self and culture are mutually constituting entities (Bruner, 1990) and creative action bears the mark of both by participating in their formation and transformation. To endorse a vision of distributed creativity means ultimately to recognise the self as an agent within an ever-changing world. (Gl˘aveanu, 2014, p. 9)

Csikszentmihalyi had suggested in 1988 that ‘perhaps even more than new research, what we need now is an effort to synthesize the various approaches of the past into an integrated theory’ (1988, p. 338). We argue that this synthesis exists in the systems model of creativity. Since

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the systems model of creativity is so fundamental to the argument we present here, a consideration of systems in general is needed to introduce some of the principle characteristics of all systems. This allows us to later move to a more detailed elucidation of what we call the creative system in action (McIntyre et al., 2018). Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968), who was writing in the 1930s and 1940s, indicated that the idea of systems is ‘not limited to material systems but applies to any “whole” consisting of interacting “components”’ (Bertalanffy, 1981, p. 109). Ervin Laszlo wrote in 1972 that there were ‘systems of organized complexity wherever we look. Man [sic] is one such system, and so are his societies and his environment’ (Laszlo, 1972, p. 12). Systems, like ecosystems and ecologies, are characterised by multiple components that interact in densely interrelated networks. They are ‘chaotic, highly nonlinear and essentially impossible to explain and predict from mechanisms and laws’ (Sawyer, 2010, p. 368) and they are difficult to either understand or explain via a reductionist approach. Sawyer further argues that, like their biological cousins, ‘social systems are complex systems that share many systemic properties with other complex systems, including the human mind’ (ibid.). For example, an acceptance of complexity, rather than simplicity, is a prerequisite to understanding them. Along with complexity, systems exhibit multifactorial properties, as well as interconnectedness, non-linearity, dynamism, adaptability, scalability, emergence, self-organisation and complementarity. Complementarity is described as a state of reciprocity between what are often seen to be two oppositional frames (Kelso & Engstrom, 2008) and each frame only tells half the story. For the purposes of our argument here we can say that the individualist perspective of creativity needs to be complementary to a sociocultural one as each only tells half the story. This duality is not oppositional but instead a complementary one, each bringing the other into being. This can be seen for example in the idea that constraints are also, at the same time, enablers. This can be expressed as a ‘constrabling’ effect (Criticos, 2019). This duality is true for tradition and innovation, as ‘an avant-garde or radical aversion to tradition as a dead weight to be thrown off, and a conservative reverence for tradition as fixed and sacrosanct, are equally misleading’ (Negus &

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Pickering, 2004, p. 114). This applies to any other set of complementary pairs, such as agency and structure. One begets the other, and once the duality between complementary pairs is dropped there is a recognition, as Waldrop points out, that ‘there’s no division between doers and done-to because we are all part of this interlocking network’ (1992, p. 323). Systems quite readily exhibit this interconnectedness of seeming opposites in their complementarity. Non-linearity of cause and effect is a principal characteristic of systems too. One cannot make a straight-line causative conclusion when looking at systems since ‘small changes may have dramatic effects because they may be amplified repeatedly by self-reinforcing feedback’ (Capra & Luisi, 2014, p. 106). This feedback becomes iterative and as a result it turns out to be exceedingly difficult to delineate or predict where and when change in the system may occur. As Skyttner explains ‘a change can be initiated everywhere in an event cycle and after a certain time be read off as either cause or effect elsewhere in a system’ (2006, p. 34). This dynamism is reflected in the idea that systems are in a state of continual change, and while there is a tendency on the part of systems themselves to attempt to achieve a solid steady state, dynamic equilibrium, an active and fluid state that keeps the system in flux as it attempts to become stable in an unstable world, is far more typical. Systems are also composed of multiple factors. They are never simple. All systems are made of ‘interacting components that stay together, as a set, over time’ (Homer-Dixon, 2006, p. 22). All of these component factors are deeply networked and interconnected with each other and they are not only networked across multiple factors within the system, but are also interconnected with other related systems that are proximate to them. In short, systems never exist in isolation from other systems and can be seen as scalable (Thompson, 2019, pp. 45–46). Arthur Koestler (1975) introduced the notion of a holarchy to explain scalable systems. For him, holons are complete systems while also being a part or parton, of a larger system at exactly the same time. Holons and partons are thus the component parts of a holarchy, a hierarchy of nested systems that extends horizontally and vertically. None of the nested systems ‘can be regarded as more primary than the other’ (Skyttner, 2006, p. 34). At the same time these systems are continually adapting to the ever-changing environments they exist within by ‘constantly revising and rearranging

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their building blocks as they gain experience’ (Waldrop, 1992, p. 146) in a process of dynamic equilibrium. The dynamic interactions of these systems produce what is called emergent phenomena. Emergence is the process of a novel thing, which cannot be reduced to its constituent parts, coming into being. Emergence is synergistic inasmuch as the emergent and novel object or process is seen as more than the sum of its parts, and the parts, in and of themselves, could not produce the new and often unexpected property or behaviour on their own. For Montuori ‘emergence and self-organisation are characteristics of open systems that are adapting their environment in new ways’ (2011, p. 418) and this situation applies equally to creative systems (ibid.). Complexity, multifactorial properties, interconnectedness, complementarity, non-linearity, dynamism, scalability, self-organisation and emergence are therefore the basic components and action-producing characteristics of systems. And so, ‘as we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, non-linear, kaleidoscopic world’ (Waldrop, 1992, p. 333). Given all of the above, as Sawyer suggests, ‘a complete scientific explanation of creativity would have to include detailed accounts of both psychological and social mechanisms’ (2010, p. 368). The creative system in action (McIntyre et al., 2016) takes up this challenge, synthesising a sociological understanding of creativity (Bourdieu, 1977, 1993, 1996) with a psychological one (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1997, 2014). We argue the synthesis of these two approaches results in a comprehensive account of creativity and from their creative practice (Velikovsky, 2016). To put these ideas in place we can say that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological account of creative practice suggests: It is the interplay between a [space] of works which presents possibilities of action to an individual who possesses the necessary habitus, partially composed of personal levels of social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital that then inclines them to act and react within particular structured and dynamic spaces called fields. These fields are arenas of production and circulation of goods, ideas and knowledges. They are populated by other agents who compete using various levels of the forms

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Fig. 1.1 A re-presentation of Pierre Bourdieu’s complex approach to cultural production (from McIntyre, 2021, pp. 5–26)

of capital pertinent to that field. Bourdieu suggests that it is the interplay between these various spheres of cultural production that makes practice possible. (McIntyre, 2009, p. 7 [italics in original])

This complex approach to cultural production not only encompasses individual agents, drawing on a unique but shared background, but also the ‘the set of social conditions of the production, circulation and consumption of symbolic goods’ (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 9). If these ideas are true, we can no longer privilege individual creators or the sociocultural contexts they exist within but must examine ‘all these things at the same time’ (ibid. [italics in original]) (Fig. 1.1).

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In developing these ideas Bourdieu argued for the complementarity of agency and structure, that is, he insisted that the ability to take action and make decisions or choices, and this includes creative ones, was always circumscribed by a set of social and cultural structures that were previously thought to determine actions. Social and cultural structures, instead, provide possibilities of action and predispositions to act. These structures don’t determine action but there is, nonetheless, a deep interdependence between decision-making agents and the structures that both constrain and enable their activity. These complex interrelationships are also exemplified in a very similar set of ideas: The systems model developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposes that three major factors, that is, a structure of knowledge manifest in a particular symbol system (domain), a structured social organisation that understands that body of knowledge (field), and an individual agent (person) who makes changes to the stored information that pre-exists them, are necessary for creativity to occur. These factors operate through “dynamic links of circular causality” (1988, p. 329) with the starting point in the process being “purely arbitrary” (ibid) indicating the system’s essential nonlinearity. Each component factor in the system is as equally important as the others as each “affects the others and is affected by them in turn” (ibid.). (McIntyre, 2009, p. 7)

Montuori states simply that culture is made up of a set of domains such as music, engineering, religion, and so on. What is considered creative in these domains is decided by the field, which is made up of gatekeepers who decide what is or is not creative (2011, p. 416) adding that ‘both domain and field are necessary to understand what we mean by creativity’ (ibid.). He argues that ‘focusing on only one part of the system is not enough’ (2011, p. 417) since trying to separate out the individual from the sociocultural is fraught with difficulty because ‘the individual is always interacting with his or her environment, and those interactions are significant and have an impact on the person’s ‘“internal” processes’ (Montuori, 2011, p. 417). As Vlad Gl˘aveanu states, in describing this system, ‘creativity is produced in the dialogue between [these] three interrelated factors’ (2014, p. 41), adding that this perspective ‘is essential for any account of distributed creativity’ (ibid.), a perspective where

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‘actors create in relation to audiences and they are both embedded within culture’ (ibid.). In his 1988 article, under a section entitled ‘the clement of time in the constitution of creativity’, Csikszentmihalyi also points out that ‘it should be clear that time plays an important role in the creative process’ (1988, p. 332). He suggests that creative breakthroughs usually follow ‘a long period of gestation in the domain’ (ibid.) and adds: It is not only in the transition from the domain to the person but also in the move from the person to the field, and from the field back to the domain, that time is involved. The only way to establish whether or not something is creative is through comparison, evaluation, and interpretation. Sometimes, as we have seen, the field reverses its judgment; Botticelli moves to the forefront, and Lievens fades into the background; Mendel is hailed a genius, and Lysenko is revealed a fake. And once the field makes up its collective mind – at least temporarily – it takes a while for the new idea to be included into the canon of the domain. Given current technology and the highly rationalized organization of most fields, this time lag is shorter than at some times in the past. But it has been estimated that it still takes an average of 7 years for a bona fide new discovery to make its first appearance in the textbooks of most domains. This process is faster or slower depending on the structure of the domain and of the field. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p. 332)

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to say that there ‘is another sense in which time is implicated in the systems model’ (1988, p. 333) inasmuch as ‘the model represents a cycle in the process of cultural evolution. As the terms suggest, variation, selection and transmission are the three main phases of the cycle’ (ibid.) and are also ‘the main phases of every evolutionary sequence’ (ibid.). Following these assertions, it can be then argued that ‘a domain is a system of related memes that change through time and what changes them is the process of creativity’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p. 333). Rethinking and recombining many of these ideas, and taking them a few steps further, we can now say creative systems in action must inevitably be fluid, open, dynamic and spatiotemporally dependent, as most active systems are. We can also say that creative systems in action

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would include an agent, an active choice making entity which may be an individual, a group or institution, that is enabled and constrained (or constrabled) by a field , a social organisation where cooperation and competition (or coopetition) using various forms of capital takes place. This field is not only constituted by those with varying degrees of expertise but is made up of all those who hold knowledge of the domain and can affect its constitution. This must inevitably include audiences and the active agent themselves ‘noting that artists internalise an anticipated reception of their work as a part of the process of production’ (Robbins, 2007, p. 84); a critical point that is also underlined by Sawyer (2006, pp. 126–127). The agents, who also reside in the field, draw on the preexisting work done to this point, a domain of knowledge, to produce novel and valued things. The domain is a knowledge system constituted by codes, conventions, rules, techniques and symbols which is historically accreted in a set of pre-existing creative works and acts as a set of antecedent conditions for creative action. These codes, conventions and techniques are also embedded within technologies (Toynbee, 2000), and the affordances they present are actively used within the field. Each component of this system—principally the agent, field and domain—is necessary but not sufficient, in and of itself, for the action of creativity to emerge (Fig. 1.2). With this model in place as a useful metaphor or map of creativity, it is now time to turn our attention to music and creativity since, as Keith Negus and Michael Pickering have argued, a ‘critical interrogation of creativity should be central to any understanding of musical production’ (2002, p. 147). They further argue that: creativity is one of the most important yet unexplored issues in the study of popular music. Its significance is routinely noted, usually in passing, and its value often taken for granted. Its conceptual status in music studies is that of an unquestioned commonplace. Most of all, it is raised in reference to what is taken to be in opposition to it, to what is held as restricting or obstructing its realization and potential…What it involves in its own right or what meanings it is made to carry are seldom subject to any critical attention. (Negus & Pickering, 2002, p. 179)

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Fig. 1.2 Re-conceptualising the systems model of creativity as a creative system in action (from McIntyre, 2021, pp. 5–26)

In essence, knowledge about this area of creativity in regard to popular music (Hesmondhalgh & Negus, 2002) is, according to Roy Shuker, decidedly sparse (1994, p. 99). Nonetheless, despite its scarcity, there has been some critical attention paid to music and creativity and this appears to be on the increase. For example, Simon Frith had rejected the idea that creativity resulted from a deep connection to an external muse by arguing that ‘skill and creativity are the result of training and practice’ (1978, p. 75). In essence, creative individuals need to be immersed in the domain of knowledge they work with.

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Peter Wicke, suggested that the type of creativity that was postulated as the Romantic ideal was partially useful in that it enabled a ‘criticism of commerce, which was seen as the opposite of creativity and communication’ (1990, pp. 98–99). However, he went on to refute this Romantic ideal, instead preferring to valorise what could be called a collectivist approach. In doing so Wicke turned to Theodor Adorno, a central figure who had presumed the culture industry and its supposed constraints were simply antithetical to creativity. Unfortunately, Wicke had ignored the idea that institutions and structures of the type Adorno was critiquing could also be enabling (Wolff, 1981). Antoine Hennion also wanted to de-centre the individual, preferring to see recorded music coming into being through the actions of what he called a ‘creative collective’. This collective, not the individual, was responsible for ‘the final product [which] is the fruit of a continuous exchange of views between the various members of the team; and the result is a fusion between musical objects and the needs of the public’ (Hennion, 1990, p. 186). In replacing the individual agent for the creative collective, we argue that Hennion’s ideas should be seen here within the context of scalability. For us, he was looking at a different scale of the creative process. Reinforcing these ideas, but giving them a much needed nuance, Roy Shuker argued that ‘those involved in making music clearly do exercise varying degrees of personal autonomy, but this is always circumscribed by the available technologies and expertise, by economics, and by the expectations of their audience’ (1994, p. 99). He continued that ‘once again, it is a question of the dynamic interrelationship of the production context, the texts and their creators, and the audience for the music’ (1994, p. 99). Following on from these ideas, Keith Negus, in his book Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (1996), looked at various aspects of creativity and realised that certain musical creators ‘are not unique individual geniuses but synthesists working at the fuzzy boundaries where generic codes and stylistic conventions meet and create new musical patterns’ (1996, p. 146). In other words, creative individuals can be viewed as selecting and combining existing domain elements in order to create something new. Jason Toynbee’s work, which drew heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s, continued to explore these ideas on musical creativity within popular

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music. In his book Making Popular Music: Musicians Creativity and Institutions (2000) he suggested that musicians identify and select musical possibilities from within a radius of possible choices within the field of works, which Bourdieu had in some translations called the space of works, which also intersects with the musician’s habitus plus the rules of the field they operate in. Their habitus is constituted in part by varying degrees of symbolic, cultural, social and financial capital. Toynbee argued that what he calls. social authors are organized in a complex “field of cultural production” (Bourdieu, 1993, 1996). They work by recombining symbolic materials from a historically deposited common stock, and must negotiate with audiences which have a powerful influence through the market over which texts are selected. (2000, p. 3)

Peter Tschmuck in his book Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry (2012) was in broad agreement, taking a position very similar to both Csikszentmihalyi and Bourdieu in applying this to his understanding of the music industry. He argued that creative action ‘meets a pre-structured social and cultural reality’ (2012, p. 201) that he labels an ‘integrated concept of creativity’ (ibid., p. 204). He believes that creativity is ‘not only attributable to individual thinking and action but is embedded in collective processes and, in a wider sense, in a social context. Thus, the social context is not just contingent but constitutive for the emergence of newness’ (2012, p. 269). Additionally, Tschmuck has argued, in a similar fashion to the idea of ‘possibles’ set out by Bourdieu in Rules of Art (1996, p. 236), which was elaborated by Jason Toynbee (2000), ‘that the music industry provides the framework for their actors’ thought and behavioural processes. It separates the thinkable from the unthinkable and makes actions possible or impossible’ (Tschmuck, 2006, p. 216). In her book Musical Creativities in Practice (2012) Pam Burnard quickly dismisses many of the myths about musical creativity and goes on to analyse a variety of musical practices through a set of empirically detailed studies of a number of musical creators. These creators range from singer-songwriters, through to those engaged in DJ culture,

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members of ‘original’ bands, composers and improvisers of music, those engaged in the classical tradition and those coming up with interactive audio design. The narratives she elicited from these musical creators is placed against the specific field of music each occupies and out of this she developed a plural view of creativity, or more precisely what she labels creativities, which are situated within certain social and cultural practices of each of the relevant fields. Her analytical work synthesises the work coming from both Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Pierre Bourdieu. Burnard suggests that: Like all fields of human creativity, musical creativity arises in and as social practices. The field of music involves individuals, institutions, and social groupings, both large and small, all of which exist in structural relations to each other. These relations determine and reproduce musical practices in their multifarious forms. The coexistence of these practices allows us to objectify the field of music, which, in Bourdieu’s sense, is a structured system of social relations at a micro and macro level, so that we can make sense of what it is and how it works, the contexts in which it is operating, and the sorts of things that are at stake in musical creativities. Multiple manifestations of creativity arise across all music. They are contingent and socially constructed, durable, and inherited, as well as discontinuous and new, hard to pin down, and elusive. (Burnard, 2012, p. 7)

Similarly, in his study of dance music producers who use samples in their work (or ‘sampling composers’), Justin Morey explored the interrelated domain and social aspects of this type of musical creativity. He argued that ‘creativity can be seen as the by-product of an individual’s sufficient immersion in a domain to be in a position to produce a novel variation on work within that domain, which is then validated by the field’ (Morey, 2016, p. 62). Other work in this area of musical creativity has been focused on popular songwriting. For example, Joe Bennett’s studies into collaboration in songwriting (2012a, 2012b) provided the first detailed investigations ‘into collaborative songwriters’ creative processes’ (Bennett, 2012b). Others who were looking at songwriting teams included Richard Hass, Robert Weisberg and Jimmy Choi who published ‘Quantitative Case-studies in Musical Composition:

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The Development of Creativity in Popular-Songwriting Teams’ in the Psychology of Music journal in 2010. Practitioner-researchers have also studied their own areas of creative activity through autoethnographic methods. Bill Bruford for example took his years of professional experience and poured them into his doctoral thesis which formed the basis of his book, Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer (Tracking Pop) (2018) and Clive Harrison produced a detailed empirical account of creativity in his own book The Songwriting Labyrinth: Practical Tools to Decode the Mysterious Craft (2015). Harrison’s book also came out of his lengthy professional experience as a successful songwriter and was supported by his doctoral thesis entitled A Songwriter’s Journey from Little-c to Pro-c Creativity: An Applied Analytical Autoethnography (2016) in which: significant scholarly models of creativity are applied to the realm of the author’s songwriting practice, documented in long-held journals and current blogs. This application is carried out using four lenses - person, process, product and place. Particular focus has been given to the multiple intelligence theory of Howard Gardner, located within the system of songwriting, as a productive lens through which to view this writer’s creative practice. (Harrison, 2016, online)

Paul Thompson has also focused on musical creativity, applying researchbased ideas to creative activity in the context of the commercial recording studio. His detailed published work sets out the idea that ‘creativity isn’t simply the result of an individual’s efforts. Rather, creativity occurs through the interaction between the individual, a knowledge system and their related social context’ (Thompson, 2019, p. 5). He took the notion of the scalability of systems and expanded upon it to illustrate how the creative system can be seen in action at various scales and on different levels during different creative tasks. He argued that: These levels form part of a complex interconnected web of interrelated domains of knowledge and social fields in which agents employ their domain knowledge and deploy various types of cultural, social, symbolic and financial capital. These holons, operating at various levels, form a

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holarchy of systems that contribute to the emergence of commercial records. (Thompson, 2019, p. 244)

In one example from his book, Thompson used ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967) to demonstrate how the creative process can be viewed at the level of lyric writing, the arrangement, the creative group, EMI record company, the recording industry, North Atlantic popular music and the broader level of popular music culture. From one perspective, each of these scales or levels can be viewed as a separate creative system, but in reality, they are all part of a broader complex, non-linear, dynamic, complementary, interconnected and interactive system of creativity that all contributed to the emergence of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967). Greg Clydesdale conducted his study with a focus on creativity and The Beatles in the Creativity Research Journal entitled ‘Creativity and Competition: The Beatles’ (2006). He began by suggesting there was a duality between competition, which is thought to detract from creativity, and cooperation, which is seen to enhance creativity. Clydesdale disputes these ideas arguing that ‘creative work has frequently been driven by both competition and cooperation. The two are not mutually exclusive and are in fact inextricably entwined’ (2006, p. 130). Clydesdale used The Beatles’ work as a case to demonstrate the complementarity of these supposed polar pairs. He quotes their producer George Martin, who noted that ‘competition was the essential thing that made them work so well’ (in Clydesdale, 2006, p. 133). Clydesdale argues that this competition wasn’t just internal, within the band, but there was also competition or ‘creative rivalry’ that existed external to the group. This rivalry with other groups and performers ‘raised the quality, not only of The Beatles output, but also the output of the groups with which they competed’ (ibid). Importantly though, Clydesdale posits that ‘as much as competition was a key aspect of their continual improvement, what The Beatles achieved was also a function of their working team and the relationships between them’ (ibid., p. 134). He goes on to state ‘each creative output of The Beatles reflected its own combination of competition, team participation, and team dynamics’ (2006, p. 136) which supports the idea that ‘competition and cooperation can be extrinsically entwined’ (ibid.). Crucially, Clydesdale presented evidence to suggest that ‘a single

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creative act is only a part of a larger, longer process’ (2006, p. 137). He argued that seeing creativity as a time, and learning-dependent, process highlights the importance of what is called a creative trajectory, which exhibits a certain degree of path dependence. This itself points to the fact that creative work cannot exist in an isolated vacuum separate from the context in which it emerges. In his study of the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Phillip McIntyre concluded that: While there were multiple structural factors that contributed to the creativity in the work produced, it was these two, as individual agents, who brought their personal backgrounds to bear upon the collaborative system they found themselves in. They, as agents within the system, were both enabled and constrained by these structural factors. (2011, p. 254)

Yrjö Heinonen’s study in the Popular Music History journal (2014) explored the creative process of The Beatles through a multi-level analysis of the interaction between the individual and collaborative creative group. Heinonen argued that a lot of both popular and scholarly work that attempts to understand creativity in popular music simply adheres to the assumption that there is an ongoing struggle between commerce and artistic creativity, a manifestation of what we saw described earlier as ‘the modern incoherence’ (Watson, 2005) and a distinct characteristic of Romanticism. Heinonen suggested that a portion of this popular music writing has focused on a macro view of the music industry or on a Romanticised and individualist view of creativity. This latter view, according to Heinonen, has been the dominant way The Beatles’ creative activity has been characterised, so instead he proposed to challenge this perspective and focus on the necessary interactions that occur between creative individuals and expose the complex basis for those collaborations. As Csikszentmihalyi has argued: to study creativity by focusing on the individual alone is like trying to understand how an apple tree produces fruit by looking only at the tree and ignoring the sun and the soil that support its life…In other words, if one wants to understand creativity, it does not make any more sense to turn to a study of the individual than it would to a study of the field or of

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the domain. Real understanding may, however, come from investigating the interaction among all three. (quoted in McIntyre, 2004, p. 6)

With only these few works focused on creativity and The Beatles specifically, scholarly literature has tended to focus more broadly on The Beatles and has come from a wide variety of academic areas. These include musicology (Elliott, 1999; Everett, 1999, 2001; Moore, 1997; Nobile, 2011; Reck, 1985; Reising, 2017; Wagner, 2003), history (Hertsgaard, 1995; Heilbronner, 2008), linguistics (Petrie & Pennebaker, 2008), information technology (Whissell, 1996), psychology (Clydesdale, 2006), politics (Collins, 2014), philosophy (Baur, 2006), sociology (King, 2016), geography (Kruse, 2004) cultural studies and literary theory (Hammond, 2002; Heinonen & Eerola, 2000; Heuger, 2005; Womack, 1998; Womack & Davis, 2012), and of course popular music studies (Inglis, 2000a, 2000b, 2010; West & Martindale, 1996). Although fruitful in gaining new insights into The Beatles and their work, very little of this has focused directly on the idea of creativity and The Beatles. Scholarly material on Paul McCartney as separate from The Beatles is decidedly limited in comparison to the growing body of research on The Beatles as a group. Academic work on McCartney includes early sociological accounts of the supposed ‘death’ of Paul McCartney where empirical evidence to the contrary, notes that sets of irrational beliefs can take hold in a supposed modern, industrialised and enlightened world (Suczek, 1972). Psychologist David Giles also explored McCartney’s attempt to cross cultural boundaries by moving from popular to classical music. In doing so Giles explored the scalability and interconnectedness of cultural systems, which allowed him, via the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘to conceive of the overarching field of cultural production as containing a hierarchical network of nested subordinate fields’. Giles employed the concept of celebrity migration where ‘figures established in one cultural field attempt to cross over into a neighbouring field’ (Giles, 2015, p. 539) to analyse McCartney’s commercial success in this endeavour but failure to cross the evaluative boundary established by the field’s cultural intermediaries. On the other hand, James McGrath treats McCartney as a serious and accomplished lyricist and an extraordinary musical force within The Beatles and beyond into his

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solo career. McGrath premised this wide-ranging account of McCartney’s songs on a recognition of ‘the mythology of the man as a reflection of the cultures in which he is celebrated, and [explores] the content, context and achievement of his work’ (2003, p. 16). On the other hand Jon Stratton, a scholar steeped in cultural studies and popular music analysis, takes as his subject only one song from McCartney’s vast catalogue of songs. Stratton writes that ‘Ob-La-Di ObLa-Da’ (1968) is ‘often considered to be a trite but enjoyable piece of fluff ’ and goes on ‘to examine the track as the site of complex negotiations around identity and diaspora’ (Stratton, 2014, p. 1) arguing that the song is situated in the experience of both Jamaican and Irish diasporas. While these studies explore aspects of McCartney’s creative output, none of them focus specifically on McCartney and his creativity. In one of the few studies on Paul McCartney’s creative practice, Phillip McIntyre explored the analysis of the creation of Paul McCartney’s much covered composition from his Beatles period, ‘Yesterday’. McIntyre presents evidence to suggest that, despite the promotion of the creation of ‘Yesterday’ as a highly Romantic process which has helped perpetuate: the myth of the mystically inspired freely expressive artist, the creation of ‘Yesterday’ can be seen as a more considered and rational process than otherwise mythologised…As an example of a system at work, the song’s creation satisfies more closely the characteristics ascribed to the rationalist approach to creativity. From the evidence, it can be argued that creativity is a dynamic system that works on a larger scale than that of the sole individual posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings. (McIntyre, 2006, p. 201)

For much of what we could call more popular writing, on both The Beatles and Paul McCartney, the prevailing cultural assumptions about creativity have, unsurprisingly, tended to dominate in a number of these types of works (e.g. MacDonald, 1994). There are multiple books and magazines that contain interviews with McCartney and the other Beatles, which fill out the common narrative of his musical and personal life. As Weber indicates ‘in fifty years, The Beatles have amassed one of the largest historiographies of any cultural subject, and certainly the

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largest of any musical group’ 2016, p. 5). There are the stories told about The Beatles written by those who were part of the story themselves (e.g. Aspinall, 1969; Brown, 1983; Emerick, 2006; Epstein, 1964; Martin, 1979, 1994; Williams, 1975) as well as those books which tell the narrative of The Beatles in book form (e.g. Coleman, 1985; Davies, 1992; Diperna, 2019; Doggett, 2010; Fulpen, 1983; Giuliano, 1986; Hepworth, 2018; Mellers, 1973; Mitchell, 2019; Pascall, 1974; Schaffner, 1978; Spence, 1981; Stokes, 1980; Turner, 2016; Woffinden, 1981). While many of the works ‘written primarily by journalists, contain no citations, documentation or bibliographies’ (Weber, 2016, p. 7) and produce ‘a fascinating compelling story with contradictory narratives’ (ibid., p. 12) many tend to display particular biases and play favourites. However, a number of books and magazines do serve well as useful archival and reference material that set out, amongst other things, The Beatles daily recording and performance activities in great detail (e.g. The Beatles, 2000; Egan, 2009; Everett, 1999, 2001; Lewisohn, 1988, 1993, 2013; Pedler, 2001, 2003; Ryan & Kehew, 2006; Schultheiss, 1980; Southall et al., 1997; Womack, 2019). There are also resources that detail daily activity for all of the group’s players after The Beatles had broken up as a working unit (e.g. Badman, 1999) with some specifically focused on McCartney’s post-Beatles activity (e.g. Benitez, 2010; Peel, 2002; Perasi, 2014). Books specifically written about McCartney from a biographical point of view (e.g. Barrow & Bextor, 2004; Carlin, 2009; Coleman, 1995; Doyle, 2013; Du Noyer, 2015; Elson 1986; Gambaccini, 1976; Gracen, 2000; Lewisohn, 2002; McGee, 2003; Pascall, 1977; Salewicz, 1986; Sandford, 2005) sit alongside those that have been given Paul McCartney’s imprimatur (e.g. Grimshaw, 2004; Miles, 1997; Norman, 2016). McCartney has also given lengthy interviews to a number of magazines setting out anecdotes and his own point of view of the events he has experienced across his lifetime of creative practice (e.g. Blake, 2015; Bonner, 2015; Cavanagh, 2007; Eccleston, 2017; Garbarini, 1988; Gilbert, 2013; Hutcheon, 2011). Of course, there is much to be gleaned about Paul McCartney’s creative practice by listening to and analysing the many recordings of his work, the transcribed sheet music of those songs (e.g. Beatles, 1993; Connolly, 1983) as well as the

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film and TV interviews and performances (Pieper, 1993) and the many DVD documentaries that show him at work in the studio and on tour as a performing musician (Beatles, 2006; Haefeli, 2005; Powell, 1993; Wings, 1979). So far, there has yet to be a unifying and comprehensive focus on the creative practices of Paul McCartney as a musician, as a songwriter or as a record producer in relation to the creative system. And so, this is the point of departure for the following chapters in this book. We’ll be bringing together this expanding body of literature written on Paul McCartney, and referencing his recorded work, in applying the framework of the creative system at various points in time so we are able to see it in action as McCartney performs, writes and produces.

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Robbins, J. (2007). Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: Belief, time, and the anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology, 48(1), 5–38. Rothenberg, A., & Hausman, C. (Eds.). (1976). The creativity question. Duke University Press. Ryan, K., & Kehew, B. (2006). Recording the Beatles: The studio equipment and techniques used to create their classic albums. Curvebender Publishing. Runco, M. A., & Pritzker, S. (1999). Encyclopedia of creativity. Academic Press. Salewicz, C. (1986). McCartney: The biography. Futura. Sandford, C. (2005). McCartney. Arrow Books. Sawyer, K. (2006). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford University Press. Sawyer, K. (2010). Individual and group creativity. In J. Kaufman & R. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 366–380). Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Sawyer, R. K., & DeZutter, S. (2009). Distributed creativity: How Collective Creations Emerge From Collaboration. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 81. Schaffner, N. (1978). The Beatles forever. McGraw Hill. Schultheiss, T. (1980). The Beatles: A day in the life—The day by day diary 1969–1970. Omnibus Press. Shuker, R. (1994). Understanding popular music. Routledge. Simonton, D. (2003). Creative cultures, nations and civilisations: Strategies and results. In P. Paulus & B. Nijstad (Eds.), Group creativity: Innovation through collaboration (pp. 304–325). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skyttner, L. (2006). General systems theory: Problems, perspectives, practice (2nd ed.). World Scientific. Southall, B., Vince, P., & Rouse, A. (1997). Abbey Road: The story of the world’s most famous recording studio. Omnibus Press. Spence, H. (1981). The Beatles forever. Crescent Books. Stein, M. (1953). Creativity and culture. The Journal of Psychology, 36 , 311– 322. Stein, M. (1974). Stimulating creativity: Volume One, individual procedures. Academic Press. Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (1988). The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

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Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (1999). Handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press. Stokes, G. (1980). The Beatles. Rolling Stone Press. Stratton, J. (2014). “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”: Paul McCartney, diaspora and the politics of identity. Journal for Cultural Research, 18, 1–24. Suczek, B. (1972). The curious case of the “death” of Paul McCartney. Urban Life and Culture, 1(1), 61–76. Thompson, P. (2019). Creativity in the recording studio. Palgrave Macmillan. Toynbee, J. (2000). Making popular music: Musicians, creativity and institutions. Arnold. Tschmuck, P. (2006). Creativity and innovation in the music industry. Springer. Tschmuck, P. (2012). Creativity and innovation in the music industry. Springer. Turner, S. (2016). Beatles ’66: The revolutionary years. HarperCollins. Velikovsky, J. (2016). Communication, creativity and consilience in cinema: A comparative study of the top 20 Return-on-Investment (RoI) movies and the Doxa of screenwriting (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Newcastle. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and EastEuropean Psychology, 42, 7–97. Wagner, N. (2003). “Domestication” of Blue Notes in the Beatles’ Songs. Music Theory Spectrum, 25 (2), 353–365. Waldrop, M. (1992). Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. Simon & Schuster. Watson, P. (2005). Ideas: A history from fire to Freud . Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Weber, E. (2016). The Beatles and the historians: An analysis of writings about the Fab Four. McFarland & Company Inc. Weisberg, R. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius. W.H. Freeman and Co. West, A., & Martindale, C. (1996). Creative trends in the content of Beatles lyrics. Popular Music and Society, 20 (4), 103–125. Whissell, C. (1996). Traditional and emotional stylometric analysis of the songs of Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Computers and the Humanities, 30, 257–265. Wicke, P. (1990). Rock music: Culture, aesthetics and sociology. Cambridge University Press. Williams, A. (1975). The man who gave the Beatles away. Macmillan. Williams, A., Ostwald, M., & Askland, H. (2010). Creativity, design and education: Theories, positions and challenges. ALTC Press.

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2 Paul McCartney as a Performing Musician

James Paul McCartney was born into a working-class family in Walton, a suburb of Liverpool, on 18 June 1942. His father was a cotton salesman and his mother, until she died of breast cancer in 1956 when Paul was fourteen, was a midwife. His brother Michael came along in 1944, towards the end of WWII. These were hard times where ‘the music their parents danced to was intended to make them forget their daily troubles, whether that meant the food they didn’t have or the bombers overhead’ (Hepworth, 2018, p. 9). Following the war, the family moved a number of times across Merseyside, including Anfield, Wallasey, Knowsley, Everton and a number of council terrace houses in Speke. They went where McCartney’s mother’s work as a midwife took them and they eventually relocated to a larger council house in Allerton on Forthlin Road, which is now a National Heritage site1 owned by the National Trust. It was from here, 20 Forthlin Road, that Paul eventually moved to London for the bright lights of the big city and much, 1 For more information see: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/beatles-childhood-homes#Ove rview.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_2

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much more. But before we dip further into that story it is important to note here that Paul McCartney’s father, Jim, was also a musician, as was his grandfather who had played the tuba in a classic working man’s brass band. Paul’s father Jim had played semi-professionally around Liverpool, both in the Masked Melody Makers in 1919 and again during the 1920s in his own Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Jim was also at the heart of the McCartney family sing-alongs and parties: ‘My Dad was the fella at the family parties who played the piano and knew all the tunes…And I remember him saying to me when I was quite young, learn the piano, you’ll always get invited to parties’ (quoted in Everett, 2001, p. 13). Paul remembers these occasions fondly, they connect him to some of his most treasured memories where he was firmly wrapped in the bosom of his extended family. More importantly, the regular family sing-alongs are an influential part of McCartney’s journey as a performing musician. It is here that he first encountered the power of the form he would contribute so much to. He also saw first-hand what music could do for the people listening as they joined in the catharsis and communal release of emotions. It’s here too that he realised the effect that music had on the performer. As his Dad played, Paul observed how good musicianship can connect with an audience. So, it was not only the songs Paul absorbed from his father’s playing. As important as that facet of his creative practice was to become, and one we will deal with more fully shortly, he was also learning how to gather and hold an audience, and bring them to joyful release. As Walter Everett points out, ‘the son certainly did learn from the father that popularity could be gained’ as one learned to manipulate ‘the art and its audience’ (ibid., p. 11). Undoubtedly, Paul’s home was musically rich (ibid.). Not only was the radio broadcasting the songs of the day but his Dad would be ‘sitting around the piano tapping out things like “Chicago” on the ivories’ (ibid.). For McCartney these were simply great tunes to play and he knew in his bones there was little serious delineation to be made between all types, genres or forms of music. It was all just music to him. At this point: ‘rock and roll had not been invented yet. Blues had started but that was nowhere near as popular; you had to be a real folkie to be into blues. Anything up to the 1950s was the old traditions and in Britain that was the music hall’ (ibid.).

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In other words, McCartney’s journey as a performing musician began with an immersion into these multiple traditions that lead to a wholehearted plunge into a journey of personal creative development to become a performing musician. While he now tours with a mass of semi-trailers packed full of all the necessary equipment to reach huge audiences—back line equipment, monitoring set ups, huge FOH PA systems, lighting rigs, video monitors, catering and a supporting crew that numbers in the hundreds—Paul McCartney still has his father’s WW1 vintage piano and plays it often. McCartney’s first public musical performance was in the summer of 1957 with his brother Mike at Butlin’s Filey holiday camp on the East coast of Yorkshire. Paul played guitar and they both sang the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’ (1957). By this point, Paul had discovered his ability to imitate the vocal performances of singers like Little Richard and used it as his ‘turn’ or his ‘trick’ as a feature of his musical performance to both have fun and entertain his classmates. After their performance of ‘Bye Bye Love’ (1957), Mike left the stage and Paul drew on his newly acquired skill to perform Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ on his own (Havers & Evans, 2010, p. 126). Paul’s first instrument wasn’t the most obvious for a future rock star though. Like so many young boys in England, McCartney had joined the church choir and when he came to take up playing an instrument other than his voice, it was the trumpet. Jim had bought Paul a trumpet when he was thirteen and he received some ‘formal instruction, in an instrument, theory or composition’ (Everett, 2001, p. 12) and Jim McCartney taught Paul a few rudimentary things on the piano, pointing out harmonies and bass lines and other features of the songs that he was playing. Paul had also learned a number of chords on the banjolele (precisely six) from his cousin Bett Robbins, which enabled him to play songs like ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’ (Everett, 2001, p. 11). McCartney quickly ‘realised you couldn’t sing with the trumpet and I wanted to sing as well. So I asked [my dad] if he wouldn’t mind if I traded it in for a guitar’ (quoted in Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 14) and so he bought his first guitar, a Zenith acoustic. This proved to be a difficult instrument as so many cheap guitars are because of its ‘action’— where the string height is set in relation to the fretboard. If the action

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is too high then beginners can find it difficult to press on the strings in order to play notes or chords. A difficult action can make the difference between staying with the guitar, an often temperamental musical tool, or moving on. McCartney had an additional problem though, he was left-handed and the guitar was right-handed: ‘I tried it right-handed and I couldn’t get any rhythm, because it was all the wrong hand doing it’ (quoted in Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 16). It wasn’t until he saw a picture of Country and Western performer Slim Whitman with a lefthanded guitar that Paul remembers thinking: ‘that’s good, you can have it the other way around. Then I changed the strings around’ (ibid.). Bacon and Morgan argue that being left-handed can be an advantage because: most left-handed people are forced quite early on in their lives to do some things with their right hand, and so quickly get used to the benefits of a degree of ambidexterity. The result is that a left-handed guitarist will almost always have, potentially, a better balance of mobility between fretting and picking hand than right-handers. (ibid.)

He persisted with guitar and practiced it until he had enough songs under his belt to impress the local boys. It was his ability to play Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ (1957), including the guitar parts and the correct words, that initially impressed John Lennon, his eventual songwriting partner and band mate for 12 years. Lennon at this point was the leader of the skiffle group the Quarrymen. Skiffle was the latest craze adopted by the Madison Avenue-designated demographic category labelled as teenagers and it ‘swept through Britain in 1956 and 1957’ (Lewisohn, 1993, p. 12). Its own origins were in African American blues and folk songs from Depression-era USA. The Scottish musician Lonnie Donnegan had been enormously successful with Huddie Ledbetter’s ‘Rock Island Line’ (1957), so much so that skiffle bands began to spring up all over Britain. In Liverpool alone it’s thought there were at least several hundred skiffle groups ‘with upwards of 5000 skiffle groups in existence around Britain’ (Lewisohn, 1993, p. 12). What attracted all these nascent musicians to Donnegan and others was their highly energetic performances and, importantly, the style ‘was basic and easy to play’ (ibid.). All you needed was:

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a cheap (often Spanish) acoustic guitar, a household washboard and, an inspirational invention, the tea chest bass. This was a crude copy of a stand-up bass, made by poking a broom handle through a hole in an upturned tea chest and tensing a piece of cord to form a sounding string. More instruments could be added if one was particularly flush with money – a banjo, or set of drums, perhaps – but these were superfluous to the core of the group. (Lewisohn, 1993, p. 12)

Paul McCartney saw ‘Lonnie Donnegan perform in person at the Liverpool Empire on 11 November 1956 and became besotted with the guitar’ (ibid.). When he later stood at the Woolton fair watching the Quarrymen perform he knew what he needed to do. After this young and ragged skiffle band had finished their set Paul picked up the closest guitar from the stage and played Cochran’s hit as well as Gene Vincent’s ‘BeBop-A-Lula’ (1956) for them. John Lennon was impressed and shortly after asked McCartney to join the band. While his quasi-audition had the desired effect, Paul’s first real public performance in the role of lead guitarist had a long-term effect on him: I kind of went in first of all as a lead guitarist, really, because I wasn’t bad on guitar. And when I wasn’t on stage I was even better. But when I got up on stage my fingers all went very stiff and then found themselves underneath the strings instead of on top of them. So I vowed that night that that was the end of my career as the lead guitar player. I just thought: I’ll lean back. (quoted in Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 14)

Much later, after The Beatles had split up and his new band Wings had been recording in Paris, McCartney realised that: Guitar playing is better if you really don’t try and if you play like you’re playing in the bathroom, playing on the bog, just for yourself. Those are all the great licks, that’s when it really happens, you know it’s just beautiful then and people can feel that you don’t care and it’s loose and it’s lovely. That’s what great musicians have, this kind of feeling that they’re not even trying. They just pick up the thing and this great graceful music happens. Basically, the thought is to kind of unthink the trying bit. (in Gambaccini, 1976, p. 66)

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In 1958 though, he had yet to learn that deceptively simple fact. The Quarrymen played any gig they could find around Liverpool, including a number of band competitions (none of which they won) and appeared at various parties and small clubs, which gave the Quarrymen and McCartney an early grounding on how to survive in a band. Getting, promoting, playing and keeping gigs is a set of necessary functions any performing musician must learn if they are to survive, thrive and succeed. As Pat Wilson notes, performing musicians in their formative period of musicianship typically develop skills and knowledge beyond simply learning their instrument: Like all people in small business, band members have to plan a lot of dreary details. Once they’re famous or rich, or preferably both, they’ll have a manager, a host of roadies, a sound tech, a lights and rigging tech and the odd spotlight operator. Until then, it’s the band members who have to see to getting bookings and hiring vans, people and a tonne of equipment. They have to sort out any technical problems, have to get everything to the gig in time to set up the hardware, run sufficient sound checks to satisfy everybody, make sure the light rig is up and going, reassure the management, make sure they’ll get paid the agreed amount, do the gig brilliantly, bump all the equipment out quickly – especially if there’s another band on straight afterwards – then return all hired gear promptly and in good order tomorrow morning at an indecently early hour. People who work in rock bands are not lazy. Their commitment to their music and performance skills is such that they often become their own entrepreneurs, working intensely hard in order to keep doing the job they have chosen to do. (Wilson, 1997, p. 57)

McCartney worked hard at his chosen profession and absorbed as many of the details as he could about what performing skills were required. He was also astute enough to know that he needed to get on with as many members of the field as he could; particularly in the social arena where the contestation and cooperation needed to acquire the skills, experience and reputation (what Bourdieu calls cultural, social and symbolic capital) takes place. The Beatles gigged wherever they had the opportunity, including at small home-grown coffee clubs like the Casbah and

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took advantage of their connection with its promoter Mona Best (whose son was drummer Pete Best). One of the first members of the field to take The Beatles seriously as musicians in these early days of their development was Allan Williams (1975). Williams in effect managed them. He mentored them and, importantly, showed them how to get and keep gigs. He was instrumental in introducing them to the professional end of the field. Williams for example organised an audition with Larry Parnes, an important impresario of the time, which led the young band to an unexpected, brief but formative tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle. This experience not only gave them their first taste of performing in theatres, as opposed to the small clubs they were used to, but also introduced them to what a professional touring musician could expect from life ‘on the road’. In the early stages of their career and well into the time they began touring seriously, playing gigs eight days a week, Paul McCartney and his bandmates shared a flurry of experiences as touring musicians. They travelled in the band’s van, together with their road crew of Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, as they went. After joining the band, Ringo recalled: We would go everywhere in the van and the amps and everything would fit in it with us. I remember sliding all over Scotland. It was bloody freezing in the winter. We never stopped anywhere. If we were in Elgin on a Thursday and needed to be in Portsmouth on Friday, we would just drive…Some nights it was so foggy that we’d be doing one mile an hour, but we’d still keep going. We were like homing pigeons…One night, I remember, when it was very, very cold, the three of us on the bench seat were lying on top of each other with a bottle of whisky. When the one on top got so cold that hypothermia was setting in, it would be his turn to get on the bottom. We’d warm each other up that way, keep swigging the whisky, keep going home. (in The Beatles, 2000, p. 85)

After returning home from that very first tour of Scotland (Ringo hadn’t yet joined The Beatles at this point) McCartney had his first opportunity to learn drums. They were ready to head out on another series of dates across the Wirral peninsula but their drummer at the time, Tommy Moore, let them down. He never turned up but his kit was still with the band and so Paul set it up at home, which allowed him to practice

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the rudiments. While he’s always found a shuffle beat difficult to play, playing a right-handed kit as a left-hander (Homan, 2019), Paul’s skills on the drums improved over the years to the point where he played the drum part on The Beatles’ song ‘Back in the USSR’ (1968) from The White Album (1968) and, as the band was nearing its cycle of life, ‘he records with Lennon The Ballad of John and Yoko’ (1969) in which he takes the drumming on his behalf. That is mainly for practical reasons: Lennon is in a hurry to record and release the track, but George Harrison is on a vacation and Ringo Starr is busy acting in a movie. So it is just the two of them’ (Homan, 2019). On ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ (1970), from his first solo release that reached number 1 in the USA, he also played drums as well as all the other instruments and, when another drummer let him down at the last minute, he played drums on the entirety of the highly successful Band on the Run (1973). Our guitarist at the time Henry McCullough, and Denny Seiwell failed to turn up. It was one of those numbers where they said, “We don’t want to go to Lagos and record this album, sorry.” I was left in the lurch at the last minute – literally an hour before the flight. So there was just Denny Laine, Linda and myself in Nigeria. I played drums, bass and a lot of guitar myself. (Garbarini, 1993, p. 11)

In 1997, McCartney also played drums on all but two of the songs on his album Flaming Pie (1997) and again on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005). He also contributes drum performances to The Fireman’s album Electric Arguments (2008) as well as his 17th solo album Egypt Station (2017). He also ‘impressed the American band The Foo Fighters, for whom he made a surprising guest appearance as a drummer on their track “Sunday Rain”. He did it in one take’ (Homan, 2019). But long before these musical accomplishments, Allan Williams had The Beatles performing in the city’s only strip club, the New Cabaret Artiste’s Club in Liverpool, as well as venues like the Jacaranda Club. McCartney wrote about these experiences as a young performer beginning to ‘tread the boards’ in songs like ‘Ballroom Dancing’ (1982) and ‘Take it Away’ (1982) on his Tug of War (1982) album. At this stage of their early development the group McCartney was performing in was, in

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essence, a covers band. By learning the songs written and performed by others they immersed themselves in recorded performances of songs from the field of works (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 235); that is, the accumulated cultural heritage held in a large body of records that they had access to. They learnt to play these songs and the functional role of each instrument and its various musical parts through intense concentration on other’s performances of those songs. As David Bowie later recalled, ‘when I was starting out in the sixties, before I started writing my own songs, I played everyone else’s songs. Everyone did! That’s how I learned to write songs’ (Clott, 2004, p. 8). As well as learning to write songs McCartney, like Bowie and a host of other musicians, was learning to play from recordings. This process, as Lucy Green contends, is a form of ‘informal music learning practice’ (Green, 2002, p. 5) which shares few of the defining features of formal or institutional music education. In this process McCartney and his young bandmates were deeply and unknowingly involved in their own personal ethnographic process. They were participant observers of the musical culture they were becoming absorbed into and, by participating and observing both at the same time, Paul and his bandmates were led into an unconscious ‘knowing’ of their instruments. As Donald Schon (1983) suggests, ‘knowing’ for creative practitioners has a number of properties: (Firstly), there are actions, recognitions, and judgements which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during their performance. (Secondly), We are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find ourselves doing them (and thirdly), in some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalised in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to describe the knowing which our action reveals. (1983, p. 54)

Learning to adjust their actions, while in the process of acting, led musicians like McCartney to be absorbed into ‘a kind of reflection on their patterns of action, on the situations in which they are performing. And on the know-how implicit in their performance. They are reflecting on action and in some cases, reflecting in action’ (1983, p. 55).

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Schon describes this as practitioners ‘finding the groove’ or having a ‘feel’ for their material. In Csikszentmihalyi’s terms it is a process of domain acquisition and immersion, in Bourdieu’s terms McCartney was acquiring the ‘habitus’ of a musician. Habitus, also described as having a ‘feel for the game’ or a practical sense of how things work (Johnson, 1993, p. 5), is partially derived from all of the activities musicians engage in when learning their instruments. These include activities such as memorising parts, copying licks, jamming around well-known song structures, embellishing, improvising and rearranging what they have heard and seen (Green, 2002, p. 45). Within these informal traditions: Young musicians largely teach themselves or ‘pick up’ skills and knowledge, usually with the help or encouragement of their family and peers, by watching and imitating musicians around them and by making reference to recordings or performances and other live events involving their chosen music. (ibid.)

Learning to play from and listening to records is both enabling and constraining. These recordings can be played over and over until an image of the song is embedded in the musician’s brain or at least until they have deconstructed the important musical information the song contains. As Lars Lilliestam indicates in his article ‘On Playing by Ear’ (1996), a record has infinite patience as a teacher but ‘there is no demonstration or explanation of what is happening’ (1996, p. 207). There has been no way, until the advent of platforms like Youtube, for an aspiring musician to watch what fingering is being used, which is particularly problematic for guitarists. As one example among many others, McCartney and his bandmates were intrigued by Hank Marvin’s guitar introduction to Cliff Richard’s early hit ‘Move It’ (1958). Although they could not describe it in this way, it featured ‘descending pentatonic minor lines in double stops’, the last being a technique particularly amenable to guitar players. They could not, simply by listening to the recording over and over again, figure out precisely how Marvin had played that introduction though. Then, as McCartney recounted:

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I saw them do it on TV. I rushed out of the house straight away, got on me bike, and raced up to John’s with me guitar. “I’ve got it,” I shouted. And we all got down to learning it right away. It gave us a little bit of flash to start off our numbers. (quoted in Everett, 2001, p. 39)

McCartney’s acquired habitus wasn’t just concerned with how to play his chosen instruments fluidly but included learning to work as a professional, including the values, the behaviour expected of a performing musician. Alan Merriam in his book The Anthropology of Music (1964) claimed that musicians play a specific role and hold a specific status and this: role and status are determined by the consensus of society as to what should be proper behaviour for the musician. Musicians may form a special class or caste, they may or may not be regarded as professionals, their role may be ascribed or achieved, their status may be high or low or a combination of both. In nearly every case, however, musicians behave socially in certain well defined ways, because they are musicians, and their behaviour is shaped both by their own self-image and by the expectations and stereotypes of the musicianly role as seen by society at large. (Merriam, 1964, p. 123)

In the summer of 1960, Allan Williams used his connections with Bruno Kirschmeider, the owner of the Indra nightclub in Hamburg’s red light district, to book The Beatles for an intensive season of performances. It was here that they learned what was expected of them as performing musicians. Their experiences in Hamburg have been recognised by many as formative in their development as musicians and performers, and where they really learned to play as an ensemble. With Paul playing a red sunburst Rosetti 7 solid body six string guitar, they performed reasonably well but were initially seen as somnambulistic on stage until they were encouraged to make a show of it, that is, make enough noise to attract an audience in off the street, then hold their attention so they stayed long enough to buy a drink. The band soon learned how to entertain and execute their roles as performing musicians.

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As Simon Frith has noted, musicians become musicians, or develop the attributes of musicians, by being absorbed into both the society of other musicians and music culture itself. For Frith: Musicians have to make a series of decisions – should I play this note, use this take, hire this musician, change the melody here, that order of the set there, shorten my solo, change the key; and these decisions rest on a constant process of evaluation – that’s the wrong chord, the wrong tempo, the wrong sound, the wrong mix – and a constant process of encouragement: that’s good, leave it! Such decisions are both individual, a reflection of one’s own talent (musical talent describes, among other things, the ability to make the right decisions about what’s good), and social. (Frith, 1996, p. 52)

Other musicians began to observe the change in The Beatles as a result of their time in Hamburg. Howie Casey, a saxophonist with Derry and the Seniors who would later go on to perform with Paul during the height of his Wings Over America tour in the seventies, dropped by the club in Hamburg one night during a break in his band’s own hectic schedule. ‘Casey was amazed at the change in that ‘bum group’ he’d last seen at the Larry Parnes audition. ‘Then, they’d seemed almost embarrassed about how bad they were. But they’d turned into a good stomping band’ (Casey in Norman, 2016, p. 114). One of Casey’s bandmates, Brian Griffiths, recognised that ‘Paul was really the one keeping them together’ (ibid.). Even with the copious distractions this area of Hamburg offered, ‘Paul’s primary concern was always the band’ (ibid., p. 116). On a number of occasions he would sit alone in the empty club practicing new material. Given the hours they were working he knew they ‘couldn’t get through the night only on rock “n” roll and they had to appeal to the German audience’ (ibid., pp. 116– 117). When they moved from the Indra to the Kaiserkeller club they were working five and a half hours per night with three half hour breaks. Their sets had to be filled with crowd-pleasing material and the more they played the better they got. Tony Sheridan, who The Beatles made their first recordings with, observed them live on stage many times and later remarked ‘watching them I used to think that Paul could probably

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make it without John, but John was never going to make it without Paul’ (quoted in Norman, 2016, p. 120). A critical event in McCartney’s development as a performing musician was the loss of The Beatles’ first bass player, Stuart Sutcliffe. In mid-1961, Sutcliffe had decided to stay in Hamburg with his current girlfriend to paint and McCartney remembers: ‘Oh-oh, we haven’t got a bass player. And everyone sort of turned around and looked at me. I was a bit lumbered with it, really; it was like: “Well…it’d better be you then”’ (ibid.). McCartney wasn’t at a complete loss as to what to do on this instrument though as his knowledge of what the bass player was supposed to do in an ensemble situation began, once again, with his Dad. McCartney remembers: Funnily enough, I’d always liked the bass. My dad was a musician and I remember him giving me little lessons, not actual sit-down lessons but maybe there’d be something on the radio and he’d say “Hear that low stuff? That’s the bass”. I remember him actually pointing out what bass was, and he’d do little lessons in harmony. So when I came to The Beatles I had a little bit of musical knowledge through him – very amateur. (quoted in Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 17)

From that self-professed amateur status McCartney went on to become one of the most noted, admired and imitated bass guitarists in Western popular music. One of the things that made McCartney’s playing so unique, from ‘Michelle’ through to ‘Silly Love Songs’ (Hutcheon, 2011, p. 84), was that he was firstly a guitarist. As Tony Bacon and Gareth Morgan have argued, a bass player who begins by playing the guitar ‘plays differently compared to bassists who start on bass as their first instrument. Guitarists inevitably bring guitar techniques and habits to the bass, consciously or otherwise’ (2006, p. 16). The recording of the Beatles at Hamburg’s Star Club on 31 December 1962 contains some notable examples, not least Paul’s use of the double-stop on ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ (1936). A term borrowed from classical music, a double-stop is when a string player, typically a violinist, plays two notes or two strings at the same time to add colour to the sound. Bacon & Morgan explain that while playing ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ (1936):

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McCartney is working in the middle of his Hofner’s fingerboard, and he may have worried about the weaker sound this gave. A double-stop proved to be an effective method for him to bolster the sound – and as an ex-guitarist he would be used to root-fifth shapes from rock’n’roll six stringing. (2006, p. 23)

There were other things he brought to his performance too; specifically the way he combined his singing with his playing. For Bacon & Morgan, ‘playing any instrument and singing at the same time, live, is a skill not to be underrated. Some, like McCartney, appear to manage it almost without effort’ (2006, p. 31). This is reminiscent of the story told about Fritz Kreisler, of whom ‘a fan once said of the Austrian violinist that she would give her life to play as he did. He replied, very simply, “Madame I did”’ (Gualco, 2010, p. 85). Just like Kreisler’s virtuosic reputation, McCartney’s reputation as a bass player was hard-earned, and as well as focusing on his technique he also paid close attention to the various details of the bass sound. Towards the end of 1961, Paul ordered a custom-made 15-inch speaker cabinet from Adrian Barber (guitarist from the Liverpool band ‘The Big Three’), which they nicknamed ‘The Coffin’. Paired with his 15-W Selmer amplifier, his new speaker cabinet significantly improved his bass sound, remembering ‘it was great live’ (quoted in Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 19). Paul’s dedication to detail was evident later in his career too inside the recording studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick remembers one very long recording session, after the band had come off the road after years of intense playing and touring, where Paul insisted on perfecting his lines well into the midnight hour. He had run a cable down to the amplifier in the studio and was playing bass in the control room. Brow furrowed in deep concentration, fingers wrapped around the neck of his Rickenbacker, Paul instructed Richard to drop in and out over and over again. Determined to get every single note and phrase as perfect as it could possibly be, that night he was like a man possessed. (Emerick, 2006, p. 183)

McCartney’s dedication to his craft as a player was an essential part of his development as a musician, as Richard Wolf explains:

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Dedication is the first bridge because it is not only essential to building a daily practice, but it’s also pretty much a foundation for everything that follows. No musician ever became moderately successful without being dedicated to making music. A strong resolve is necessary in overcoming setbacks, failures, disappointments, and disillusionment that we all experience as musicians. (2019, p. 22)

By practicing various instruments, memorising parts, copying licks and learning and performing well-known song structures, McCartney is internalising the domain of musicianship. At the same time, through his on-going live performance experience, working as part of the band, reacting to the audience and listening to an extensive range of recordings, McCartney is also internalising the mechanisms and criteria for selection that operate within the field of musicianship. After the break-up of The Beatles, McCartney had to draw on his resolve, suffering the disillusionment of losing the band he had dedicated so much of his life to. He released two solo albums McCartney (1970) and Ram (1971), after which he decided to form a new band: ‘He intended to develop the group slowly, as the Beatles had been able to grow naturally, enjoying the process of playing small shows again, and making records in a relaxed collaborative atmosphere’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 480). After re-gathering his confidence at his secluded farm on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, Paul drew on all of his accumulated domain knowledge and his connections with the field, choosing New York-based session musicians who had worked on Ram (1971) Denny Seiwell (drums) and Hugh McCracken (guitar). The final member to be selected was Denny Laine, previously the front man for The Diplomats and The Moody Blues, and someone Paul had known since the early 1960s. McCartney chose Laine because he wanted someone: ‘he could write with, play with and sing harmony with, as he had with Lennon’ (ibid.). Paul and his new band headed to London to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) a place ‘where artists could practice, and where there was a café so we could get lunch, and it allowed bands to rehearse…Above all we tried to get the band together’ (McCartney in Lewisohn, 2002, p. 40). He named the band Wings, and after rehearsals

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Paul took the band on the road, fulfilling his desire to start small and build from there, just as The Beatles had done and something he’d suggested when The Beatles were making Get Back, an album that was eventually released as Let it Be (1968). His idea wasn’t realised then, but with a new band he now had a chance to put it into action. Knowing his fame would precede him, McCartney had deliberately tried to keep this initial tour very low-key. ‘We had decided we would go back to square one’ (ibid., p. 43). Booking a big tour was therefore out of the question, certainly until the musicians had gelled together as a band. McCartney knew that the critics would be dissecting every aspect of the show and making inevitable comparisons to what had been one of the biggest and most successful acts in the world. In fact, to prevent anybody knowing too much about what was going on there was no booking to take place at all. Venues and accommodation were not pre-planned, ‘we’d just go in a van – the band, the kids, the dogs – take off up the motorway and find somewhere to play’ (ibid.). The Bedford van was complemented by an Avis rental truck carrying all of the stage gear (Lewisohn, 2002, p. 38). By Paul’s twenty-first-century standards this consisted of limited stage equipment, a small PA and a few requisite lights. The idea was to travel the roads randomly until they could find an accommodating University audience. ‘Our roadie would go in, find someone from the Students’ Union and say, “I’ve got Paul McCartney in the van, with his band Wings. Do you want ‘em to play for you?”’ Invariably, once the disbelief had dissipated, they did. We didn’t have many songs. To be precise we had eleven, which – at about three minutes a song – is a 33-minute act. They wanted longer so we repeated things. “We’ve had a request to do Lucille (1957). We did it earlier but now we’re gonna do it again for Jenny Babford on the science course.” Whatever. We just repeated things, especially our new single “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (1971). The gigs went quite well. (McCartney in Lewisohn, 2002, p. 43)

McCartney quickly recovered a sense of what it was like to be a gigging musician again. When he was in The Beatles they were used to others taking care of the money. He recalled ‘it was all cheques and accounts and

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stuff, bank statements. And suddenly there it was, we had to change all those half-crowns’ (McCartney in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 106). At this point the band was being paid a percentage of the door fee and, like countless others before and since, split their earnings up after the show in the van. With this tour they had been ‘through the baptism of fire. Eventually we got a bit better’ (McCartney in Lewisohn, 2002, p. 44) and set off on a tour of England and then Europe cautiously edging Wing’s way into the regular life of professional touring musicians working in the seventies. His appetite for live work whetted, Paul arranged for a full European tour. Scheduled to begin on July 9 at the Châteauvallon Centre Culturelle, the shows were promoted by John Martin, who had booked the Woodstock festival and was now running the Rainbow Theatre, London’s principal rock venue. Because of the relatively small capacity halls in which Paul insisted the tour begin, Martin lost a fortune, as did Paul McCartney himself. This notwithstanding the fact that – the gypsy feel of the short British tour having established a precedent – the group travelled between most of the dates in an open-topped, converted double decker bus… arduous rehearsals began at the Manticore rehearsal studios, owned by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, in Fulham, West London. To document the tour and provide press photographs, Joe Stevens, a New Yorker working in London for the underground press, was hired. (Salewicz, 1986, p. 227)

The following Wings over the World tour which took place in 1979 and was documented for television by McCartney’s own production company, MPL Communications (Priestly, 1979), was to turn out to be the penultimate tour for Wings. They were banned from entering Japan at the time so McCartney arrived in Australia instead with his expanded entourage and his troupe of newly recruited musicians. The Venus and Mars album featured a deliberately written show-opener simply titled ‘Rock Show’, which details and celebrates the ephemera of attending a seventies rock concert; a complex form of life imitating art, writing about life, which Wings proceeded to deliver on. While The Beatles in their early days had performed using their Vox AC30 instrument amps, they were reliant on house Public Address (PA) systems often only consisting of a 100 W amplifier driving 2 small columns of 12in speakers. Bands in this period worked hard and often

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‘did 3 gigs a night, traveling in unregistered Kombis or transit vans. This restricted PAs to two 4 × 12in columns, similar to the size of instrument amps’ (Burnett, 2009). In the 1970s things began to change as venues became larger, audiences increased in number, and staging became more elaborate. ‘For a PA to be effective it had to be at least 4 times the scale of the instrument amps and fully active to achieve fidelity’ (ibid.). The PA itself began to be the main audio system used to throw sound into large spaces and the need for larger stage guitar amplifiers was diminishing. Musicians continued to use them however, often for their visual effect. Lighting also became crucial for rock bands in the seventies. Light shows had been developed in an ad hoc way in the 1960s but took a serious turn as tours became more extensive across a number of continents by bands like Wings. McCartney, like all other performers using big touring rigs, had to get used to what these technologies afforded not only for his instrumentation but also for his vocal performance. He had to learn how to sing with high sound pressure levels at his disposal and to work with his vocal monitor speakers, which can highlight every tiny vocal detail and inflection. He also had to get used to the increased staging of these big shows, the dramatic theme to the James Bond movie ‘Live and Let Die’ for example was performed live on stage by the band with flash pyrotechnics and smoke flashes timed to the rhythmic climax of the song. As McCartney explained, ‘it was quite a high-tech tour, with lasers and light shows…I’d seen lasers in James Bond films where they could cut people in half. I first saw one in a rock concert when I went to see Led Zeppelin at Earls Court in London, and I remember thinking, “How brave is that Robert Plant? He’s standing in front of these things and it could cut him clean in half ”’ (Lewisohn, 2002, p. 103). The US leg of the ‘tour was run on an enormous scale. Three articulated trucks lugged twelve and a half tons of gear…Their drivers communicated via CB radio, as a helicopter rotored overhead, filming the progress of this showy cavalcade’ (Doyle, 2013, pp. 184–185). But there were some who were mystified by McCartney’s decision to still tour. Asked by one journalist in Australia about why he continued to be out on the road when he appeared rich enough not to be, he replied that he was talking to Jerry Reed, a guitar player from Nashville in the USA, about going on the road. Reed quipped, ‘If I was Paul McCartney, I’d

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buy the road!’ (Priestly, 1979). As he confirmed many years later ‘it’s not like I needed to. It’s just for the love of it. Someone asked Ringo why he was going out on tour, and he said, “It’s what I do.” And that’s exactly right. It’s what you do. It’s what I’ve practiced enough, it’s what I love doing’ (McCartney in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 258). That tour saw them cope with the troubles that are often part of the musician’s life on the road and on stage. For example, in Houston as they played the second date of the American leg of the tour, Tom Doyle noted that ‘Paul was nearly injured by a piece of scaffolding that fell from the elaborate rigging during the set, the metal pole instead hitting tour manager Trevor Jones on the head, an injury that required thirteen stitches’ (Doyle, 2013, p. 186). Further along the road, in Detroit, ‘Paul was ratty onstage, coping with feedback and a pizza-slicing cut on his finger that caused him to mess up the complex guitar picking of “Blackbird’” (ibid.). As a guitar player Paul had come a long way, particularly as his guitar part from ‘Blackbird’ had become a rite of passage for so many burgeoning guitar players looking to improve their skills. McCartney’s five-piece band, with him playing bass, and occasionally guitar and piano, was now supplemented by a four-piece brass section, led by saxophonist and old mate from his Liverpool and Hamburg days, Howie Casey. But for Paul the reward was his reception at some of the final shows of the tour. “Everything I’ve done since The Beatles split has been leading up to this show”, Paul told a reporter backstage at Madison Square Garden on 24 May, the start of a sold-out two-night stint at the prestigious, star-making New York venue. Inside the arena, the mood of the crowd was rising towards hysteria…Fans crushed at the lip of the stage, while others in the bleachers mindlessly set off flares and fireworks. Arriving onstage, Wings walked tall, to be met with scenes reminiscent of Beatlemania…Launching into their set, the band rose to the occasion and, well oiled as they were on more than one level, easily surpassed expectations. (Doyle, 2013, p. 191)

As the tour drew to its climax McCartney rejoiced in the fact that he and his band were now well and truly established as successful performing musicians with him fronting a show that had moved from university

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bars, to theatres and then to arenas (Priestly, 1979). The finale came at the Seattle Kingdome where they were credited with ‘breaking the attendance record for the biggest ever indoor gig, something like 67,000 people’ (McCartney in Lewisohn, 2002, p. 95). After this triumph the band went through a number of line-up changes but, after the Back to the Egg (1979) album was recorded, McCartney planned another world tour taking in the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA. However, only the UK leg of this 1979 tour went ahead. Following McCartney’s arrest, incarceration and deportation from Japan, he didn’t tour again for another decade. And then in 1989 he began a series of world tours as a solo artist. These have continued regularly to the present day. The Paul McCartney World Tour (September 1989–July 1990) ‘smashed box office attendance records with his first ever show in Brazil at Rio’s Estádio do Maracanã - over 184,000 people came to see him. This also earned Paul another entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, this time for the Largest Concert Audience’ (MPL, 2020). This tour was followed by the Unplugged Tour (May–July 1991), The New World Tour (February–December 1993), the Driving World Tour (April–November 2002), the Back in the World tour (March–June 2003), the ‘04 Summer Tour (May–June 2004), The ‘US’ Tour (September– November 2005), the Secret Tour (June–October 2007), the Summer Live‘ 09 tour (July–August 2009), the Good Evening Europe Tour (Dec 2009), the Up and Coming Tour (Mar-June 2011), the On the Run Tour (July–November 2011), the Out There Tour (May 2013–October 2015), and the One on One tour (April–December 2017) which earned gross revenues of $242,600,000 (Wikipedia, 2020). Each tour is unique, integrating new technology, different audiences and drawing on an extensive back catalogue to offer the audience value for money. Each tour has to be novel in order to be valued. It’s often the title McCartney gives to each tour that triggers new ideas for him and he explains that the name of the tour ‘suggests what you’ve got to try and do’ (McCartney in MPL, 2017, pp. 10–11). As a performer he attempts to build the show around that idea and the all-important setlist comes from that, which in turn, dictates the running order to effectively build dynamics, musical light and shade, into the show. Paul realises:

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You have to keep most of your favourites – and then you look at what you can change and what you can bring to the show that either hasn’t been heard for a long time or something you’ve never done before so that you’ll have added that uniqueness to the show that the fans appreciate…I don’t want anyone to be disappointed. Then the band will make suggestions. They’ll kick in ideas and we end up with a list that we rehearse, and from that we choose the one that we think we’re playing well and that we can enjoy playing – and that ends up as the set. After that we get in contact with our production people and start to look for interesting ways to present the songs with lighting, video and things like that. (MPL, 2017, p. 11)

Creating a touring show doesn’t end there though. Each member of his band and crew creates one aspect of it until, as Antoine Hennion (1990) suggests, the collective effort results in the final novel product. Each tour, just like a film production, is supported by a cast and crew that typically numbers in the hundreds. As well as the band, the in-house crew is hired directly by McCartney through MPL Communication and includes the Travel Director, Tour Director, MPL Consultant, Security Director, Tour Financial Director, Lighting and Set Design, Travel Coordinator, various Personal Assistants, Tour Manager, Security, Publicists, Photographer Videographer, VIP Director and the DJ. The Backline Crew Chief is responsible for all the band’s instruments. John Hammel is McCartney’s long-time principal guitar technician and he notes that: He has a great band behind him and, to me, they support him like no other band has. They support him like we all support him, like they are part of the team. Paul is the guy everyone is coming to see, and he needs the whole team of people to produce this for him to perform like he does on stage – with the lights and the screens and everything else, PA, monitors, the whole thing. He needs everyone to do it. And for me, with this band, there’s been no ego trips. They just back Paul brilliantly, and they just make it easier for Paul to play on stage. (Grimshaw, 2004, p. 48)

The Front of House (FOH) Sound Engineer travels with the band and is responsible for the sound in every venue. The Lighting Director is responsible for those visual aspects of the staging. The rest of the crew

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and production team, who set up the show, run it and pack it down for the next gig, includes a Production Manager, Production Coordinator, Stage Manager, Advance Production, Accountant, Backline Crew, Carpenters, Caterers, Wardrobe, Electricians, Lighting Crew, Follow Spot and Laser Operators, Video Directors and Camera Operators and all the locally hired porters and backline staff who bring the show to life every night. As well as all this necessary work there are the ancillary businesses the tour depends on. For the One on One (2016) tour, for example, these included all of the venue operators and their staff, touring companies like Frontier Touring in Australia and New Zealand, and Live Nation Latin America, as well as companies like Pyrotek Special Effects, Clair Worldwide public address systems, Upstaging Lighting and Upstaging Trucking, Rockit Cargo, Blackout Merchandise, Travelhire, Hemphill Brothers Coach Company, Nationwide Touring Services and Smog Design who deliver the tour programmes, as well as many others used by Paul McCartney as he and his crew tour worldwide. None of these shows could be created if it wasn’t for the cooperative effort of all of these people. As McCartney himself admits: ‘It’s the overall production really, the band and the production team. It’s the sum of all those parts that’s impressive, and the fact everyone comes together as a family and puts on this show by piecing together all these little parts; everyone doing their job amazingly’ (MPL, 2017, p. 12). Nearly three hours nightly of the greatest moments from the last 50 years of music, dozens of songs from Paul’s solo, Wings and of course Beatles catalogues that have formed the soundtracks of our lives. Paul and his band have played an unparalleled range of venues and locations throughout the Americas, the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and all points between: outside the Coliseum in Rome, Moscow’s Red Square, Buckingham Palace, The White House, a free show in Mexico for over 400,000 people, the last ever show at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park where The Beatles played their final concert in 1966, a 2016 week in the California desert that included two headline sets at the historic Desert Trip festival and a jam-packed club gig for a few hundred lucky fans at Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, and even one performance broadcast live into Space! The One On One Tour features a brand new

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production, as always, utilising state of the art audio and video technology and to ensure an unforgettable experience from every seat in the house. Employing massive screens, lasers, fireworks and, of course, a staggering selection of the best songs ever written or performed. (Marshall Arts, 2019)

Performing with a band that has now lasted longer than any of the others he has worked with before, including The Beatles, Paul McCartney has become a highly experienced and much admired musician, an old hand as it were. But he still follows the habits of a working musician. Each night there is the soundcheck where he and his touring band run through songs and check the sound of instruments, amplifier settings, line levels and so on until they and the FOH, Backline and Monitor crew are satisfied all is in working order before the doors open. They often play longer at soundchecks than McCartney ever did doing nightly shows with The Beatles. It’s always really good to play in the hall that you’re going to play that night. It’s good to give all the technicians the chance to run through all the instruments you’re going to play, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so long – you have to go through your guitar, your bass, your piano, your mandolin, your ukulele, your acoustic guitar, your 12 string guitar and all that. (MPL, 2017, p. 13)

Once all of the required tasks have been completed, the doors open and the audience arrives into the venue and, once the lull between soundcheck and showtime is over, the band readies itself to take the stage. McCartney often starts each show with a few rituals such as using a steam inhaler to clear his sinuses to help his singing voice, a ritual that he learnt from Little Richard: In the early days of the Beatles we played with Richard in Hamburg and got to know him. He would let us hang out in his dressing room and we were witness to his pre-show rituals, with his head under a towel over a bowl of steaming hot water. (Quoted in Kreps, 2020: online)

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Paul and the band usually harmonise together as they leave their dressing rooms and head towards the backstage area, warming up and spurring each other on as they go. ‘Behind the stage his assistant John Hammel gives Paul his guitar’ (Grimshaw, 2004, p. 80). They use the same lead and same tuner each night. John and Paul high five each other and, ‘as Paul comes to the stage, me and Syd [Pryce] will be behind the curtains with the guitars, and Keith will be over by the amps. Then I’ll give Paul the Strepsil’ (ibid.). The Strepsils are a hangover from McCartney’s early recording days at Abbey Road where these cough lozenges sat on top of the amps in the studio to help ensure The Beatles voices, often worn from singing eight days a week on the road, were also tuned for the task at hand. The band huddles together just before they move into position in the darkness, and as they do so Paul places this ‘red cough drop on a speaker, the same spot each night’ (ibid.). The curtain goes up and McCartney is once again back in centre stage deploying all of his instrumental and vocal skills, his life-long experience as a touring musician dealing with all sorts of people and eventualities, and his formidable reputation, what Bourdieu called cultural, social and symbolic capital, to help himself and his crew work their way through two to three hours of organised chaos. Onstage McCartney not only concentrates on his and the band’s performance but also keeps his eye on reading the crowd he is communicating with. When asked what goes through his mind on stage he replied: It’s impossible to say really. It’s…that would be a great movie. I mean…everything is the only answer to that, really. It’s astounding, the abilities of the human animal, when you think about it. Me, for instance, I’ve got to be making my throat make these notes, that’s like one thing I’ve got to do. And they’ve all got to be the right note, not flat or sharp. So that’s one thing I’ve gotta do. Then I’ve got to be thinking of the words that go with these throat noises, and I’ve got to perform them like I mean it. Then I’ve got to, then, forget all of that; I’ve got to play a bass line, which is completely different. OK. I’ve been doing it for so long it’s like second nature. Then I’ve got to look at all these people looking at me – I don’t even get to be in a little closet and try and remember all this stuff. I’ve then got to look at all these people…and they’re holding up signs! Distracting me! And I’m reading these bloody signs and singing this, and

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making these noises…It’s, ah, I don’t believe it, it’s uncanny. Sometimes it’s a bit scary. I go, “My God, you know, this is like sensory overload.” And then you’re seeing some people and, oh, they’re kissing. “Ohmigod, what is going on?” So you’re getting, like, this movie you’re watching, and all those signs, these subtitles – It’s like a foreign movie…“Paul! The first time I made love to my husband was during ‘Hey Jude’!” “What??!! Don’t say that, I’m trying to think!” You get all this stuff, and then you’ve gotta think what you’re gonna say to them, because they react. So it’s massive sensory overload…And you’ve got lights on you and an explosion during “Live and Let Die”…It blows up and you’ve all this dust to deal with. It’s terrifying! But I enjoy it. We’re having so much fun”. (quoted in Grimshaw, 2004, p. 97)

Being together for fifteen years Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens on keyboards, Brian Ray on bass/guitar, Rusty Anderson on guitar and Abe Laboriel Jr on drums, having spent so much time close to him and his playing, have each noted what it is about Paul McCartney they believe sets him apart as a creative performer. Anderson comments that ‘as a musician it’s like God said, “OK, I’m gonna give 50 talents and I ‘m gonna put them into this one person. There you go, Boom! ”’ (quoted in Grimshaw, 2004, p. 60). With each of these talents on display nightly Anderson observes that it is ‘mind blowing. But yet, at the same time, the way he applies his musicality to each instrument is like … it feels natural, you know?’ (ibid.). Wickens observes that: I am always amazed at how much he is into playing and singing music. He has done everything you could possibly want to do in the music business, and films and the rest of it. And he is still fired up by it; he really loves playing and singing and that is where he started. And when he plays and sings, especially when he plays bass, he is like two people. He’s this great bass player and this great singer. I’ve seen it a lot, and I’m still amazed at how into it he is. (quoted in Grimshaw, 2004, p. 60)

Drummer Abe Laboriel Jr comments: Musically – ah, man – It is great to see someone who has done so much and has written so many songs and has done so many gigs and broken so

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much ground, still be excited to do what he does. You know it’s very easy for people to get complacent and to feel jaded, but he doesn’t have any of those affectations. He’s still just as happy and still feels as excited as if he’s 16 years old and playing his first gig. (quoted in Grimshaw 2004, p. 61)

As Bacon and Morgan commented, ‘there is no greater compliment than respect from your peers for your craft, skill, musicianship, and musicality’ (2006, p. 8). His former producer George Martin noted that ‘he’s an excellent musical all-rounder, probably the best bass guitarist there is, a first-class drummer, brilliant guitarist and a competent piano player’ (quoted in Homan, 2019). ‘“He’s the guvnor,” says Sting, simply and appropriately’ (Bacon & Morgan, 2006, p. 8). ‘“It’s what I do,” says McCartney. “You don’t work music, you play music and I hope to be singing and playing when I’m 90 years old. I always thought I would live until about 90 and that estimate is going up! In the end I will probably be wheeled up on stage to sing ‘Yesterday’”’ (McCartney in Barrow & Bextor, 2006, p. 137). And it is to the way this song was created, all those years ago, that we now turn our attention.

References Bacon, T., & Morgan, G. (2006). Paul McCartney Bassmaster: Playing the Great Bestels Basslines. Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books. Barrow, T., & Bextor, R. (2006). Paul McCartney: Now and then. Melbourne: Penguin. The Beatles. (2000). The Beatles anthology. Chronicle Books. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Polity Press. Burnett, J. (2009). Professional live music—Historical context. Lenard Audio Institute. http://education.lenardaudio.com/en/08_live.html. Accessed 26 February 2021. Clott, J. (2004, February). The many faces of David Bowie (p. 8). Concrete Press. Doyle, T. (2013). Man on the run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s. Polygon.

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Du Noyer, P. (2015). Conversations with McCartney. Hodder & Stroughton. Emerick, G. (2006). Here, there and everywhere: My life recording the music of the Beatles. Gotham Books. Everett, W. (2001). The Beatles as musicians: The quarry men through rubber soul. Oxford University Press. Frith, S. (1996). Performing rites: Evaluating popular music. Oxford University Press. Gambaccini, P. (1976). Paul McCartney: In his own words. Omnibus Press. Garbarini, V. (1993). Paul McCartney: Lifting the veil on the Beatles, The best of musician (pp. 9–16). Amordian Press. Green, L. (2002). How popular musicians learn: A way ahead for music education. Ashgate. Grimshaw, C. (2004). Paul McCartney: On stage, off stage and backstage. Chronicle Books Gualco, D. (2010). The great people of our time. iUniverse. Havers, R., & Evans, R. (2010). The golden age of rock ‘N’ Roll. Chartwell Books. Hennion, A. (1990). The production of success: An antimusicology of the pop song. In S. Frith & A. Goodwin (Eds.), On record: Rock (pp. 185–206). Pop and The Written Word: Pantheon Books. Hepworth, D. (2018). Nothing is real: The Beatles were underrated and other sweeping statements about pop. Penguin. Homan, A. (2019). ‘Drummer Boy McCartney’, Macca News. https://maccanews.blogspot.com/2016/10/drummer-boy-mccartney.html. (accessed 9 January 2020). Hutcheon, D. (2011, August). ‘You Can’t Do That…’. Mojo, Issue 213, (pp. 74–87). Bauer Media Group. Johnson, R. (1993). Editors introduction. In P. Bourdieu (Ed.), The field of cultural production (pp. 1–25). Polity Press. Kreps, D. (2020). Paul McCartney: ‘I owe a lot of what i do to little Richard’ . https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paul-mccartneylittle-richard-tribute-997033/. date accessed 18 June 2020. Lewisohn, M. (1993). The complete Beatles Chronicle. Pyramid Books. Lewisohn, M. (Ed.). (2002). Wingspan: Paul McCArtney’s band on the run. Little Brown. Lilliestam, L. (1996). On playing by ear. Popular Music, 15 (2), 195–216. Priestley, J. (Dir). (1979). Wings over the world (MPL Communications), TV Movie, original airing 16 March 1979, CBS USA TV, Distribution by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (all media).

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Marshall Arts. (2019). Paul McCartney gets one on one with Mexico. Marshall Arts Ltd . https://marshall-arts.com/news-articles/paul-mccartney-gets-oneon-one-with-mexico. (Accessed 26 February 2021). Merriam, A. (1964). The anthropology of music. Northwestern University Press. MPL. (2017). One on one: Tour programme. MPL Communications. MPL. (2020). Paul in Brazil—A World Cup Special! PaulMcCartney.com. https://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/news/paul-in-brazil-world-cupspecial, date accessed 6 June 2020. Norman, P. (2016). Paul McCartney: The biography. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Salewicz, C. (1986). McCartney: The biography. Futura. Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. Sounes, H. (2010). Fab: An intimate life of Paul McCartney. Harper Collins. Wikipedia. (2020). List of Paul McCartney concert tours. Wikipedia. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Paul_McCartney_concert_tours. Date accessed 4 June 2020. Williams, A. (1975). The man who gave The Beatles away. Macmillan. Wilson, P. (1997). The singing voice: An owner’s manual. Currency Press. Wolf, R. (2019) In tune: Music as the bridge to mindfulness. The Experiment.

3 Paul McCartney and the Creation of ‘Yesterday’

Paul McCartney is a much-celebrated performer. Among so many of his fellow musicians he is seen as a highly influential and trendsetting bass player, a talented multi-instrumentalist and an accomplished vocalist. But McCartney is often most remembered for his songwriting and in this chapter we apply Mihaly Cskszentmaihlyi’s systems model of creativity () to Paul McCartney’s songwriting process with a specific focus on just one song, ‘Yesterday’ (1965). Since its release, the creation of this song has been promoted as a Romantic piece of creative activity, in which the entire melody of the song came to McCartney one night in a dream and when he woke up he rushed to his nearby piano to transcribe it before he forgot it (Turner, 2005). We set out in this chapter however to show that the creation of ‘Yesterday’ (1965) was, on analysis, a more considered and rational process than otherwise mythologised. As we’ve established in previous chapters, creativity is an activity whereby products, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent conditions by the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of human knowledge and so, we argue that the emergence of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_3

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‘Yesterday’ (1965) is a paradigmatic example of this creative system in action. While ‘Yesterday’ (1965) is credited to Lennon/McCartney it has been widely acknowledged that Paul McCartney instigated and guided much of the songwriting process (e.g. Beatles, 2000; Coleman, 1995; Elson, 1986; Lewisohn, 1992; MacDonald, 1994). The finished song emerged via the agency of McCartney, which resulted from his immersion in a pre-existing domain of knowledge, and his part in a set of necessary interactions with the field of songwriting. As a pivot point in McCartney’s and The Beatles’ career, the emergence of ‘Yesterday’ highlights the actions of a choice-making entity operating within a systemic relationship with the field and domain of popular song. These three components, the individual agent, the symbol system they use, and the social organisation they create within, are factors which are all equally important and interdependent in producing creative products such as songs. For us, ‘Yesterday’ is but one creative product of this system at work. However, since Romantic ideas have been so readily and conveniently applied to the creation of this song, this conception needs a little exploration on our part. In the West it has become common sense to think that creative people work within some form of mystical inspiration of mind or spirit and are not controlled by external forces as ordinary people are. These inspired individuals are thought of as autonomous beings whose intentions are self-expressive and whose will to accomplish things is, and must be, free from any form of constraint. If this person is to be ‘truly creative’, whatever that expression might mean, they should be seen to be operating in an independent way, completely distanced from any perceived hindrances. They simply do things as their muse suggests. This conception, as flawed and as contradictory as it is, is part of an historically generated discourse (Negus & Pickering, 2004, pp. 7–9; Williams, 1961) that is often presented in the West as an unchallenged transcendent truth (Petrie, 1991). It is worth noting here that this Romantic conception can’t be reduced to a few of its shibboleths, that is, the actions of ‘the muse’ or ‘divine inspiration’ but we can certainly suggest that it holds a faith in the individual as a mystical harbinger of the creative act. Consequently, it’s also possible to align it with the ‘genius’ view of creativity

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where it accords with ‘the myth of monumental greatness’ (Negus & Pickering, 2004, p. 161) and shares similar problems with that point of view (Albert, 1992; Howe, 1999; Perelman, 1994; Stillinger, 1991 ; Weisberg, 1993). Furthermore: It is widely believed that creativity usually involves sudden flashes of insight and great leaps of imagination. Robert Weisberg (1986) calls this the “aha! myth.” Undeniably, creative bursts of insight do occur (Feldman, 1988). However, the evidence suggests that major creative achievements are generally logical extensions of existing ideas, involving long, hard work and many small, faltering steps forward (Weisberg,1988, 1993). Creative ideas do not come out of nowhere. Creative ideas come from a deep well of experience and training in a specific area, whether it’s music, painting, business, or science. As Snow (1986) puts it, “Creativity is not a light bulb that is in the mind, as most cartoons depict it. It is an accomplishment born of intensive study, long reflection, persistence, and interest” (p. 1033). (Weiten, 1998, p. 373)

This final point aligns well with the systems model of creativity, one among a number of confluence models of creativity (Sternberg, 1999, pp. 10–12) that de-centres the creative individual and locates them as one necessary but not sufficient part of a re-conceptualised creative act (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1997, 1999). This doesn’t mean that there is no room in this model for the actions of the individual. On the contrary, it points to the conditions where acts of extraordinary achievement may occur. What the model provides is a framework of enabling and constraining factors, also necessary but not sufficient, which contribute to these achievements and at times drive them. What this means is choice-making agents like McCartney (as has been suggested a number of times in the literature (e.g. Archer, 2003; Boden, 1994, 2004; Bourdieu, 1993; Giddens, 1979), can never be free of structures. Rather, it is the very structures they engage with that give them the capability of taking action; creative action takes place because these structures are in place. In the case of the creation of ‘Yesterday’ (1965), these structures are to be found in the symbol systems and conventional practices of popular music, as well as the way in which the social world of popular music is organised. The creative individual therefore operates within a social

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relationship involving an array of industry functionaries, be they record producers, audio engineers, media critics, audiences or a host of other operatives involved in music. Both the body of knowledge itself and the people who hold and understand that knowledge does two things at once; they both constrain and enable the act of creativity, allowing it to emerge from these necessary sets of interactions. As Margaret Boden argues: the ascription of creativity always involves tacit or explicit reference to some generative system. It follows too that constraints – far from being opposed to creativity – make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking. (Boden, 1994, p. 79)

The coalescence of all of these ideas are manifest in the systems model in which: for creativity to occur, a set of rules and practices must be transmitted from the domain to the individual. The individual must then produce a novel variation in the content of the domain. The variation then must be selected by the field for inclusion in the domain. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, p. 315)

The emergence of ‘Yesterday’ can then be more readily explained using the systems model of creativity than it can by the mystically oriented Romantic conception that has become so readily identified with it in the popular imagination (e.g. Salewicz, 1986; Snow, 1995). We therefore conceive of Paul McCartney as an active agent who is embedded within a set of constraining and enabling factors, all of which constitute a system of creative action in which the song ‘Yesterday’ (1965) emerged. Firstly, we explore McCartney’s immersion into the domain of songwriting, which includes the knowledges and conventions of songs, and, secondly, whether or not he interacted with the socially constructed field of popular music, a field which holds and understands the knowledge of songs and makes decisions about them, and see what effect this had on McCartney’s actions. From here we can also conceive of McCartney as an exceptional creator who ‘cannot be isolated from the ordinariness of

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human life’ (Negus & Pickering, 2004, p. 160) and who is personally positioned within a set of ‘changing biographical circumstances, social relationships, economic imperatives, stylistic conventions and historical traditions’ (ibid., p. 161). Since ‘songwriters are people working inside cultures and social contexts’ (Cook and Mercer in Inglis, 2000, p. 87), not in an isolated and autonomous vacuum, we concur with the idea that their aesthetic ambitions are bound by their own personal experiences and the professional pressures they are exposed to (Heinonen & Eerola, 2000). In other words, we demonstrate the multifactorial and interdependent creative system that allowed ‘Yesterday’ to emerge, which was a holistic and deeply integrated activity that took place between McCartney, domain and field.

McCartney and His Immersion into the Domain of Songwriting To begin, we go back to the time the song is believed to have come into existence. In his comprehensive study of ‘Yesterday’ Ray Coleman (1995) points out that Paul McCartney woke up late, which was not unusual for him. He was, after all, a working musician. On this day in November 1963, he got up from his bed, which was situated upstairs in the Asher family’s home in Wimpole Street, London. The melody he had been dreaming about was still floating through his head and in that justawake state he got up and sat at the piano that was near to his bed and began to play it. His first reaction upon hearing the tune played on the piano was to assume that it was from one of the standards that his father had played to him and, as a result, one he was now very familiar with. Was it ‘Chicago’ or ‘Stairway to Paradise’ or ‘Lullaby of the Leaves’? Was it something similar he just couldn’t quite remember from his days at home with his family? As a musician and songwriter McCartney had been fortunate. He was born into a tight knit and gregarious working-class, Irish/Scottish, Catholic/Protestant, Liverpudlian family. They had also been shaped by the Second World War.

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Family – they were all in the war. Think about it, my Dad was putting out incendiary bombs in Liverpool, getting heavily bombed and it was, like, they were all cheery because that was the way of dealing with it, you wouldn’t even think they’d been in a war…My Dad, my uncle Harry, my uncle Ron, my uncle Joe, my auntie Gin, my auntie Milly, my auntie Edie – you know they were all like it..,They’re so strong. It’s great, they teach me a lesson. People still have to be resilient in hell. (McCartney in Gilbert, 2013, pp. 76–77)

Sing-alongs, getting together to sing and uplift each other’s spirits, was one of the ways that they and many others had of coping with a pretty grim situation. These family get togethers continued to happen postwar and helped embed a wealth of songs in the young McCartney’s musical memory. This Liverpool community gave McCartney the chance to become immersed in the most popular songs of the day. His family not only performed these songs when they got together but he also had access to various record collections a number of his relatives owned. Importantly, his father was not only a cotton salesman during his working day but was also, for quite some time, an amateur dance band leader and popular musician. All of this gave McCartney a chance to become immersed in a host of standards, popular sing-along tunes and the occasional light classical piece, all of which were very familiar to this cross-generational set of relatives and friends. There was also the flood of material coming into England via the 18,000 American troops stationed nearby to Liverpool, primarily at RAF Burtonwood. There were also the sailors who worked the Atlantic merchant seaman’s run between American ports and the shipping centre of Liverpool who brought with them the records of the day. All of this activity gave McCartney access not only to these songs but also to many of the early rock and roll songs and country songs that proved highly popular in Liverpool. This latter group came from artists like Hank Williams, Buck Owens and Slim Whitman. These songs jostled for position in the popular imagination with tunes from Broadway shows and Hollywood films; sheet music renditions from piano players like Fats Waller; the wealth of easy listening repertoire

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performed by singers such as Vera Lynn, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington and Frankie Laine blues and R&B hits coming from Bobby Parker, Ray Charles, Joe Turner, Arthur Alexander and of course The Isley Brothers. And then there were the many jazz standards like ‘Begin the Beguine’, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, ‘September in the Rain’,‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, ‘Falling in Love Again’ and a veritable host of songs written by much lauded songwriters like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and quite a number of others (Coleman, 1995; Lewisohn, 1992; Martin, 1994; Pedler, 2001a). Ian Hammond argues that although ‘Yesterday’ was a ‘stunning composition in its own right [and a] completely original and individual’ tune (Hammond, 2002), its antecedents aren’t solely founded in this tradition of popular songs but, rather, can be traced to a single source within it. He suggests that McCartney admired the work of Ray Charles and it was Charles’ version of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’ that he identifies as the starting point for ‘Yesterday’ (1965). While not an exact match, Hammond sees similarities in the melodic content of both songs and suggests that the melody of ‘Yesterday’ follows the bass line of the Charles’ recording. ‘Yesterday’ (1965) also presents a similar theme and, most telling as far as Hammond is concerned, it follows an equivalent chord progression. However, the proliferation of this type of chord progression can be heard throughout a number of Tin Pan Alley standards, themselves sourced from a diverse array of what became generic styles peculiar to the early twentieth century and so it may be that the generic style rather than the actual song was the source. Nevertheless, Hammond contends that an evolutionary line can be traced from Hoagy Carmichael’s original composition, leading to a transformation in Louis Armstrong’s version of ‘Georgia’, taken up by Ray Charles who then proceeded to amend the arrangement further by never singing it the same way twice. For Hammond ‘Yesterday’ was simply another step in that transformational process of re-composition. This situation fits with the idea that all songs are antecedently linked in one form or another to other pre-existing songs. McCartney himself has noted that the use of other songs as templates is not unusual for many songwriters. As an example, he explained that: ‘in my mind ‘Hey Jude’

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is a nick from the Drifters. It doesn’t sound like them or anything, but I know that the verse, with those two chords repeating over and over, came when I was fooling around playing ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ on the guitar’ (McCartney quoted in Gelly, 1976, p. 47). To take this one step further, McCartney recognised this song’s place in the lineage of popular music with a fond nod to it in the bridge section (referred to by these self-taught composers as the middle eight) of the later Beatles’ song ‘Back in the USSR’. This interaction with what Bourdieu calls the space of works, the accumulated heritage that provides possibilities of action (1996, pp. 233–235), supports the proposition that domain acquisition is crucial to the creative process. In fact, Hammond points out that he doesn’t ‘know where Hoagy Carmichael got his inspiration from, but I ‘d be pretty certain we’d find it is part of a song tradition stretching back hundreds of years’ (Hammond, 2002). The point is that access to this evolving song tradition through hearing the multitude of songs he had come into contact with, including ‘Georgia on My Mind’, afforded McCartney a deep domain immersion in the popular songs of the day. Heinonen (cited in Heuger, 2005) argued that this process of immersion might be best characterised as pre-compositional, since it encompasses a stage of enculturation into the conventions and rules of songwriting. Avoiding the essential linearity of this conception, Csikszentmihalyi argues that immersion may be best seen as a critical part of the creative act itself. He argues that this information feeds into the idea because each time a creative person acts, they access this knowledge that is: ‘stored in the symbol system of the culture, in the customary practices, the languages the specific notation of the domain’ (1988, pp. 325–339). This domain presents possibilities of action and it is the task of the songwriter to produce a variation in the inherited information, conventions, rules and ideas that exist in the domain. This immersion into the domain is so critical that Robert Weisberg argues that it might be impossible to identify a creative individual ‘who has made a significant contribution to a creative discipline without first having deep initial immersion in that discipline’ (1999, p. 242). This process of continuing immersion and its centrality to the act of creativity has held true across McCartney’s career. His close friend, Barry

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Miles, observes that McCartney imbibes popular songs and ‘anything musical that he learns goes immediately into his head and is liable to resurface years later, when for whatever reason he knows that he needs it’ (quoted in Salewicz, 1986, p. 174). A songwriter’s output is therefore destined to ‘reflect their conscious and unconscious responses to the lives they are living’ (Cook & Mercer in Inglis, 2000, p. 87). For McCartney to think that the melody that came to him in a dream was simply one of those tunes he encountered in his early years was not surprising: I first thought: oh, it must be one of those old songs...I’ve just forgotten which one. But I had this piano by the bed...I just fell out of bed, found out what key I had dreamed it in, and it seemed near G, and I played it. I said to myself: I wonder what it is, you know. I just couldn’t figure it out at all, because I’d just woken up. And I got a couple of chords to it. I got the G, then I got the nice F sharp minor seventh, that was the big waaaahhhh. That led very naturally to the B which led very naturally to the E minor. It just sort of kept tumbling out with those chords. I thought: well this is very nice, but it’s a nick, it’s a nick [from another song]. I don’t know what it is...We were always very careful...the great danger with writing is that you write someone else’s song without realising. You spend three hours...and you’ve written a Bob Dylan classic. This one, I was convinced, was just something I’d heard before. I said to people: well, it can’t be mine, I just woke up dreaming [italicized in original] it! There was no logic to it at all. And I’d never had that. And I’ve never had it since. This was the crazy thing about this song. It was fairly mystical when I think about it, because of the circumstances. It was the only song I ever dreamed. (McCartney quoted in Coleman, 1995, pp. 6–7)

The fact that he dreamed the snatch of melody that would form the basis of the song, mistakenly attributed to a mystical occurrence, is now cited as lore for Beatles aficionados. Chris Salewicz for example tells the story that ‘Yesterday’: was one of the easiest pieces of writing Paul had ever done. Falling out of bed one morning, he went straight to the piano (on which he had started taking formal lessons) and - still close to his unconscious dream state played as the song flowed from him with an ease that suggested divine

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inspiration. “It was one of the most instinctive songs I’ve ever written”, he said later. (1986, pp. 171–172)

Faced with these myths, McCartney ventured his own opinion on the song’s origin: ‘Yesterday’ came out of the blue, I’ve no idea where from. I dreamed the melody. I woke up and I had the melody in my head. It depends how far you want to go with this; if you’re very spiritual then God sent me a melody, I’m a mere vehicle. If you wanna be a bit more cynical, then I was loading my computer for millions of years listening to all the stuff I listened to through my dad and through my musical tastes, including people like Fred Astaire, Gershwin, and finally my computer printed out one morning what it thought was a good tune. (McCartney quoted by Snow, 1995, p. 57)

McCartney himself seems to have become more convinced over the years of this last position. Talking frankly in 2019 with Stephen Colbert at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, scene of one of the early Beatles’ memorable exploits playing live on television to millions of Americans, Paul McCartney was questioned by Colbert about how he writes songs: SC : I’ve got to ask you a personal question on behalf of anybody who’s ever tried to write anything um (pauses) how do you do it? (laughter). How do you…do you ever look back at your own catalogue and say “how did I do that?” PMc: Well actually, I do, that is true, cause when I do them in the shows, I’m singing “Eleanor Rigby” or something and I’m thinking ‘whoever wrote this was pretty good!’ (laughter). SC : Sure, Sure (laughter). But where do you think it comes from? Where do you think…you know, people talk about a muse or some are touched by grace. Why do some people become Paul McCartney and other people become Stephen Colbert (laughter)? PMc: Um (pause), seriously? SC : Seriously. PMc: Aaah…You know what, my Dad was very musical and I used to listen to a lot of what he did. So, a lot of music went in, you know I listened to records and watched films and stuff, so I always think of it

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like my computer got loaded with a lot of data from all the songs I’d heard, all the old songs and so on, and so when I finally came to write I kind of printed it all out, you know. So I think there was a lot of information in my brain. SC : So you had a lot of references to make the connections!? PMc: Yeah, a lot of stuff. And my family was very musical. We would have musical evenings, all the old ladies, all the old aunties, would be singing all the songs and getting gradually more and more drunk, so you know (smiles – laughter)… SC : That’s a good crowd actually (laughter)! PMcl : Great! (laughter). My Dad was the pianist for that. It was all the old songs. And then eventually he got arthritis so I became the pianist for that. SC : Okay. Okay. PMc: So you know (mimes playing piano and sings) “Chicago, Chicago…When the Red Red Robin Come Bob Bob Bobbing Along”…so I know all that stuff. So I think when I finally came to write I think I had a lot of clues as to how to write. SC : And.. PMc: Plus (pause) I’m a genius (uproarious laughter)! SC : You buried the lead (laughter)!! That’s called burying the lead! (pause) So you’re recommending to young people “just be a genius”!? PMc: Yeah, why not?! (laughter). (Colbert, 2019)

Despite the levity and his self-deprecating tone, McCartney reveals not only his access to the domain and his immersion into it but also his belief that the mystical view is not the most viable explanation. Barry Miles suggests that there is a feasible set of mechanisms that can help explain at least the dream aspect of the creation of ‘Yesterday’; one quite distinct from the Romantic myth of its creation, which may be found in Freud’s contention that: dream formation is determined in part by the previous day’s activities and it would be interesting to know what Paul had been listening to the night before. The melody of ‘Yesterday’ may be a dream-work transformation of something completely unlikely, from a television theme song to a classical piece; or, more probably, a musical idea he had already been playing with but which emerged from the dream state so different that it was

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unrecognisable. The notes had to be there already in his subconscious, but Paul’s musical vocabulary had become so vast, his subconscious so saturated with chord progressions, note combinations and fragments of melody, that in this instance he did not have to even place himself in a receptive songwriting mode; he just put them together in a new way while he was asleep. (Miles, 1997, p. 203)

While Freud’s ideas on dream interpretation have been reconsidered over time, his thinking on dream formation (Wolman, 1979) appears to have prefigured what would later occur in cognitive psychology. Freud argued principally that: ‘residues of the previous day have been left over from the activity of waking life and it had not been possible to withdraw the whole cathexis of energy from them’ (Jones in Wolman, 1979, p. 276). Others such as Cavallero and Foulkes also indicate there are valuable understandings to be taken from Freud’s thinking on dream formation because this conception: looks surprisingly cognitive in the contemporary sense. Here Freud is not so much concerned with specific content (why or how did I come to dream/think that particular thing?) As with generalised processes (how are dreams generated by the mind?)...Freud’s dream process psychology foreshadowed the paradigm later adopted by cognitive psychology: compare inputs with outputs and then model the transformations that might underlie the intervening mental processing. (Cavallero & Foulkes, 1993, p. 5)

Nielsen and Powell (1992), as one example, found evidence that the integration of events from the immediately preceding day into dreams, what they call the day-residue effect, was indeed a supportable proposition. Rosalind Cartwright also found that there is ‘considerable continuity between waking and sleeping thought’ (Weiten, 1998, p. 197). George Mandler further contends that some of the themes found in dreams ‘may be activated by events of the preceding day, or they may be activated simply because a reasonable number of their features have been left over as residues from the day before’ (Mandler, 1995, p. 14). More broadly, in the activation-synthesis hypothesis proposed by McCarley and Hobson:

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dreaming represents a person’s subjective awareness and interpretation of neural activity during sleep...our acceptance of bizarre occurrences in dreams is caused by changes in brain physiology. That is, just as our brains also organize sensory information during wakefulness, our brains also organize sensory information during sleep. (in Sternberg, 1995, p. 210)

All of these ideas appear far more supportable than those suggested by the ‘genius’ perspective on creativity, one where divine inspiration in the form of a muse, or any other mystical cause, provides the creative breakthrough. It is more likely that the dream formation of this melody came about from the many activities McCartney took part in the days prior to ‘dreaming’ it. During this period as a very busy professional musician, McCartney was taking part in living and breathing a musical life. In November of 1963 The Beatles were on the road as part of their Autumn Tour of Britain (Coleman, 1995). During this month McCartney was playing night after night with The Beatles as well as engaging in all their related promotional activity. There was only one day in this busy itinerary that was unaccounted for: 11 November (Schultheiss, 1980, pp. 64–68, Lewisohn, 1992, pp. 127–130). The set list they played each evening included the songs: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘From Me To You’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Boys’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ and ‘Twist and Shout’ (Lewisohn, 1992, p. 127). The majority of these songs were covers, not songs written by Lennon and McCartney. As well as playing songs on stage, each gig was accompanied by a set of television and radio appearances where they were interviewed about their work. It is no surprise that offstage McCartney and the rest of The Beatles were thinking and talking about music and little else. From 7 November through to 9 November, screenwriter Alun Owen accompanied The Beatles on tour so he could observe what they were doing and make a note of how they acted; he began translating what he saw into a usable script form that would become The Beatles’ first feature film A Hard Day’s Night . On 22 November, the day that President John Kennedy was assassinated in the USA, The Beatles officially released their

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second album, With the Beatles and by 30 November, seven days later, it had risen to the number one spot on the charts. While these were indeed busy times for the band this was only a part of a continuing and escalating series of performances that they had begun in 1957. By the beginning of the mid-1960s, The Beatles: ‘were performing approximately 400 times per year—on average more than once per day’ (Weisberg, 1999, p. 239). They would go on, between 1957 and 1963, to gather a growing repertoire of approximately 250 songs that they could call on for their performances. Most of the songs performed, over 90% at this time, were songs written by others (Weisberg, 1999, p. 239) as McCartney himself acknowledges: There were a certain amount of records people had and heard and those were all the songs we did, because we were basically cover bands. In the end, I don’t know if it was me or John or both of us, suddenly said, “The thing you’ve got to do is write some songs, and that will be stuff they can’t get to. So we won’t hear them singing it just as we’re waiting backstage to go on.” The other trouble was, even though we introduced ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody”, the other bands would nick it off us. They’d cover our covers. So there was no way out of it, unless you wrote your own songs. I like that, it demystifies the Lennon/McCartney thing. Instead of “The great muse descended upon us”, it was more like necessity. We had to write songs. (McCartney in Bonner, 2015, p. 43)

George Harrison too noted that playing for hours on stage in their early days in Hamburg was directly formative for them. Harrison states they were forced, once again out of necessity, to play a broad variety of material to fill the eight-hour sets they were contracted to play: Suddenly, we were even playing movie themes, like ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Moonglow’, learning new chords, jazz voicings, the whole bit. We learned a lot from doing that. Eventually, it all combined together to make something new and we found our voice as a band’ (Harrison quoted in Pedler, 2001b, p. 33). Robert Weisberg contends that this proved to be an intense immersion process that gave them an intimate knowledge of the domains of songwriting and performance that enabled them to ‘learn their craft’ (1999, p. 240). Weisberg asserts that:

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deep immersion provides extensive opportunities for practicing any skills, such as playing the piano, required to create within the domain, which makes them automatic. Automaticity of skills may be necessary for the production of novelty, for example, improvisation of new melodies. (1999, p. 247)

The idea that skills could become ‘usefully automatic’ appears similar to some of the ideas that have been expressed by Donald Schön in his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983). Schön asserts that many practitioners use a process of what he calls ‘reflection-in-action’ arguing that the spontaneous behaviours seen in the actions of skillful practice are, as Chester Barnard indicates, a type of non-logical process which is ‘not capable of being expressed in words or as reasoning, and which are only made known by a judgement, decision or action’ (Schön, 1983, p. 51). Citing Barnard’s work, Schön argues that, given the bias in our culture that prefers logical analytical thinking, this bias ‘blinds us to the non-logical processes which are omnipresent in effective practice’ (Schön, 1983, p. 52). Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s concept of ‘tacit knowing’ Schön argues that this process is fundamental to acquiring skill and the feelings about their efficacy practitioners acquire in the repetitive exercise of the practice. Eventually this knowing, which they are initially aware of, becomes deeply ‘internalised in our tacit knowing’ (Schön, 1983, p. 52). Schön suggests that practitioners ‘are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find ourselves doing them’ (ibid.). Taking this argument one step further, we can connect this line of reasoning to the idea of intuition as suggested by Tony Bastick. Bastick sees intuition as a form of non-linear parallel processing of global multi categorised information, rather than simply being a mystical or metaphysical process (1982, p. 215). There is a correspondence here to some of the ideas that Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1993) has argued for as well. For Bourdieu, if a person is to become a cultural producer who uses the knowledge, internalised codes and way of thinking of a maker, they must initially become well versed in the relevant cultural capital. In order to acquire this capital, this knowledge, they must become inculcated or immersed in it. By doing so they

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develop a ‘feel’ or sense of how it operates. According to Bourdieu this sense of things, the feel for the way things are done, is called ‘habitus.’ The components of this habitus are not produced as a result of individual action alone but are produced in the wider society. As Bourdieu explains: The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures (e.g. language, economy, etc.) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 85)

Once it is acquired, people are predisposed to operate within its limits. They then tend to act and react in specific situations within the confines of their habitus. Importantly the ability habitus gives to actors to engage in cultural practices circumscribes their choices while at the same giving them the ability to make those choices. Habitus both constrains and enables their choice.

McCartney and the Field of Songwriting So far we can say that McCartney’s immersion in the domain of songwriting, and music more generally, enabled him to acquire a songwriter’s habitus. In this specific case it was influenced by the day-to-day activity at the time he ‘dreamed’ the verse melody of what would become ‘Yesterday’ (1965). This indicates that he was memorising musical sounds and developing new ideas almost constantly. With a form of global processing occurring as he awoke, with a specific melodic fragment in his head, McCartney chose to exploit this melodic fragment acting within the parameters of the domain of knowledge he was now very familiar with. As Weisberg suggests: a large amount of domain specific practice is necessary [italics in original] for the development of the skills that underlie creative accomplishment, not that practice is sufficient for creative accomplishment. Production of masterworks requires not only a large amount of practice, but also the coming together of a number of different sorts of external factors, many

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of which are independent of the amount of study and practice put in by a given individual. (Weisberg, 1999, pp. 241–242)

These external factors, often seen as independent from the individual, are what constitute the field, that is, the professional decision-makers within the music industry, as well as the audience. In this case we now need to turn away from exploring the domain of knowledge McCartney had access to, and was himself immersed in, and concentrate on the social organisation, the field, that is constituted by that domain knowledge. As Csikszentmihalyi advises the ‘the easiest way to define a field is to say that it includes all those who can affect the structure of a domain’ (1988, p. 330). The notion of a ‘field’, as described by Csikszentmihalyi, appears similar to what Becker was striving to explain in his use of the term ‘art world’ (1982). It also corresponds in many ways to Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field’ where it is seen as an arena of social contestation (1993), although Bourdieu himself wrote that ‘without entering into a methodological expose of everything that separates this vision of the “world of art” from the theory of the literary or artistic field, I will merely remark that the latter is not reducible to a population, that is to say, to the sum of individual agents linked by simple relations of interaction, or more precisely, of cooperation’ [italics in original] (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 205). Nevertheless, Csikszentmihalyi asserts that a field ‘is necessary to determine whether the innovation is worth making a fuss about’ (1997, p. 41). Csikszentmihalyi suggests that fields can contribute to the emergence of creativity in a variety of ways. They can be, firstly, reactive or proactive spaces. For him, a reactive field does not solicit novelty but reacts to it as it emerges. A proactive one does seek novelty from the creative agents operating there. The field, in this case the social organisation that governs popular music, as one example, requires constant novelty in order to sustain its commercial operations. Secondly, the field affects the emergence of creativity by putting in place a broad or narrow filter to aid in the selection of novelty. As Csikszentmihalyi asserts: Some fields are conservative and allow only a few new items to enter the domain at any given time. They reject most novelty and select only what

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they consider best. Others are more liberal in allowing new ideas into their domains, and as a result these change more rapidly. (1997, p. 44)

The field of popular music and contemporary Western song can be considered a dynamic and proactive one, as publishers, record labels and audiences all demand new material. Part of that activity is to not only seek new works constantly but, in allowing new variations into the domain. It also has to provide verification that this new work has made an original contribution, no matter how small or indeed radical, to the domain. It is also true to say that this attribution of creativity must always be relative as it is primarily grounded in social agreement. It follows too that ‘social agreement is one of the constitutive aspects of creativity, without which the phenomenon would not exist’ (1988, p. 326). From this perspective, it is obvious that creative acts are only deemed creative within a specific sociocultural setting. Morris Stein wrote in an article entitled ‘Creativity and Culture’ that was published in The Journal of Psychology in 1953 that ‘the creative work is a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group at some point in time’ (1953, p. 311). As Stein pointed out it is only in the process of social validation that a creative process, product or idea can be viewed as being creative. It is not possible, as Csikszentmihalyi asserts, to ‘introduce a variation without reference to existing patterns. “New” is only meaningful in reference to the “old”. Original thought does not exist in a vacuum’ (1999, pp. 314–315). Paul McCartney was at the epicentre of the popular music industry, a sizable portion of the field, in Britain during the northern winter of 1963–1964. He had little trouble finding members of the field familiar enough with the domain of songwriting to verify that the melody he was working on at the time was unique and valuable. As he himself stated, ‘first of all I checked the melody out, and people said to me, “No it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s yours”…It had no words’ (Miles, 1997, p. 202). McCartney was astute enough in both his grasp of the domain but also the workings of the field to play it to quite a number of people who could help him verify the tune was original.

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McCartney played the tune to his writing partner John Lennon (Coleman, 1995). Lennon could not identify the melody and so indicated to McCartney that as far as he was concerned, it was an original piece. McCartney took it further afield and played it for Lionel Bart. Bart was deeply respected as a songwriter and composer of musicals but, like McCartney, could neither read nor write sheet music but held a lot of songs in his head. When McCartney hummed the melody to Bart, he also did not recognise it. Bart told McCartney he should pursue it. Late one evening in Autumn 1963, McCartney also took the melody to the home of Alma Cogan (Coleman, 1995). She was a well-known singer who had also cultivated a coterie of show business types who often attended parties at her home. Lennon and McCartney were among this group and they often mingled with other well-known celebrities at these parties. McCartney let Cogan know that he had a new tune: I played the melody for her and she said “It’s lovely.” It was a little bit embarrassing because I think she thought I’d written it for her. Maybe I didn’t make it very clear by saying: here’s a song I’ve written; what do you think of it? I probably said: “this is something I’ve written; does this remind you of anything?” (McCartney quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 9)

As a dedicated songwriter, McCartney was adept at taking happenstance and working the circumstances it presented into ideas for songs. Alma Cogan’s sister, Sandra, remembers, as McCartney was playing the melody on the piano, that their mother, Fay, walked into the room. She asked the three of them would ‘anyone like some scrambled eggs?’ This query prompted McCartney to begin singing ‘Scrambled eggs…Oh my baby how I love your legs...oh...scrambled eggs’ (Coleman, 1995, p. 9). Quoted elsewhere, McCartney remembered that: ‘the tune came just like that, although I didn’t have words for it. It was breakfast time so I sang, “Scrambled egg, How I love to eat a scrambled egg”...until, several days later, I fitted “Yesterday” to the first three notes and I was away’ (quoted in Gelly, 1976, p. 45). This line may well be the one he remembered at the time, especially if the Cogan anecdote is an accurate example of McCartney playing around with the possibilities of this unfinished song, but he was also quoted in another source as stating that the original

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scratch lyrics were indeed ‘Scrambled eggs/ Oh my baby/ How I love your legs’ (Snow, 1995, p. 57). Whichever way it occurred, the evolving scratch lyrics remained wedded to the melody for some time. McCartney visited his former teacher ‘Dusty’ Durband during this period and played the piece on the household piano singing the ‘scrambled egg’ lyric (Salewicz, 1986, p. 172) and the use of these placeholder lyrics has been confirmed a number of times (Smith in De Lisle, 1995, Gambaccini, 1976, Miles, 1997, Snow, 1995).

The Emergence of Yesterday (1965) Within the Creative System Once the melody for the verse, complete with scratch lyrics, had been finalised McCartney moved onto the rest of the song. He remembers working on the song on the piano in his upstairs bedroom in Wimpole Street in which he added the middle or: what we used to call middle-eights, even if they were middle-sixteen bars or middle-thirty-twos. They were always, to us, middle-eights, because we had heard some musicians call that part of a song the middle-eight. (quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 10)

McCartney continued to work on the middle eight, the B section of the ternary song form, during the filming of the Help movie (Miles, 1997, p. 203) so much so that his preoccupation with the song on set drove the director Dick Lester to demand that he finish it or give it up (Coleman, 1995, p. 16). And so, McCartney began the task of doing just that. While he now had compiled a complete tune, verse and middle eight, McCartney was still stuck singing the scratch lyrics suggested to him by Fay Cogan’s question. He has since said that: the only difficult thing was the words originally blocked out were, “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby/How I love your legs”. So I knew that had to change. I had to get something that scanned like “scrambled egg”

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– “tomorrow night” - no that doesn’t scan...“morning light?” And all of them were crap. And then “yesterday” - wow. And that just sat, and then “suddenly”, and once I had those two words it came. (McCartney quoted by Snow, 1995, p. 57)

He had fitted the word yesterday ‘to the first three notes and I was away’ (quoted in Gelly, 1976, p. 45). From that point onward the lyrics came about as a result of some considerable work. When he and The Beatles had finished on the set of Help, McCartney took a plane to the southern coast of Portugal, on 27 May 1965. He was on holiday in Albufeira in the Algarve, at his friend Bruce Welsh’s house. Welsh played rhythm guitar and wrote songs for The Shadows. McCartney’s partner at the time, Jane Asher, travelled with him. At this point, it’s worth reflecting on the suggestion that McCartney’s relationship to both Jane Asher and his deceased mother influenced a number of McCartney’s songs. Heinonen (Heuger, 2005), Elson (1986) and Coleman (1995) have all proposed that songs such as ‘Yesterday’ (1965) and ‘For No One’ (1966) manifest a mourning process for the songwriter where he worked out the relationships he had to two central women in his early life through his songwriting. When Asher and McCartney arrived in Europe they were driven 180 miles along the route to Bruce Welsh’s house. As was his habit when travelling, McCartney saw this as an opportunity to think about the song that had now been with him since November 1963: It was a long hot, dusty drive. Jane was sleeping but I couldn’t, and when I’m sitting that long in a car I either manage to get to sleep or my brain starts going. I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea: Scram-ble-d eggs, da-da da. I knew the syllables had to match the melody, obviously: da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly, and yes-ter-day, that’s good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It’s easy to rhyme those ‘a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s lots of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and ‘e’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it. (quoted in Miles, 1997, p. 204)

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On arriving at their holiday villa, McCartney asked Welsh for a guitar. Bruce Welsh was on his way out the door but returned to find the instrument for Paul who immediately started work on finishing the lyrics: I think I finished the lyrics about two weeks later. Which was quite a long time for me. Generally, John and I would sit down and finish within three hours, but this was more organic. I put in the words over the next couple of weeks. (quoted in Miles, 1997, p. 205)

McCartney, pleased with his efforts, continued to perform the piece to a member of the field. Arriving at the Help recording sessions he played it for the members of the team who were so crucial to his creative practice. John Lennon, McCartney’s songwriting partner, noted in 1974: even with ones where we’d have it 90% finished, there’s always something added in the studio. A song is - even now when I write a song - not complete. I can never give my song to a publisher before I’ve recorded it, however complete the lyrics and the tune and the arrangement are on paper, because it changes in the studio. (Lennon quoted in Beatles, 2000, p. 98)

Heinonen has noted that, for many, there are two distinct stages labelled as songwriting and recording. While these may be seen as separate activities, it was increasingly the case that they involved a series of overlapping events that were often non-sequential, with the writers returning to certain stages while moving through each one (in Heinonen & Eerola, 2000). This process appears similar to Graham Wallas’s ideas of creativity occurring in stages, but stages that should be seen as highly iterative and much ‘less linear than they are recursive’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, pp. 80–81). This latter conception of the process has a bearing on the differentiation Heinonen suggests exists between songwriting and recording. While it is traditional to see them as two distinct phases of the creative process, The Beatles’ approach raises the question of ‘what’ is being created here? Jon Fitzgerald notes that:

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various authors (e.g. Hennion, 1983, p.163; Hesbacher, 1973, p.297; Moore 1993, p. 32) have stressed the importance of considering the sound recording as musical text...Hennion (1983, p. 161) goes so far as to say that “the song is nothing before the arrangement” arguing that creation “occurs at the moment of orchestration, recording, and sound mixing”. (Fitzgerald, 1996, pp. 20–21)

This proposition points to the question of what constitutes a song. At what point does a song come into being? The shift in thinking ‘away from the perceptions of the fundamental elements of a song as lyric and melody, to a broader idea of the elements of a song encompassing all of the aspects of a recorded work, can be seen in the corresponding demise of the sheet music industry and the rise of the recording industry’ (McIntyre, 2001, p. 106). The domain of songs, and therefore what denotes the activities of songwriters, must therefore not only include lyric and melody writing but also a realisation that song creation now involves: simple and complex harmonic and rhythmic features such as accompaniment, arrangement or orchestration, and according to some perspectives, [this manipulation] would also include performance characteristics and production elements. (McIntyre, 2001, p. 109)

George Harrison and John Lennon, as members of the field who were aware of these changes in the way the domain of songwriting was perceived, reacted to McCartney’s presentation of this new song in the recording studio with this in mind. They thought it was certainly a good tune but didn’t think they could contribute anything to its arrangement. Ringo also thought that this song needed drums. Their producer, George Martin, who had initially heard the embryonic formation of the melody and scratch lyrics in Paris in the Hotel George V, suggested to McCartney that the title wasn’t especially original as Peggy Lee had recorded a standard called ‘Yesterdays’ (Coleman, 1995, Miles, 1997). Both The Beatles and Martin were apparently unaware of the existence of another song already titled ‘Yesterday’ (1926) that had been written by Charles Harrison and Monte White and had been published in 1926 in Chicago by the Ted Brown Music Co. McCartney insisted the title should remain as ‘Yesterday’.

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Then, to McCartney’s horror, Martin suggested the use of strings for the arrangement (Martin, 1979, pp. 166–167). ‘Are you kidding [italics in original]? The Beatles is a rock’n’roll group!’ a surprised McCartney exclaimed (quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 43). There was an exchange about the impropriety of using what were called ‘Mantovani strings’ so Martin quickly clarified that he thought a string quartet would work best. They could experiment with that and if it didn’t work they’d try something else. McCartney then arranged for him and Martin to sit down and work out the arrangement for the string quartet. McCartney went ‘round to George’s house and we had a pleasant couple of hours, had a cup of tea, sat there with the manuscript paper on the piano’ (quoted in Miles, 1997, p. 206): So George showed me this voicing, and I said “lovely” and we did the whole song, very straight, for a string quartet. And there was just one point in it where I said, “Could the cello now play a slightly bluesy thing, out of the genre, out of keeping with the rest of the voicing?” George said, “Bach certainly wouldn’t have done that, Paul, ha ha ha.” I said “Great!” That was what we often used to do, try and claim our one little moment. I mean, obviously it was my song, my chords, my everything really, but because the voicing now had become Bach’s, I needed something of mine to redress the balance. So I put a 7th in, which was unheard-of. It’s what we used to call a blue note, and that became a little bit well known. It’s one of the unusual things in that arrangement. (quoted in Miles 1997, p. 206)

McCartney suggested that the first [upper] violin hold the high note in the final section. Martin graciously acknowledged how adventurous McCartney was in suggesting the use of the blues note in this innovative addition to the arrangement (Lewisohn 1988, p. 59). Remembering that this use of a minor against a major was Paul’s idea, Martin admired the move saying ‘“and I wish it had been me”. John Lennon fell in love with that particular sound when he first heard it’ (Coleman, 1995, p. 46). Margaret Boden (1994, p. 76) pointed out that combinations of strings within a pop format justify for many people the creative contribution the song made to the domain of popular music at that time.

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There was another innovation to come as far as the arrangement goes, one that has been little commented on and something that The Beatles, as popular musicians, may have seen as rudimentary. This is the use of the capo as a device to alter the key of a piece without altering the essential tonality of the song; a method employed repeatedly by The Beatles. This method of changing key without disturbing the tonality of the performance of ‘Yesterday’ is not often fully appreciated. McCartney had originally worked out the ‘dream’ melody in the key of G. This is an ‘easy’ key on the piano, performance wise, but he more than likely found this key unsuitable for his voice for his recorded performance of the song. But, having transferred the song in this key to the guitar, he checked that the tone on the guitar was fine and that he would not lose much by shifting the whole thing up or down the fretboard; in particular the chord shapes or the tonality. The recording of the song however is in the key of F (relative to concert pitch) and yet McCartney often refers to it in relation to the key of G. The key of F often proves more difficult to play for guitarists and has a less open and ringing quality than playing open chords in the key of G. This latter key would have appealed to the finely tuned musical sensibilities that McCartney had developed as a player over time. So what happened? It appears that: he sings it in the key of F, but he actually plays it on the guitar in G, so the acoustic guitar has been dropped a tone. He probably did this because the open string sound of the G chord was a better sound, but he wanted his vocal to be in F. So he dropped the acoustic guitar a tone so that he could play G, but he was actually forming a G chord. (Cooper quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 83)

This was evident as McCartney played the song solo with acoustic guitar, using the open position chords in the key of G, during The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was pre-recorded on 14 August and broadcast on CBS television in the USA on 9 September 1965. Interestingly, McCartney performed a tongue-in-cheek version of the song during rehearsals on this day, accompanying himself on Hammond organ and singing its original scratch lyrics (Fulpen, 1983, p. 93). However, it was the tonality of the guitar version in G that

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featured in the earlier recorded version for The Beatles’ studio album Help. It was the fact that McCartney had been immersed in the domain, his years of guitar playing and composition on the instrument, that enabled him to realise the possibilities the guitar offered. For Jason Toynbee (2000, p. 38), drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘possibles’, musicians identify and select musical possibilities from a radius of possible choices which intersect with their musician’s habitus in addition to the rules of the field they work within. These possible choices are not limitless inasmuch as they are drawn from what is available to them. It is also true that some possibilities are unlikely to be selected because they are too far from the central point of the musician’s habitus. McCartney’s habitus, the result of an entwining of agency and structure providing a practical sense or ‘feel for what will work’, must have been firmly in place as he transferred the song from piano to guitar. This was well before he walked into EMI’s Abbey Road recording studio to start work in Studio 2 on Monday 14 June 1965. The Beatles spent the early part of that day in the studio recording the acoustic guitar based ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ and ‘I’m Down’, a rock’n’roll belter which was described as being in ‘the most larynx-tearing cord-shredding style imaginable’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 59). Remarkably, McCartney went on into the evening to record his vocal and guitar part for ‘Yesterday’ (1965) onto a four-track tape with the second take marked as ‘best’ (Coleman, 1995, p. 42). This evening session took three and a half hours, beginning at 7.00 pm (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 59). Three days later the string quartet, comprising Tony Gilbert on first violin, Sidney Sax on second violin, Francisco Gabarro on cello and Kenneth Essex on viola (ibid.), was brought into the studio to overdub their parts. Once they began to run through the arrangement, McCartney’s keen ear, his practical sense of what was ‘right’, came into play. He promptly asked Martin what the tremulous sound the string players were making was. Martin informed him they were using vibrato. McCartney was wary of this effect. He indicated ‘it sounded a little too gypsy-like for me’ (quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 43). He then asked the violinists whether they could play without using vibrato. Martin cautiously asked what the problem was:

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McCartney answered that it reminded him of Mantovani’s lush strings, of the Victor Sylvester Orchestra which he’d heard on the radio as a child and which used that effect from the violin. Wide though his interests were in music, there was a line, never to be crossed, between rich, fine music and over-the-top cornball. Vibrato represented that to him. (Coleman, 1995, p. 43)

Martin then approached the first violin, Tony Gilbert, and asked if the string section could stop using vibrato. Wanting to satisfy the person who had hired them for the session the string players gamely played the part as requested. McCartney was pleased observing that: When they dropped the vibrato, it sounded stronger. Before it had sounded quite classical enough. Now it was no longer like the old gypsy violinist playing around a campfire! It was...on the money! (quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 45)

Louise Fuller, who performed this particular string arrangement during the 90s with the Duke String Quartet, suggested that: if the strings were taken away from the song, it might not be such a powerful performance. The strings don’t come in until the second verse and when they do, it’s a really beautiful moment. People who listen to the words won’t think of that. When he sings ‘Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be’, the strings subconsciously move people more than they realize [Also] if you take vibrato away you have to work much, much harder with your bow to get the Beatles sound...In a string quartet, where you have four people playing close harmony, as on “Yesterday”, if you are not using vibrato, the musicians have to hit every note accurately. On the top note of the McCartney record, vibrato is apparent. I don’t know if it crept in and Paul McCartney wished it hadn’t, but it does sound nice. (Fuller quoted in Coleman, 1995, p. 84)

There is one further thing to note. It is almost imperceptible and most certainly a serendipitous component of the final recording. There appears to be an ‘additional vocal track’ (Lewisohn, 1992, p. 196) which was recorded on Thursday 17 June, the day the strings were overdubbed. George Martin explains that:

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Because we didn’t use headphones there was leakage from the studio speaker into his microphone, giving the impression of two voices or double-tracking. (Martin quoted in Lewisohn, 1988, p. 59)

Finally, on Thursday 17 June 1965, after fifteen months, the song as it has become known to the world was ‘complete now in its stunning simplicity, the song was mixed into mono’ (Lewisohn, 1992, p. 196). Structurally ‘Yesterday’ follows a classic ternary (AABA) form. This form is typical of a pre-war popular style and one favoured in their early period by both John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Fitzgerald in Inglis, 2000, p. 71). Lyrically the song deals with nostalgia for a lost love or, dependent on the interpretation, a recognition of one’s own maturation in the face of lost innocence. Wilfrid Mellers described the song as ‘a small miracle’ suggesting that its ‘immediate nostalgia’ is strengthened by the ‘music’s frail bewilderment’ (1973, p. 57). Melodically, as discussed above, it stays mainly in the key of F, venturing occasionally out of the diatonic F major scale as the harmonic progression pivots around this tonal centre, with the first officially recorded version of it played on acoustic guitar tuned a full step below concert pitch. This tuning gives the resonances and tonalities of the guitar as they are produced in the key of G played in first position. The recording used the string quartet for simple yet effective accompaniment (Pollack, 2005) and this combination of instruments captured the essence of the feeling it was after without, as Mellers argues, descending into ‘cornball.’ At the point in the song when the strings are expected to indulgently soar, it remains on ‘a long inverted pedal thereby inducing a wide-eyed wonder, with a tinge of apprehension’ (Mellers, 1973, p. 57). Since its creation, the novelty of ‘Yesterday’ has been valued by a broad audience and remains enduringly popular. By the mid-nineties it had been played on US radio 6,480,000 times. At the time it averaged 50,000 plays on American radio every three months. It has now become one of the world’s most recorded songs (Coleman, 1995, pp.162–163).

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Conclusion In conclusion, drawing on the evidence set out above, the production of ‘Yesterday’ didn’t happen overnight, coming into the world as a complete entity from the dream consciousness of Paul McCartney. Instead, after the highly explicable occurrence where he dreamt and remembered a crucial portion of the melody, the song became fully formed as a result of a long and often arduous but nonetheless highly explainable process. It emerged from McCartney’s deep well of experience, resulting from his intensive immersion in the domain of popular songs. It was also the product of long reflection and persistence. Its verification as creative owes a considerable debt to the members of the field McCartney had access to, with its meaning constructed and reconstructed through its many interactions with audience members, also seen as critical components of the popular music field. Despite the song’s promotion as a Romantic piece of creative activity, perpetuating the myth of the mystically inspired freely expressive artist, the creation of ‘Yesterday’ can be seen, in analysis, as a more considered and rational process than otherwise mythologised. Following the definition of creativity being used here, that is, that creativity is an activity whereby products, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent conditions by the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of human knowledge, the production of ‘Yesterday’, occurring within the interactive system of domain, field and person, can be seen as a creative act. As an example of a system at work, the song’s creation satisfies more closely the characteristics ascribed to the rationalist approach to creativity. Indeed, from the evidence, it can be argued that creativity emerges from a dynamic system in action that works on a larger scale than that of the sole individual posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings. It, instead, incorporates the actions of the person within the systemic relationships of the field and domain. These three components, person, domain and field, comprise a system with circular causality where the individual, the social organisation they create within, and the symbol system they use are all equally important

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and interdependent in producing creative products. ‘Yesterday’ is but one creative product of this system at work. The scalable systemic collaborations McCartney was involved in his whole life is where we will turn to now as we explore the recording of ‘Paperback Writer’.

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4 Paul McCartney and the Creation of ‘Paperback Writer’: Examining the Flow of Ideas and Knowledge Between Scalable Creative Systems

As we have shown from the way ‘Yesterday’ came into existence, nothing exists in isolation. Everything is, quite simply, interconnected. This situation applies not only to biological or physical systems but it also applies to social and cultural ones as well (Capra & Luisi, 2014). When looking specifically at creative practice, and the cultural production that emanates from it, there has been a steadily growing consensus among many scholars researching creativity that a confluence approach may best account for the multifactorial elements that constitute creativity (e.g. Dacey & Lennon, 1998). Creativity researchers Beth Hennessy and Teresa Amabile take this a step further. They declare in their review of the literature (2010) that research into creativity has become increasingly sophisticated in its use of a variety of methodologies and a diverse set of theoretical orientations. They also assert that quite a number of contributions to the study of creativity have come from an expanding variety of disciplines. However, these disciplines do not seem to converse with each other at any significant depth. Hennessey and Amabile suggest that a deeper understanding of creativity ‘requires more interdisciplinary research, based on a systems view of creativity that recognizes a variety of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_4

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interrelated forces operating at multiple levels’ (2010, p. 571). One of the more apt ways to do this is to operationalise the notion of creativity as systemic through the work of American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1991, 1997, 1999, 2014). In summary, Csikszentmihalyi proposed that: three major factors, that is, a structure of knowledge manifest in a particular symbol system (domain), a structured social organisation that understands that body of knowledge (field ), and an individual agent (person) who makes changes to the stored information that pre-exists them, are necessary for creativity to occur. These factors operate through “dynamic links of circular causality” (1988, p. 329) with the starting point in the process being “purely arbitrary” (ibid.) indicating the systems’ essential nonlinearity. (McIntyre, 2009, p. 7)

These ideas correspond in many ways with the research of European empirical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990, 1993, 1996). They are not identical of course, both bringing differing epistemological orientations to their work, but in a similar way to Csikszentmihalyi, Bourdieu provides both rational and empirical evidence to support the idea that: it is the interplay between a field of works which presents possibilities of action to an individual who possesses the necessary habitus, partially composed of personal levels of social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital that then inclines them to act and react within particular structured and dynamic spaces called fields. These fields are arenas of production and circulation of goods, ideas and knowledges. They are populated by other agents who compete using various levels of the forms of capital pertinent to that field. Bourdieu suggests that it is the interplay between these various spheres of cultural production that makes practice possible. (McIntyre, 2009, p. 7)

These propositions have been variously worked through prior by the authors in some depth (e.g. McIntyre, 2006, 2008, 2011b, 2012; McIntyre & Thompson, 2011; Thompson & McIntyre, 2013, 2020; Thompson, 2016) and this evidence has been added to a growing body

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of literature using the systems approach (e.g. DeZutter, 2011; Fulton, 2011; Kerrigan, 2013; Paton, 2012; Redvall, 2012; Sawyer, 2012). With this as a basis, we can turn to the broader literature on systems for a second. From this literature, we can derive the idea that systems operate as a form of organised complexity. This systems based approach sits ‘one step beyond the Newtonian view of organized simplicity, and two steps beyond the classical world views of divinely ordered or imaginatively envisaged complexity’ (Laszlo, 1972, p. 15). To deal with systems one must thus be able to move away from mechanistic simplicity and begin to think holistically about complexity (McIntyre, et al., 2016). Very quickly the researcher must start to think with a different array of concepts. The emphasis in systems thinking is on understanding non-linear dynamics, contingency, self-organisation, complexity, emergence, networks, interrelations and interdependence as well as scalable hierarchical structures. It is these last few that we will concentrate on here. At first glance systems, such as those that typify a system of recording, can sometimes appear to operate independently, isolated from other things within a set of well-defined boundaries. However, this assumption can be misleading as systems are always very much located in relation to and dependent on other systems (Skyttner, 2006, p. 38). From this perspective, there are multilayered systems within systems, within other systems, which one must take account of. As Laszlo points out ‘a system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components’ (1972, p. 14). This vertical interconnectedness of systems has been illustrated by Arthur Koestler (1967, 1978) using the terms ‘holon’, ‘parton’ and ‘holarchy’. For Koestler, a holon is an aspect of systems that is both a part of something at one scale (parton) and, at exactly the same time and at another lesser scale, is itself a whole system (holon) (Koestler, 1967, p. 48). To repeat, a parton, as a component portion of the system it is part of, is itself a complete system, a holon. To get around some of what can be an apparent confusing concurrent dualism, Joe Velikovsky suggests a portmanteau word, holon/parton, as a synthesis of the two terms, holon and parton. This word is useful as it emphasises the dual or complementary

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nature ‘of these whole/part entities; they are a whole and also a part at the same time’ (Velikovsky, 2019, p. 809). With this term as a base, we can then see that a holarchy is the multilayered hierarchy of these holons and partons. Inside this nested world, system within system, one system is no more or less important than the others operating above or below it; a little like a complex set of babushka dolls. However, for Joe Velikovsky: Holarchies function according to the three laws of holarchies - which are also three laws of evolution in Systems Theory (see Laszlo, 1972, pp. 55– 118, 176–180) - namely: (1) competition and/or cooperation (and/or co-opetition), sideways with other holon/partons on the same level; (2) integration upwards, into the larger holon/parton on the level “above”; and (3) control and command of holon/partons on the level “below” (Koestler, 1964, 1967, 1978). (Velikovsky, 2019, p. 809)

While a command and control downward rule implies a downwardly hierarchical version of power, this rule may be modified to allow the upward movement of power where control also emanates from systems that are seemingly below others and only responding to those above. Noting that there is no spatially fixed ‘above and below’ in any set of systems, and the understandable anthropocentric tendency to give preeminence to ‘upstream’ systems as it were, we can claim that the very idea of interdependence in systems precludes complete command and control solely from above. As such the power to implement downward command and control, especially in social systems, is very limited. Power is far more diffuse across a system than it is downwardly hierarchical. Those holon/partons seen to be ‘above’ in the holarchy may, in truth, be responding just as readily to the actions of those below as they do in the obverse. Not only are systems part of these vertically arranged holarchies but they are also, as Velikovsky (2019) points out, often connected horizontally to complex networks of many other similar systems; theatre is linked to film which is linked to electronic games. They share commonalities. Similarly, holons of recorded songs are not only linked vertically in a holarchy to the broader system of popular record production and, at a different scale, to the system of western music, they also operate

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horizontally across networks of related and contributing systems. For example, the system of audio engineering has deep connections horizontally to the system of record producing and the system of musicianship. In other words, all systems are parts of scalable hierarchical structures and at the same time are interrelated horizontally with closely related but differing systems that, in conjunction, enable and constrain complex and collaborative creative action. Just as Giddens coined the term ‘structuration’ as a portmanteau word to help conflate, in a single word, the absolute interdependence of agency and structure, Harry Criticos (2019) has also proposed another portmanteau word, ‘constrabling’, to point out that systems work to both constrain and enable creative action at one and some time. Scaled systems are thus constrabling. To investigate these ideas a little more fully Paul Thompson, in particular, has examined the notion of scalability in relation to music production. He argued, in reference to a case of song creation in the recording studio, that: the creative system could be viewed as scalable where the individual interacted with the internalized domain and the internalized criteria for selection of the field...The musical parts, therefore, were developed in response to the constraints imposed by the domain and the song and subject to a filtering process by the participants in the recording studio. In this way, the group formed a microfield inside the recording studio, assessing and rejecting ideas generated by the musicians, engineer and record producer. The final recording or ‘track’, therefore, formed a microdomain, which further operated inside the broader domain and field of record production. These findings not only demonstrate a creative system in action, they also illustrate how the creative system can be scaled during the process of collaboration inside the recording studio on an individual level and a group level. (2016, p. 85)

We can explore the scalability of creative systems, their hierarchical structures, interrelations and interdependence, by examining the recording and production of The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ (1966). While The Beatles’ work has been examined extensively at the scholarly level (e.g. Cohen, 1997; Everett, 1999; Gould, 2008; Inglis, 2000; McIntyre, 2006, 2011a; McIntyre & Thompson, 2011; Moore, 1997),

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we want to concentrate on this one song for now and examine its emergence at multiple scales of creative action. In doing this we can expose some of the creative processes that occur at an individual level and, further up the scale, the sharing of ideas and knowledge between the creative group, and then work our way up to the broader set of contributions that occurred within Studio Three of EMI’s Abbey Road studio. This institutional scale of systemic creative activity is itself located temporally and spatially as a holon within a specific sociocultural milieu. The flow of ideas back and forth between the various vertically and horizontally interconnected systems will give us a more comprehensive perspective on the processes that contributed holistically to ‘Paperback Writer’ and its production as a recording. The various holon/partons at play in the holarchic system that produced ‘Paperback Writer’ begins, for this particular case, at the level of the individual agent, that is, Paul McCartney. It then proceeds upward to the interactive dyad that was the Lennon and McCartney songwriting team. It then moves out to the group system that they were part of, that is, the entity of The Beatles. The Beatles themselves were also part of a collaborative collective that was composed not only of The Beatles but also of George Martin, Geoff Emerick, Richard Lush, Phil MacDonald, Ken Townsend, Tony Clark and a number of others. At the next level, each of these holon/partons from the preceding and underlying systems in this holarchy was affiliated in one way or another with the institutional entity known as Abbey Road Studios and, from there, the EMI record company. All of these institutional players were also part of, and drew on, a particularly temporally and spatially located music scene. This scene, as large as it was, was also just one part of a sociocultural milieu, a much larger system all of these holon/partons operated within. Of course, this scaled hierarchical structure also had systems embedded even further both above and below it but for the sake of our analysis the constitution of this particular holarchy, as briefly outlined here, will suffice. It should also be mentioned that at each level of this scaled system we will be noting the horizontal interactions, for example, at the collaborative collective level there are connections not only with the songwriting system but also the related ones of musical performance, producing, engineering, management and publishing domains

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and fields, all of which operate within their own holarchic structure. It is the contention of this paper that it is out of all of the networks of these interdependent interactions, the web of ideas, inputs and influences, that the recording of ‘Paperback Writer’ emerged.

The Individual Agent: Lyrics Paul McCartney claims the song, in particular, the lyrics which formed the basis of the recording, as one of his own (Miles, 1997, p. 279). In bringing these words into being, he certainly brought something unique to his role as a songwriter. Over the course of his career, to this point, McCartney had developed a strong songwriter’s habitus. As St Clair et al. declare, ‘one is not born with habitus; it is acquired through repetition’ (2005, p. 150). As a result of repetitively immersing himself in songs, McCartney had established an enviable connection to both the domain, the knowledge and skills pertinent to songwriting, and the field, the social organisation that held this knowledge system as its raison d’etre. By the time he developed the lyrics and song structure to ‘Paperback Writer’ he had already acquired a strong ‘feel’ for the songwriter’s game, a practical sense of how both the domain and field worked. He knew what he was doing in this world. For him, acquiring the cultural and social capital of a songwriter had come about through ‘a long process of inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes a “second sense” or a second nature’ (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 5). What is important to realise here is that a person’s habitus is not deterministic. What does this mean? Firstly, it means that Paul McCartney’s agency, his ability to make creative decisions, has not been curtailed by the possession of a songwriter’s habitus. It, in fact, enables his creative action while at the same directing it towards likely outcomes. Bourdieu bluntly asserted that the type of cultural works someone like McCartney was inculcated in, as broad as they were, presents themselves: to each agent as a space of possibles, that is, as an ensemble of probable constraints which are the counterpart of a set of possible uses. Those who think in simple alternatives need to be reminded that in these

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matters absolute freedom, exalted by the defenders of creative spontaneity, belongs only to the naïve and the ignorant. It is one and the same thing to enter a field of cultural production, by settling an entrance fee which consists essentially of the acquisition of a specific code of conduct and expression, and to discover the finite universe of freedom under constraints and objective potentialities which it offers: problems to resolve, stylistic or thematic possibilities to exploit, contradictions to overcome, even revolutionary ruptures to effect. For bold strokes of innovation or revolutionary research to have some chance of even being conceived, it is necessary for them to exist in a potential state at the heart of the system of already realized possibles [italics in original]. (1996, p. 235)

To put this differently, while many naively think creative activity can only occur as a result of the complete absence of constraint, and then equate this to having the freedom to make whatever creative choice needs to be made, McCartney, like all other creative individuals, has had the freedom to make choices, to take creative action, but was predisposed to make those choices in certain well-defined ways given his long-term inculcation into the domain of Western songwriting. This was a shared experience he held in common with other songwriters of his type but at the same time, it was also very unique to him. Nobody else had his exact experiences. This is what he bought, as an active creative agent, to the system of song creation. As pointed out prior, each component of the system—domain, field and agents—is necessary but not sufficient, in and of themselves, for creativity to emerge. What this means is that no component part of this system of creation is any more or any less important than the other parts of the system. Just because the idea of structured domains and fields is introduced to the creative equation, this does not mean the action of the creative agent should be lessened in any way by this realisation. As David Swartz explains, Bourdieu argues strongly against: conceptualizing human action as a direct, unmediated response to external factors, whether they be identified as micro-structures of interactions or macro-level cultural, social, or economic factors. Nor does Bourdieu see action as the simple outgrowth from internal factors, such as conscious intentions and calculations, as posited by voluntarists and

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rational-actor models of human action. For Bourdieu, explanations that highlight either the macro or the micro dimension to the exclusion of the other simply perpetuate the classic subjective/objective antimony. Bourdieu wants to transcend this dichotomy by conceptualizing action so that micro and macro, voluntarist and determinist dimensions of human activity are integrated into a single conceptual movement rather than isolated as mutually exclusive forms of explanation. He thus proposes a structural theory of practice that connects action to culture, structure and power. This theory undergirds his key concept, habitus, which, along with cultural capital, has become one of his conceptual trademarks. (Swartz, 1997, p. 9)

In acquiring this songwriter’s habitus, and the horizontally interrelated ones pertinent to musicians and performers, Paul McCartney had been immersed in a wide variety of song styles (Coleman, 1995; Lewisohn, 1992; Martin, 1994; Pedler, 2003). These ranged across those derived from Viennese operettas to those that had their origins in African-based forms. He proved equally at home with tunes from the music hall and Broadway shows as he was with R&B in its many forms. His upbringing in Liverpool had seen to that. In fact, it was a member of his close and extended family unit who provided the initial impetus for the song ‘Paperback Writer’. According to Steve Turner (2000, pp. 123–124), Jimmy Saville, the now disgraced former Radio Luxembourg DJ and then host of the influential BBC music program Top of the Pops, claimed that, backstage at the BBC, McCartney had been discussing with the rest of the band the next single to be recorded in a few days’ time. McCartney was asked what he would write about. Paul stated that his Aunt Lil had recently challenged him to see whether he could write a song that was not a love song and, ‘as Saville recalled, “with that thought obviously still in his mind, he walked around the room and noticed that Ringo was reading a book. He took one look and announced he would write a song about a book”’ (Saville quoted in Turner, 2000, p. 124). At this time McCartney was also aware that the band’s significant commercial success might not continue indefinitely; two or three years at the top of the pops appeared to be the rule. He was thinking ahead to what might occur beyond the few years of allotted fame he presumed he’d already accrued with The Beatles. For

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him, the life of a professional songwriter was the long-term goal that would help him and John Lennon survives in show business. The lyrics penned under their name became a metaphor for, or a projection of, his own personal ambitions. Even at this early stage, the creative system can be viewed fully in operation. McCartney was already drawing from his internalised domain knowledge (of existing song lyrics) and referencing this against his knowledge of the criteria for selection of the field (i.e. a good theme or topic for a song that wasn’t a love song). The systems model can therefore be scaled at an individual level as shown in Fig. 4.1.

Fig. 4.1 The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of lyric writing

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Of course, Paul McCartney did not work entirely alone. He was also part of a songwriting duo and at this individual scale, John Lennon can be seen as a critical member of the songwriting field giving McCartney feedback. But as we move up in scale we can also see that this particular holon/parton was a neat team of two, Lennon and McCartney, both contributing in varied ways to the songs they produced (Everett, 1999, pp. 8–9). This team was expected to supply the songs, ‘the raw material that power the reactor of a large part of the entertainment business’ (Webb, 1998, p. 308).

The Collaborative Dyad: Creating the Song At this scale of song creation, the songwriting dyad, Lennon and McCartney were both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated via highlevel rewards, competition with each other and all the other songwriters on the scene, and constant surveillance by the world’s press, to produce songs that were the drivers of all the other activities that went on around them. Not only does this situation explain why they did what they did but it also provides evidence to the contrary that extrinsic motivation inhibits creativity, an idea which ‘can be traced to the romantic philosophical tradition’ (Eisenberger & Shannock, 2003, p. 122) with all its attendant problems (Boden, 2004, p. 14). During this period, in the summer of 1966, this extrinsically motivated songwriting team had not only produced the first half of a lasting body of highly regarded creative work but had already developed a set of organised and disciplined work habits, meeting at each other’s houses and writing in the way professional writers would. Driving to Lennon’s suburban house in Weybridge from his own house in St John’s Wood, closer to the centre of London and EMI’s studio at Abbey Road, McCartney had been dwelling on the song about a book. ‘Paul has said that he always liked the sound of the words “paperback writer”’ (Turner, 2000, p. 124) and this appreciation may have been triggered from memories of their early days in Gambier Terrace in Liverpool and their social interactions with poet Royston Ellis. Ellis, by his own account, had discussed his desire to be a successful paperback writer

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with them (ibid.). The source may also have been, instead, the fact that paperbacks were extremely popular in the sixties and McCartney was simply tuned into the zeitgeist, the spirit of the sociocultural milieu he operated in. Whatever the origin of McCartney’s fascination with paperback writers, he decided this would make a great title. ‘The epistolary style of the song came to him as he drove down to Weybridge for a day’s writing with John. “As soon as I arrived I told him that I wanted to write it as if it was a letter”’ (Turner, 2000, p. 124). The letter McCartney was referring to would be one directed to a book publisher. ‘I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like “Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be…” and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it’ (Miles, 1997, p. 279). As he explained ‘it just flowed’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 212). This experience of ‘being in flow’ has been described by Csikszentmihalyi as an experience where there is: A sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. (1991, p. 71)

Produced under these conditions, the lyrics became a complex story about: a paperback writer who has written a novel based on another novel, which is also about a paperback writer. The ‘man named Lear’ is probably a reference to Edward Lear, the Victorian painter who, although he never wrote a novel, did write nonsense poems and songs which John loved. The Daily Mail gets a mention because it was John’s regular newspaper and it often would be lying around the Weybridge house when they were writing. (Turner, 2000, p. 125)

As they developed the character piece, among the first they had worked on, Lennon primarily acted as a member of the field, making judgements about the quality of the work. This had an immediate effect on

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the song itself and the way it was created. Once Paul had Lennon’s seal of approval they both went upstairs to John’s music room and ‘put the melody to it’ (Miles, 1997, p. 279). While John later claimed ‘it is Paul’s song’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 212), both he and McCartney ‘sat down and finished it all up, but it was tilted towards me, the original idea was mine. I had no music, but it’s just a little bluesy song, not a lot of melody’ (McCartney in Miles, 1997, p. 279). Drawing on a classic blues-based approach, the chordal movement was minimal in comparison to the wide harmonic spread of the many other songs Lennon and particularly McCartney had written. The harmonic stability that forms the basis of the music to ‘Paperback Writer’ was derived, in part, from the same source as drone songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ that were beginning to be recorded for the album Revolver , which were themselves the result of The Beatles recent infatuation with Indian music. The use of a stable harmonic centre, repeated seemingly endlessly through the application of a single chord recurring over time, created the basis for a musical surprise when a new chord eventually appeared. In the context of what was a largely conventional pop song of the time, ‘Paperback Writer’ was ‘built essentially around a similarly prolonged, scene setting I chord that only makes a brief excursion to IV after a full 8 bars’ (Pedler, 2003, p. 27). This writing stage of the song can again be represented by the creative system, as McCartney and Lennon collaborate on ‘Paperback Writer’s’ musical features locating the work of the collaborative duo in the broader system of songwriting, as shown in Fig. 4.2. Once the duo had arrived in the studio with the song, the script as it were of their new recording, Lennon and McCartney, while a holon unto themselves now formed a parton of the next system up in scale, that is, the holon/parton that consisted of The Beatles and their producer George Martin.

The Group: Song Arrangement Lennon and McCartney proceeded to play the new song to Martin and the other members of the band, as had become the group’s practice (The Beatles, 2000, p. 212). By this stage, The Beatles were involved in giving

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Fig. 4.2 The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of the collaborative songwriting dyad

more and more input to the decisions made in the studio process. Their success had given them this opportunity. The first order of the day was to arrange the vocal harmonies for the chorus and the instrumentation that would support their version of the song. While Lennon and McCartney were writing the song, McCartney ‘had the idea to do the harmonies and we arranged that in the studio’ (Miles, 1997, p. 279). The vocal harmonies McCartney was keen on owed a great deal to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album which had been recently released by EMI and lauded in the press by McCartney and many others in the British music industry, and the Beatles were now trying to best it. McCartney thought it brilliant. So much so that he borrowed the

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style of Brian Wilson’s vocal arrangements. As Everett also explains, the vocal arrangement which introduces the song and is repeated as a chorus throughout, ‘exhibits a “Hindemithian” growth of dissonant intervals’ (1999, p. 43). To add an extra touch to the overall vocal arrangement, McCartney insisted that ‘John and George should rekindle childhood memories’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 73) by singing the French nursery rhyme ‘Frere Jacque’ under the lead vocal as an added attraction to the ear in the last two verses of the arrangement. The guitar arrangement they settled on for ‘Paperback Writer’ revolves around a rhythm derived from artists such as Chuck Berry and now used by a host of others. The Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, were by now very familiar with these rhythms via the many covers they had all performed. In this case, the two-note chords that tended to dominate in this style, as played on guitar, usually covered the root and the fifth and omitted the third degree (Pedler, 2003, p. 29). The rhythm was emphasised by forceful down strokes with variation achieved by altering the basic finger pattern of the G bar shape and extending the D on the A string a full tone to E or by moving between the G major and the G seventh, both played in the same position on the third fret. The strum on the off-beat locked into the beat of the snare drum pattern supplied by Ringo. The arrangement also features an instrumental guitar hook, the minor pentatonic riff that precedes the verse, ‘which can be directly related to Chicago blues’ (Pedler, 2003, p. 262). This hook sounds on initial hearing to be a complex run but, as anyone with a guitar player’s habitus knows, is built on a relatively simple shape that lends itself to an easily picked yet musically attractive sequence of notes. Riffs of this type are readily facilitated on the six-stringed guitar. That is, the affordances supplied by this musical technology allowed a certain ease of creation. The pentatonic box pattern that occurs in the key of G located on the third and fifth frets on the E, A and D strings, which the G bar chord overlays, puts all the relevant notes, including octave jumps, within very easy reach (see YouTube, 2016b). This type of riff, picked in the right hand using an alternate picking pattern, is certainly more difficult to achieve on keyboard but relatively easy on guitar. What makes the riff from ‘Paperback Writer’ slightly unusual is the variation, which may be

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inadvertent, that occurs after the second verse (see YouTube, 2016c). Nonetheless, the guitarists in The Beatles had acquired enough domain knowledge, not as songwriters but in the related field of performance, to use these techniques effectively throughout this period, witness the preceding ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘I Feel Fine’ riffs and the closely linked ‘I Want To Tell You’ riff off the Revolver album itself. Given the non-vertical nature of the vocal melody, eventually sung with requisite verve and humour by McCartney, the bass guitar had the freedom to range across each of these elements and produce what amounts to a melodic counterpoint to the main vocal melody, a device which has become known in rock circles as ‘lead bass’. With McCartney playing his newly acquired Rickenbacker, the isolated bass track (see YouTube, 2016a) reveals a relatively complex part reminiscent of James Jamerson’s approach on all the crucial Motown hits the Beatles had studied. It also drew on ‘London soul playing, as in the Zombies “She’s Not There”’ (Everett, 1999, p. 44) or John Entwhistle’s work on The Who’s early singles. Considered one of McCartney’s best inventive bass parts and with the ‘gritty guitar hook leading the way’ his performance of it ‘tears out of the gate with an absolutely blazing series of rollercoaster runs, catching his breath occasionally and then going back for more unexpected dives and spins’ (Bosso, 2014). As musicians who meshed well together, the Beatles had the deserved reputation of being among an acclaimed set of ensemble players of the period along with groups like Booker T and the MGs and the house band at Motown, the Funk Brothers. The basic tracks of this recording show a band who are locked and joyful in their energetic approach to their ensemble playing. This cohesiveness was reflected in their communal decision-making during this period (Howard, 2016) where they would very soon collectively abandon live performance altogether in favour of concentrating on their studio skills. In the process of arranging ‘Paperback Writer’, the Beatles and George Martin assessed, accepted or rejected ideas on band arrangements, drawing on their knowledge of the field and the domain relevant to this holon. This next scale of these vertically integrated creative systems, or holarchy of holon/partons, each a complete system within themselves but forming a subset for the other systems above it, can be seen at the group level as shown in Fig. 4.3.

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Fig. 4.3 The systems model of creativity scaled to the group level and song arrangement

Complementing the group’s ensemble performance were the other members of the creative collective (Hennion, 1990) who had gathered around them in the studio.

The Creative Collective: Recording Techniques At this expanded scale of creative activity, the next holon up in scale, there was considerable input from the other members of the creative team who went on to produce ‘Paperback Writer’ as a recording. The

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‘final product, consisting of highly disparate elements that can be considered individually and as a mixture, [was] the fruit of a continuous exchange of views between the various members of the team’ (Hennion, 1990, p. 186). What is important to recognise about this collective team effort, as Howard Becker argues in his influential book Art Worlds (1982), is that any creative output of this type is necessarily dependent on a network of cooperating individuals. In this process, everybody’s reputation is on the line. Each must eventually recognise that the imposition of these reputations, manifest in symbolic capital which represents their own ‘ticket to ride’, as it were, has an effect on, and will cause a change in, the nature of the desired work being produced by the collaborators (Becker, 1982, p. 25). George Martin, as their producer at this time, had already established a considerable reputation. Drawing on all his symbolic and cultural capital, he was attempting to satisfy the diverse and often insatiable requests from the Beatles for ‘the new’. While he had been their instructor in the early period he was now also facilitating their many ideas. As another notable producer of the time, Mickie Most, commented, the Beatles ‘lived in the studio and just experimented. And out of it came all sorts of great things but people shouldn’t forget that they had the help of a very good producer in George Martin’ (quoted in Southall et al., 1997, p. 86). Martin and The Beatles vaguely realised that the records they were working on together during the Revolver period ‘were forerunners of a complete change of style’ (Martin, 1979, p. 199). Martin was cognisant that ‘we had an enormous string of hits and we had the confidence, even arrogance, to know that we could try anything we wanted’ (ibid.). The time had come for experimentation. Working with Martin on this particular session was Geoff Emerick. Emerick had only just become The Beatles’ engineer after the departure of Norman Smith. He was young, energetic and innovative. As Martin describes it, Emerick ‘used to do really weird things that were slightly illegitimate, with our support and approval’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 211). Emerick and Martin went on to make as convincing a production duo as Lennon and McCartney did with their songwriting. Emerick’s assistant and tape operator on April 13 was Richard Lush, also on his first day with The Beatles. Lush admitted to being ‘pretty nervous’ (Lewisohn,

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1988, p. 73) but was soon accepted as part of the team. The Beatles’ trusted road crew of Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall were also present, as usual, to run any errands and help with drum, amp and guitar set-ups. Aspinall recalls ‘I was in the studio with them when they were making records, and the pattern changed over the years. At the time of Revolver it was getting so that sessions would start about two or three in the afternoon and go on until they finished, whatever the time was’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 212). Once the Technical Engineers had set up for the day in Studio Three, the team worked on this particular track from 8.00 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. the following morning (ibid.), with the basic recording for ‘Paperback Writer’ undertaken as follows: McCartney plays lead on his Casino, now distorted and played through a Leslie speaker. Taped on April 13, the backing track consists of Starr’s Ludwigs (again, the cymbals crash at crucial points in the refrain, B2, 0:28, followed by a tom fill), Lennon’s tambourine, Harrison’s lightly ringing Leslied Gibson SG (which chimes on second beats through the verse, A+1,-8, 0:13-0-24), and McCartney’s lead (“Guitar 1,” having both the Ib7 ostinato riff, mm. 5-6, 0:06-0:12, and the boogie pattern in the verse that looks ahead to “Revolution”). (Everett, 1999, p. 42)

There were two takes with one being a breakdown and thus unusable. They then undertook ‘innumerable overdubs on this day and again on April 14’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 73) when Phil McDonald took over as second engineer. Ideas, as usual, were flying around within this creative collective. As Lewisohn states (1988, p. 74) and Bosso reiterates, it was John Lennon who insisted on ‘a boosted bass sound on Paperback Writer— he’d heard a Wilson Pickett song and was knocked out by its low-end punch’ (2014). Prior to this, Beatles’ records had their bass mixed low to avoid needle jump on the vinyl format they appeared on. Emerick proceeded to come up with ‘one of his first innovations’ (Bosso, 2014) in consultation with Ken Townsend the technical engineer who had invented ADT (Artificial Double Tracking) used on the earlier ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ recordings. The Technical Engineers, like Townsend, were often ‘highly involved in addressing the creative

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demands of The Beatles and other artists. “It was like being more a part of the creative team, if you like,” recalls Keith Slaughter’ (Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 52). Once Emerick, the session’s Balance Engineer, told him what he wanted, Townsend decided to use ‘a large studio speaker as a transducer to record Paul’s bass on “Paperback Writer”’ (Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 52). Townsend used the speaker from the RLS 10 monitor cabinet which had become affectionately known, given its size and colour, as the White Elephant. They had often used this monitor box for playback instead of headphones while overdubbing in their early sessions. It can be heard for example on ‘Yesterday’ and the technique, where leakage could not be avoided, gave the impression of double tracking. But on this day, its speaker served as a microphone by the simple fact of Townsend reversing the wiring. It produced the desired result (Fig. 4.4). Mixing was done on the studio’s REDD desk. Emerick was to become very familiar with it and eventually ‘developed an intuitive understanding of exactly what must be done to achieve certain sounds’ (Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 113). He asserted that ‘if you listen to Paperback Writer, a good example, you really hear the kick of the bass drum. There was no way you could recreate that through a transistorised desk’ (ibid.) of the type installed for The Beatles’ last recorded album. Added to this were the Altec compressors and Fairchild limiters they regularly used. To use Stephen Hill’s formulation on technology (1988, pp. 33–34), rather than being technologically determinist, there was an alignment between the technology that was available to them and the cultural and creative needs they had for it. One feature of the mix for ‘Paperback Writer’ was the effect achieved at the tail of the chorus by using tape echo. They routed the vocals into a different two track tape deck connecting the outputs to its inputs. During the mix, the second engineer assisting Emerick, Phil MacDonald, had the job of increasing the record level until it reached the point of feedback. Too little and it was ineffective—too much and the feedback would become uncontrollable. There was an ideal point he needed to bring the fader to. As Emerick pointed out, ‘every time he’d go past that point, or not far enough, we’d have to stop and remix the entire song again’ (2006, p. 117). As a consequence, these mixes ‘themselves became

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Fig. 4.4 The systems model of creativity scaled to the creative collective level

performances’ (ibid.). During the whole process, The Beatles team also used in-house effects such as ‘the legendary and intriguing ADT and STEED’ (Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 284) and they also pioneered the use of many of the other tape-based effects they became famous for. As Ryan and Kehew point out though, ‘in most cases the effects were not actually invented at Abbey Road, but the Beatles and their engineers refined them and used them so musically and creatively that they became a significant part of the “Beatles sound”’ (ibid.). That ‘sound’ was also dependent on the way the records were mastered, a process similar in effect to the colour grading of film, and

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one that could make or break a record, either accentuating and highlighting the exciting rhythms or thinning out and smothering them. Also fearing the effect the bass quality they had achieved on the overdubs of McCartney’s bass part would have on the vinyl pressings, making the stylus jump, the team was fortunate to have the services of Tony Clark available at Abbey Road to master this single. Clark remembers: It was EMI’s first high level cut and I used a wonderful new machine just invented by the backroom boys, ATOC – Automatic Transient Overload control. It was a huge box with flashing lights and what looked like the eye of a Cyclops staring out at you. But it did the trick. I did two cuts, one with ATOC and one without, played them to George Martin and he approved of the high level one. (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 74)

For Martin, tensions were developing for him in his business dealings with EMI at the time but these were not apparent during the ‘Paperback Writer’ sessions (Martin, 1979, pp. 179–198). Instead, Martin deflected these concerns recalling that the recording ‘had very good vocal work’ (quoted in The Beatles, 2000, p. 212) and was rhythm heavy. ‘I think that was just the way it worked out, that the rhythm was the most important part of their make-up by this time’ (ibid.). The final mono mix and mastering of their next single was accepted and approved by George Martin and completed at Abbey Road by 16 April. In creating the master recording of ‘Paperback Writer’, the system we have just been focusing on, is scaled to the collective level. At this level, the field and domain of record production, which includes as components of it the songwriting and arranging that form the basis of the record production, are now operative for ‘Paperback Writer’. The owner and operator of Abbey Road studios was the EMI record company and it is here, at this institutional level, that we now want to focus our attention.

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The Institutional Level: Power, Finance and Distribution Not only was EMI as an institution, during this particular period of time, quite rigid in its approach to such things as the payment of royalties, it was notably an old established British company steeped in tradition and it cultivated a very particular approach to recording that had an effect on the recordings themselves. As one example, Geoff Emerick recalls that there was no editing allowed of multitrack tapes which would require the use of a razor to cut them. While this was common practice in other studios and allowed the joining of the best mixed sections together, thus allowing for more precision while saving time, ‘somehow EMI didn’t care what was going on in the outside world: we’d have to get the mix right from start to finish’ (Emerick, 2006, p. 117). But this institutional mentality had an effect on the creative process. ‘We may have had to do things the hard way, but it also meant we had to get it right. Looking at it that way always made me feel a bit better about the long hours involved’ (ibid.). Meticulous records were kept, the best quality equipment was used, the staff was very well trained and there was a strict demarcation between tasks. Technicians wore white lab coats, while maintenance staff wore brown ones. Engineers were expected to adhere to the rules. Ken Townsend, for example, paid the price at an institutional level for his inventive use of the bass speaker when he was ‘called into the office of Ken Livy, chief technical engineer, and reprimanded for matching impedances incorrectly!’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 74). This division of labour (Becker, 1982, pp. 9–10) was a basic part of Abbey Road’s institutional culture and it produced some interesting creative results. There was ‘a fundamental difference between the approach of the Technical Engineers versus that of the Balance Engineers when solving creative needs’ (Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 52). As Brian Gibson pointed out: the Balance Engineers were much less technically knowledgeable than most modern engineers. The Amp Room were mostly qualified Technical Engineers, with knowledge of circuits, etcetera. So they would often

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consider a hardware solution to a problem, involving amps and tape machines, while the Balance Engineers would mostly consider a more “artistic” approach involving acoustics and microphones. (quoted in Ryan & Kehew, 2006, p. 52)

As Martin also sees it, Emerick as a staff engineer was encouraged by the studio team and their approach to creation to do things that were for the good of the recording but were not necessarily aligned with the EMI approach. Emerick would then ‘be scared that the people above would find out’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 211). In short, there was a power dynamic at play within the EMI institutional structure that each agent at this level had to accommodate themselves to (Fig. 4.5). For Anthony Giddens (1979), the locus of power that operates within institutions like EMI can be identified in the rules and resources used by that institution. Rules, of the type employed at EMI’s Abbey Road studio and carried throughout the record company more broadly, were the result of various interactions between the agents who embodied the institution. In those interactions, EMI had developed a set of procedures they liked everybody to follow rather than a set of expressly written regulations. As such, the conventional approach at EMI was reproduced by the employees and staff as they complied with it or they engaged in changing the institutional procedures by engaging in new patterns of interaction. But the conventional procedures dictated the allocation of all of the resources that were employed by the company structure. For Giddens, these institutional resources take two forms. Firstly, there are allocative resources. These are the physical things that have been transformed by human action and for EMI they included all the technologies and studio spaces the firm had at its disposal. Secondly, EMI employed throughout its institutional structure what Giddens called authoritative resources. These are in essence non-material; they result from the action of one individual on the other and they ‘involve the ability to get others to carry out a person’s wishes, and in this way humans become a resource that other individuals may be able to use’ (Haralambos & Holbern, 1995, p. 906). At EMI not all individuals were equivalent. Some individuals within the institution wielded ‘more influence and decision-making power than others’ (McIntyre, 2004, p, 180).

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Fig. 4.5 The systems model of creativity scaled to the institutional level

While George Martin was nominally the principal decision-making entity in the recording studio system, and with the holon of The Beatles challenging that authority, his power at the institutional level was another matter altogether. He could not persuade the powers that be at EMI that he should be sufficiently remunerated for his creative part in the success of the many hits he was fostering at the time as he probably deserved. EMI would not adequately depart from their financial approach to him as an employee and offer commission on top of his salary (Martin, 1979, pp. 179–186). So, Martin left EMI and became ‘the pioneer of the freelance producer now hired by an artist to produce them in whichever studio they choose’ (Southall et al., 1997, p. 84). It was in

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this capacity that he was working on ‘Paperback Writer’. The Beatles, in a demonstration of their own power base at EMI, had insisted on using him. As a further example, while Geoff Emerick wielded a relative amount of power at the creative collective scale in the studio and also horizontally in relation to the broader domain and field of engineering as a creative activity, at the institutional level Managing Director Len Wood was a far more powerful figure. If he didn’t want a record to be made, finances would not be allocated to and it wouldn’t be made. Wood nonetheless, of course, had to consider in his powerful decision-making role, the attitude of his customers, that is, The Beatles fans who were part of the larger music scene operating at the time in the UK.

Music Scenes: Audiences, Styles and Fashion The UK Music scene they all belonged to, which fed off and contributed to what can be described as predominantly North Atlantic popular music, is shown in Fig. 4.4. At this scale, larger again than the institutional one, the scene EMI and other record companies catered to during this period was musically buoyant. There was ‘a superabundance of great pop around (the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon”, the Lovin’ Spoonfuls’ “Summer in the City”, the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday Monday”)’ (Norman, 2016, p. 245). The list also included ‘We Gotta Get Outta this Place’ by The Animals, the Sound of Silence album by Simon and Garfunkel, I Got You, I Feel Good by James Brown, The Second Album by The Spencer Davis Group, It’s 2 Easy by The Easybeats, I Hear A Symphony by The Supremes, and many other notable albums. At the beginning of April, the month they began work on ‘Paperback Writer’, Sam and Dave’s soul album Hold On, I’m Comin’ and Otis Redding’s album The Soul Album were also released. Not only were The Beatles and their fans listening to these works but many, if not all, of the musicians of the time, were also listening to The Beatles’ material and drawing inspiration from it themselves. There was no shortage of great material to listen to, adapt and draw on for musicians who had their ‘ear to the ground’. This of course included The

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Beach Boys, but in turn, these Beatles ‘acolytes turned challengers across the Atlantic had given fresh impetus to [the Beatles’] ambition in the studio’ (Norman, 2016, p. 243). It was no secret, as mentioned prior, that The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds had inspired The Beatles and in particular Paul McCartney. At the same time, The Beatles took their first extended break from touring, just prior to beginning work on Revolver . As outlined by Tom Schultheiss (1980), Harrison married Patti Boyd whom he’d met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night , and then honeymooned in Barbados. The already married Lennons and Starrs vacationed together on a Greek isle. McCartney undertook renovations to his newly acquired house in St John’s Wood close to the Abbey Road studio while frequenting the scene in London clubs like the Bag O’Nails where soul music pumped out of the house sound system on a nightly basis. He and Jane Asher also vacationed at a ski resort in Switzerland, returning in time to see McCartney’s father’s race-horse, which Paul had given him, run at Aintree. At this time both Lennon and McCartney also sold a number of shares in their publishing company Northern Songs Ltd., originally set up in a deal with their publisher Dick James (Schultheiss, 1980, pp. 153–157). With this sort of adult activity occurring for the band, and also among some of their more successful fellow musicians, it seemed that these pop music purveyors were coming of age. The Beatles ‘now moved in sophisticated circles and their outlook had changed’ (Burrows, 2000, p. 83) and this fact alone had a deep impact on the way they worked and what their seemingly insatiable curiosity alighted on. McCartney had been earlier introduced to the Asher family and they were: another important channel of influence. Highly educated and musical they took McCartney under their wing when he started going out with Jane Asher, introducing him to countless new styles of music and encouraging him to investigate sounds outside the rock and roll field. His horizons broadened with what George Martin remembered as “modern art, literature, modern music by the likes of John Cage, Stockhausen – the things he heard in the fruitful environment provided by the family Asher...they encouraged Paul in his musical education to experiment. (Peel, 2002, pp. 35–36)

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As Terry Burrows declares, ‘so it was that under the fledgling hippy underground, LSD, electronic music, experimental cinema, and the avant-garde scene, The Beatles music took a new direction’ (2000, p. 83). Moving beyond ‘the original brand of light entertainment that succeeded in making millions of people happy’ (Schaffner, 1977, p. 53) and the flighty fads and phases of adolescence their audiences were steeped in, The Beatles began to fashion ‘a popular art form which was thoughtprovoking as well as entertaining, and which managed to mirror so many of its listeners’ unarticulated feelings’ (ibid.). All of this emerged within a very particular sociocultural milieu. It is this milieu that forms the next layer, or systemic scale level, that the song was created within as shown in Fig. 4.6.

The Sociocultural Milieu: Right Time, Right Place As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued, ‘we cannot abstract the creative person from the context’ (1988, p. 332) they work within. For us, contexts are the spatial, temporal and discursive spaces, which are interconnected or woven together with other connected spaces or structures that precede or follow it and also operate hierarchically both above and below it, as we have seen above. These contextual interconnections have an effect on the object that is located in that context and the perceptions we have of it. As such the element of time is deeply implicated in the systems model of creativity since one cannot create out of time itself nor can one create outside of a spatial location. Both history and geography matter over the long term. As one example, domains of knowledge are a constitutive part of creative action ‘because every new bit of information added to the domain will become the input for the next generation of persons. Thus, the model represents a cycle in the process of cultural evolution’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p. 333). Fields, as another example, are always spatiotemporally located. They exist somewhere and for some time. As such we can go further and say ‘human action belongs to broader patterns of cultural activity that are, at once, individual and

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Fig. 4.6 The systems model of creativity scaled to the level of the broader music scene

social, symbolic and material, and embedded within longer histories’ (Gl˘aveanu, 2014, p. 65). The weather that spring and summer in 1966 was full of ‘unbroken glorious sunshine’ (Norman, 2016, p. 245). Swinging London was in full flight, the English football team had won the World Cup and there was a ‘national mood of euphoria and self-congratulation’ (ibid.). It was a good time to be a Beatle. As well as a shift from scotch and Coke to pot as the drug of choice (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 59), the British capital was awash with the newly popular discotheques which played a continuous diet of soul music. The Beatles’ songs of the period, including ‘Paperback Writer’, were ‘soaked in the atmosphere of London in that mythic

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season, its hot pavements, its wasp-striped minidresses, the mace-shaped shimmering Post Office Tower symbolising how life for its young seemed to grow measurably better every day’ (Norman, 2016, p. 245) (Fig. 4.7). As Ian MacDonald suggests, the lyrics to ‘Paperback Writer’ drew on, and reflect, ‘an era of classless ambition: The generation of “young meteors” who in the mid-sixties rose from provincial and working-class backgrounds to dazzle the heights of British fashion, film and print’ (2005, p. 195). The music of the period offered something more than a simple set of ephemeral popular ditties, however. It was ‘intoxication: it was youth, freedom, rebellion and sensuality. In a post-war world with

Fig. 4.7 The systems model of creativity operating at the sociocultural level

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nothing better to offer, this noise was practically the meaning of life itself ’ (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 57). As Gould explains: In Britain and the United States the great upsurge of adolescent fervour that the press called Beatlemania would coalesce into one of the main tributaries of a broad confluence of pop enthusiasm, student activism, and mass bohemianism that would flood the political, social, and cultural landscape of much of the industrialized world during the second half of the 1960s, spinning off whorls and eddies – the women’s liberation movement, the gay liberation movement, the environmental movement - in its wake. In a manner that was inconceivable prior to an era when pop stars, film stars, and sports stars began to achieve the sort of fame and exert the sort of influence that had once been reserved for political, religious, and military leaders, the Beatles would serve as prominent symbols, spokesman, or, as some would have it, avatars of this great international upheaval. Bridging nationalities, classes, and cultures they became the common property of a generation of young people who idealized them, and then identified powerfully with that idealization of them. (Gould, 2008, p. vii)

Through it, all The Beatles continued to make their music. ‘For the many who hated that noise, it was barbaric’, Du Noyer claimed (2015, p. 57), indicating that there was an obverse outlook on the vibrancy of the period. ‘London may have been swinging in 1966, but in the midst of the Cold War. Britain was also a place where faith in the old religions was fading’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 145). This state of flux was to have its repercussions for The Beatles in their later ‘bigger than Jesus’ fall from grace in America and the accompanying tour threats. Many also ‘feared annihilation in an atomic Third Word War’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 145). Among these was McCartney’s soon-to-be ex-fiancé Jane Asher. Both Paul and Jane were concerned about the possibilities of total destruction and were ‘half expecting an Armageddon to come by way of a nuclear strike from the East. “I think that made us more determined to enjoy ourselves and live for the moment,” Jane has said’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 147). At this exact time, as a cultural form, pop music was mutating from rock & roll into what would become known as the more serious ‘rock’ with all its pretension to being ‘high art’. It was not only establishing

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itself as a supposed art form but was also drawing on other related systems of music such as those from segregation-era USA and those they were encountering from the Empire’s crown jewel, India. Many of the Eastern philosophies that accompanied the music were forming the bedrock of what would become known as the counterculture which was, itself, just beginning to crystallise at this point. However, for those who weren’t at its epicentre, and didn’t wish to be, this music ‘vaguely presaged something fatally rotten in western civilisation’ (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 57). As had been revealed by writers such as Richard Hoggart (see Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, pp. 83–84), many also thought at this time that ‘culture’ occurred elsewhere, usually in the realm of a well-established canon of great works, and this cultural attitude resonated with the almost militaristic approach taken by companies such as EMI and the BBC, an approach that was itself a hangover from WWII. With these antithetical and often antagonistic points of view in play, some had begun to acknowledge, however, that ‘the best rock songwriting had a literacy and wit that might rival Broadway’ (Du Noyer 2015, pp. 57–58). It is out of this heady sociocultural milieu that the recording of ‘Paperback Writer’ emerged. It was released into the wider world on 10 June 1966. As an artefact of popular music, it was embedded in a particular social and cultural system that was temporally and spatially located. The social field would decide on its novelty, its creativeness and its deserved inclusion into the cultural and social atmosphere operating at the time.

Conclusion The historical period this sociocultural milieu, in fact, all of these vertically and horizontally interdependent systems, operated within, was itself just one layer of the various systems, one within the other, from one view a parton, from another a holon, that contributed to the emergence of ‘Paperback Writer’ as a recording. Embedded within this milieu was a particular temporally and spatially located music scene, centred in this case on London, which also drew on other related scenes, specifically in this case, those that were active in the USA. Located as active holons,

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or component parts of the system within these scenes, were a number of institutional players who were also part of, and drew on, the particular scene they operated in. In this case, these included not only the musicians and audiences but also institutions like the BBC and record companies like EMI. The power structure they embodied, represented in the internal culture of institutions like EMI, was instrumental to the way the collaborative collective that produced ‘Paperback Writer’ worked within Abbey Road studios, owned and operated as it was by EMI. This level of the ‘Paperback Writer’ holarchy, the creative collective, was just as crucial to the final product as all the others above and below them. Without Martin, Emerick, Townsend, Curry and the others, The Beatles’ sound would be markedly different from that which appeared on the recording. Although they were very important to this holarchy, The Beatles were just one of the contributing holons that made their, albeit very significant, contribution to the recording at this scale level. They were, of course, necessary but most importantly not sufficient to the way ‘Paperback Writer’ as a record was eventually manifest. The Beatles’ communal decision-making was also important to the internal workings of the band, particularly when it came to the arrangements of the song. At the next scale level down, the interactive dyad that was the Lennon and McCartney songwriting team, was also important. It was their relationship, the way they worked and trusted each other’s value judgements, that was crucial to the song’s existence. Without the song, the script as it were, the recording would be nothing; again necessary but not sufficient. Together this duo supplied the basic musical frame for the song, which brings us back to McCartney. Without him, embedded as he was as an active agent within a particular sociocultural milieu and possessing a unique but shared background with the others, the lyrics would not have flowed as they did that day at Weybridge where the required next single was being worked on (Fig. 4.8). As we can see from all of the above, systems are complex interrelated webs of interconnected domains of knowledge, where fields of active agents deploy a variety of forms of cultural, social, symbolic and, of course, financial capital. They operate at various levels as open, dynamic and nested holon/partons, system within system within system, that form a holarchy of systems, which in this case contributed to the emergence

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Fig. 4.8 The holarchy of scaled systems that produced ‘Paperback Writer’

of ‘Paperback Writer’. These holarchies are not static. There is no objective starting point to this holarchy. We can, however, arbitrarily dive into them at any point—in this case, we chose Paul McCartney—and arrive at the same conclusion. We could just as easily have started with John Lennon, or Geoff Emerick or any of the other active agents in the field from which the recording of ‘Paperback Writer’ emerged and at some point would have to acknowledge the input of all the related players. Some of these players, like McCartney himself, wielded considerable power in the field he worked in, much more so than many of the others, but this does not indicate that McCartney ever operated in isolation or was not, at some point, needing to acknowledge and accommodate himself to the power of others. There were things he and The Beatles relied on many others to solve and give their input and support to the recording of ‘Paperback Writer’. Finally, we can just as readily say that all the members of the creative system, scaled across a complex holarchy of contributing holon/partons—lyric writing, songwriting, arranging, record production, institutional decision-making, the preferences of the scene operative at the time and the sociocultural milieu in which all of this existed—were themselves part of the complex system that allowed ‘Paperback Writer’ to emerge as a recorded song. Each holon/parton was necessary but not, of itself, completely sufficient to its production. All of the decisions made within this holarchy, by all of the contributing individuals at all scale levels, were also just as dependent on the structures, principally the domains and fields each of them encountered, as they were on any one seemingly all-powerful agent. This can be seen, as suggested above, in the

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cooperative, competitive or indeed co-opetitive collaboration McCartney was part of with John Lennon. It is to this important partnership that we will now turn.

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5 Paul McCartney’s Major Creative Collaborators: John Lennon and the Creative System

While Paul McCartney has had a variety of collaborators across his working life—some short term, others more long-lived—it would be almost impossible to write about him and his creative practice without looking in some depth at his principle songwriting partnership. This creative partnership with John Lennon has come to be seen as one of the most successful in the sphere of contemporary Western popular music. Its beginnings have become legendary. However, in an interview on the BBC in 2020, Paul McCartney recalled seeing John Lennon for the first time as he moved around their locality of South Liverpool, before encountering him as part of a now well-documented introduction performed by their mutual friend Ivan at Woolton village fete on 6 July 1957. In an interview with Lennon’s youngest son, Sean, McCartney remembers: I’d seen him around a couple of times because, what I realised later was, my bus route; he [John] would take that bus and he would be going to see his Mum, who lived kind of in my area. Then he’d take the bus back up to his Aunt Mimi’s. So, I’d seen him a couple of times and thought “wow, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_5

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y’know, he’s an interesting looking guy”, and then I once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips. In my mind I thought “that’s that guy off the bus, he is cool looking, he’s a cool looking guy”. I knew nothing about him at that point, he had long sideboards and greased back hair…the Teddy-boy look. (BBC, 2020)

He continues: My friend Ivan, who I knew at school was a friend of John’s and took me up to the village fete and introduced me there so it was like “ahhh, that’s that guy who I’ve been seeing”, and then obviously I knew he was a musician because he was in the little band The Quarrymen and I got to sort of hang out with them in the interval. (ibid.)

That introduction at the Woolton village fete was the beginning of a friendship that blossomed into a formidable and highly successful songwriting partnership. Popular music history has tended to look at it in Romantic terms, primarily because of the deeply embedded conceptions of creativity still held in the West (Sawyer, 2012, pp. 23–25). The mythic image of the self-expressive, free-thinking individual who produces extraordinary work, which has led, in part, to the image of the quasi-neurotic artist compelled to work through various states of Romantic agony, is a common one. Despite these lingering assumptions in the popular Western imagination, the community specifically researching creativity as a phenomenon has been unable to support these ideas. Instead, there has been a steady move away from a Romantic view of creativity towards a more rationally based research approach (ibid.). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, for example, has argued that those researching creativity have needed to make a shift from a Ptolemaic, or person-centred perspective, towards a more Copernican, or systemic one (1988, p. 36). The current situation, in research terms at least if not the popular imagination, appears to favour the idea that creativity comes about through the confluence of a set of multiple factors that coalesce in an essentially non-linear system (e.g. Hennessey, 2017; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Montuori, 2011; Sawyer, 2012). As in the case of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Paperback Writer’, we’ve shown how creativity emerges from the complex interaction between the individual

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and the established cultural work, knowledge, conventional codes and methods of practice within a given field. Moving beyond a focus on the individual ‘reinforces the idea that creation is never ex-nihilo but built on the shoulders of predecessors’ (Sarmiento & Stahl, 2008, p. 1). From this standpoint we could also make the claim that creativity can be seen as ‘group-cognitive achievement’ (ibid.), particularly in the instance of collaborating on writing a song with another person. Psychologists in the 1980s studied collaborating individuals in a variety of cultural and social situations with a particular focus on aspects of planning, thinking, learning and remembering (Sawyer, 2003). They discovered, however, that individual cognitive processes were not easily attributable solely to the individual, as they identified too many ‘deeply embedded group processes’ that operate during collaboration (ibid., p. 21). Studying collaborative or group or creativity, rather than the creativity of individuals, is therefore a more challenging process because the creative contributions of individuals must be considered in equal terms as the ‘complex relations between them, [and] the communication patterns leading to unique emergent group properties’ (Gl˘aveanu 2010, p. 2). Analyses of the contributions and interactions that occur between individuals in collaborative groups across the duration of a particular task tend to be conducted by adopting what has been called the ‘process approach’ (Sawyer, 2012). These ‘process studies’ have been conducted on group interaction and idea generation (Nijstad & Stroebe, 2006; Paulus & Brown, 2003) and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Collins & Amabile, 1999; Hennessey, 2003). Process studies have also identified some of the ways in which groups develop over time, categorising some of the phases experienced by a set of collaborators, and producing a number of staged models to illustrate these processes (for a summary of ‘classic’ group and team developmental models see Weiner et al., 2013, p. 426). However, there are a number of issues with viewing group creativity as a staged process, not the inherent non-linearity of creative emergence. Furthermore, the models developed from these studies also often overlook the accumulated knowledge of the individuals, derived in part from domain acquisition and an immersion in the social context (the field), where collaboration takes place (Sawyer, 2012).

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A creative group’s interaction therefore should be considered in relation to its social and cultural context. Keith Sawyer explored these ideas further by studying improvised jazz performances in a collaborative group setting. From these studies he concluded that a focus on the individual during group creativity is limited because the way in which a group functions arises primarily from the interactions of its individual members (Sawyer, 2003). Studying group creativity therefore requires a level of analysis focused at the group rather than individuals, since these creative groups are ‘complex dynamical systems and manifest emergent properties…[and operate] at the systems level that are not held by any of the individual components’ (Sawyer, 2003, p. 166). In their own studies of group creativity Paul Paulus and Bernard Nijstad (2003) saw that there are ‘three aspects of group functioning: group members, group processes and group context’ (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003, p. 332). In much the same way that Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, 1997, 1999) systems model requires the acquisition of domain-specific information by an individual, their work identified ‘information acquisition’ as a necessary component of collaborative creativity. They argued that the individual must first acquire particular skills, knowledge, ability or expertise in order to process this information and then output an idea. These individual stages represent the individual’s creative process and are dependent upon the experience of the participants but could also be thought of as analogous to Wallas’ four-stages of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification (1945), or Bastick’s two-stage process of intuition and verification (1982), or Bourdieu’s description of ‘habitus’ (1977, 1984, 1990, 1993) for more experienced participants. Paulus and Nijstad then explain that the individual contribution is outputted to the group for discussion, assessment, verification or rejection. If rejected, the process returns to the personal level where individuals within the group begin the process again (or add to or alter the initial contribution). Alternatively, if the group, or in this case the collaborative dyad of Lennon and McCartney, has verified the contribution, it is progressed out of the immediacy of the group and in due course, the collaborative creative contribution progresses to external verification where it can be evaluated, verified or rejected (McIntyre, 2009). Although the arrangement of their model is different to that of

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the systems model (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) the exchange of knowledge, ideas and critical evaluation between the group is similar to that of the systems model because it acknowledges the ‘individual, field and domain interactions necessary to produce artefacts’ (Kerrigan & McIntyre, 2010, p. 14). These findings have shifted the focus from the individual in the system to the possibility of representing a group of individuals in the system, which acknowledges that each member of the process performs a particular function within a particular domain and their creative contribution is effectively dispersed within the process of collaboration; a process defined as distributed creativity (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). Distributed creativity refers to: ‘situations where collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative product’ (ibid., p. 82). In essence, it is the system itself that produces creative work where the individuals in the system are no longer seen as the primary actors in this process. From this perspective The Beatles should therefore ‘not be seen as creative geniuses but as a creative process’ (Clydesdale, 2006, pp. 129– 139) since ‘what The Beatles achieved was a function of their working team and the relationships between them’ (ibid., p. 134). While John Lennon and Paul McCartney contributed individually and significantly to the songwriting of The Beatles’ output, it can also be demonstrated that the overall success of the songs to which they were credited was attributable to a largely collaborative system at work. The system in this case was composed of a decision-making entity that possessed agency, a domain of knowledge that they were immersed in and drew from, and a social organisation, or field, who understood, to varying degrees, the knowledge system they were working with. Beginning first with an exploration of their domain acquisition and the personnel that makes up the field they were interacting with, the following chapter explores the collaboration of one of the most celebrated contemporary Western songwriting partnerships in popular music history; John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

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Paul McCartney’s Early Domain Acquisition As we’ve discussed and reiterated more fully in other sections of this book, Paul McCartney acquired the skills and knowledge of the symbol system, cultural conventions and the structures of songwriting in various ways and during an array of rewarding social situations. As we’ve explored, McCartney was raised in an environment infused with music. McCartney’s father was also a popular amateur dance band leader who not only played numerous songs on the family piano but also showed his son how to entertain a crowd. Singalongs, as seen in the latter section of the ‘James Paul McCartney’ TV special broadcast in 1973 (ATV, 1973), were always a centrepiece of working-class life and these were also hugely influential. With these as sources McCartney became immersed in the popular music of the day. The songs McCartney encountered in this immersion process included theme songs from shows and films, light classical pieces, the piano pieces from Fats Waller, the easy listening repertoire of Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole, Vera Lynn and Dinah Washington as well as jazz standards such as ‘Begin the Beguine’, ‘September in the Rain’, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Falling in Love Again’. He listened to songs written by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Slim Whitman and many, many others (details can be found in Coleman, 1995; Lewisohn, 1992; Martin, 1994; Pedler, 2001). McCartney was also partial to the Blues and R&B that was typical of performers such as The Isley Brothers, Arthur Alexander and Ray Charles, as well as having a special love for all the early rock and roll hits from Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. He absorbed them all. He explains: I was lucky, my Dad played music around the house a lot and it was a very musical family. I was in all the big family singsongs at New Years, y’know, quite huge occasions. The funny thing about this was that I thought everyone had families like mine, y’know, just sort of ordinary and all seemed to like each other and visited each other and sang and played the piano and stuff. And it was only later that I realized probably through

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[John’s] life of what a difficult upbringing he’d had compared to me. (BBC, 2020)

As McCartney notes, Lennon had a very different upbringing to his.

John Lennon’s Early Domain Acquisition John Winston Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 to Julia Lennon (née Stanley). Julia grew up in Liverpool’s inner-city area of Toxteth and was one of five sisters. She took an interest in music and her dad taught her the banjo. On this she learnt to play a number of late twenties popular songs (Lewisohn2013). John’s father, Alfred ‘Freddie’ Lennon was away at sea at the time John was born and, although married, Alfred and Julia never lived together and were later divorced in 1942. In June 1946, after a series of turbulent family incidents and custody disagreements, John eventually came to live with Julia’s sister Aunt Mimi (Lewisohn, 2013). Living with his Aunt and his Uncle George on Menlove Avenue, in the South Liverpool suburb of Woolton, gave Lennon a more lower middleclass upbringing and introduced him to an early set of influences: Mimi was not interested in popular music and so the radio in their house would usually be tuned to the BBC Home Service...a child could get a quite comprehensive education from listening intelligently to the BBC. John Lennon did. (Connolly, 1981, p. 26)

While he was a child Lennon wrote his own stories and his many drawings illustrated his childhood fantasies. Reading the newspapers was common for him. His Aunt Mimi explained that ‘he had read most of the classics by the time he was ten’ (Henke, 2003, p.6). Lennon’s love for Victorian wordplay humour, the literary works of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and W. S. Gilbert, and the tradition of British comedy groups such as The Goons, also developed at this time (Thompson, 2019) and these influences would later surface in his songwriting. Lennon ‘often combined his comical wordplay and imaginative flights, sometimes just

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for the absurdity itself, but often for more poetic or thoughtful ends’ (Urish & Bielen, 2007, p. 2). Lennon’s middle-class upbringing meant that ‘we never listened to pop music in our house. Then one night I heard [Heartbreak Hotel] on Radio Luxembourg. That was it’ (Connolly, 1981, p. 28). He later explained his excitement and surprise was to do with the sound of the record, the vocal performance and the use of tape echo: When I first heard Heartbreak Hotel I could hardly make out what was being said…We’d never heard American voices singing like that – they’d always sung like Sinatra or enunciated very well. Suddenly there was this hillbilly, hiccupping on tape echo, and the bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about…To us it just sounded like a noise that was great. (quoted in Keogh, 2010, p. 175)

Around three weeks later Lennon had his second musical epiphany of 1956. A Quarry Bank school friend called Michael Hill had returned from a trip to Amsterdam with a 78 record of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ and they played the record at Hill’s house (Lewisohn, 2013). Lennon later recalled: When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak. You know how you’re torn? I didn’t want to leave Elvis. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind. (Connolly, 1981, p. 32)

Songs such as ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day’ formed the formative soundtrack to his adolescence. Lennon’s mother Julia supported his flourishing musical interest and, on visits to her house on Bloomfield Road, she would teach him to play the banjo; the same banjo that her father taught her with. John had already been playing harmonica for a number of years but Lennon remembers that ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ (1955) was: ‘the first song I was able to accompany myself on, taught me by my mother. I learnt it on banjo’ (1975). Mark Lewisohn contends that Lennon’s ‘hands-on musical education also had balance: Julia showed him at least four sweet songs from her youth: ‘Don’t Blame Me’ (1933), ‘Little White Lies’ (1930),

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‘Ramona’ and ‘Girl Of My Dreams’ (both 1927). All would remain lifelong favourites’ (2013, p. 522). After his musical epiphanies, Lennon longed to own a guitar but before receiving his first guitar in March 1957, Lennon borrowed someone else’s, which was a: cheap little acoustic, possibly an Egmond (the same as George Harrison’s), the kind of instrument one would dispose of at the first opportunity and then usually forget to mention. But it was a guitar, and from approximately the last weeks of 1956 (it’s impossible to be more precise than this) John became a strummer, using the banjo chords Julia taught him. (Lewisohn, 2013, p. 636)

McCartney remembers that when he first met John, ‘he used to play these kind of banjo chords and so we had to swap it round to guitar’ (Fordyce, 1966). Although uncertain, it was likely that his mother Julia bought Lennon’s first guitar (Lewisohn, 2013) and she also supported his playing in a band, as McCartney recalls: I think she thought it was fun, a fun idea y’know, because she was a bit of a musician herself. My Dad was the other one who had actually been a musician in a little band so he was super supportive and we would go round there to rehearse, but sometimes we’d take our guitars round to Julia’s and sort of play a little something y’know and she loved it, she was very supportive. (BBC, 2020)

The Dyad: A Collaborative Partnership Although unique and idiosyncratic, Lennon and McCartney’s domain acquisition of songwriting had significant commonalities, not least the shared context of growing up in postwar Liverpool at the tail end of the big-band era (Thompson, 2019). Although it was McCartney who ‘explicitly composed pastiche songs in these pre-rock era pop music traditions’ (Urish & Bielen, 2007, p. 2) Lennon was: ‘clearly well schooled in them as well’ (ibid.). Their acquisition of the domain of songwriting also occurred in collaboration with each other as McCartney explains:

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We all had to learn together…in the Skiffle craze when everyone else is playing guitar chords he [Lennon] only knew a couple of banjo chords but that only lasted y’know a week or two and I would just show him chords I knew, which was very basic, but it was great bonding just learning chords off each other…He might have had a bit of a hangup about not being musically trained but none of us were and I think that was one of the strengths of the Beatles, that none of us knew what we were doing, so we had to discover the route for ourselves. Each of us discovered it together, at the same time, so that was lovely. (BBC, 2020)

Learning new songs, new chords and new ways of performing continued to facilitate Lennon and McCartney’s domain acquisition of songwriting, as George Harrison remembers while performing in Hamburg: We were forced to learn to play everything to fill those eight hour sets. Suddenly, we were even playing movie themes, like a Taste of Honey and Moonglow, learning new chords, jazz voicings, the whole bit. We learned a lot from doing that. Eventually it all combined together to make something new and we found our voice as a band. (ibid., p. 33)

The many songs they listened to learnt them a series of themes, structures and chordal patterns that they would later draw on again and again. They depended on this immersive experience over and over. Barry Miles noted that ‘anything musical that [McCartney] learns goes immediately into his head and is liable to resurface years later, when for whatever reason he knows that he needs it’ (quoted in Salewicz, 1986, p. 174). Lennon was just the same. As one example, the music critic for The Times in 1963, William Mann, wrote that their use of the Aeolian cadence which surfaced at the end of their song ‘Not A Second Time’, was the identical chord progression Mahler had to conclude ‘Song of the Earth’. Mann claimed this usage appeared unselfconscious, natural and outstanding (Pedler, 2001, p. 33). While Lennon enjoyed the praise, he was perplexed at what it meant. He had used this technique quite a few times including for songs like ‘A Hard Day’s Night (“working like a dog”, bVII: F-G)’ (ibid.) and on a number of others, including ‘the hybrid ballsy cadence of Help! (“help in any way”) and Good Morning, Good Morning (bVII-I:G-A)’ (ibid.).

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In order to collaborate on writing a song it was necessary for both John Lennon and Paul McCartney to learn these important domain elements. In Bourdieu’s terms, acquiring the habitus of popular songwriting through an immersion in the space of works provided the possibilities of action for them. This is further evidence that ‘being a musician is not just a matter of spontaneous self-expression’ (Frith, 1978, p. 75) since ‘true originality evolves as the individual goes beyond what others had done before’ (Weisberg, 1988, p. 173). In this case it can be claimed that commitment, training, discipline and access to the traditions and conventions of the domain of knowledge are just as critical to creativity as rule-breaking and unconventional behaviour are (Bailin, 1988; Weisberg, 1988; Negus & Pickering, 2004) and, while both Lennon and McCartney shared a common context for this domain acquisition, they each absorbed it in their own unique but shared way. Access to the accumulated heritage of music (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 235), that is, the space of works (ibid., p. 233), was a factor but not the only one that led to Lennon and McCartney’s success. They made decisions exercising ‘varying degrees of personal autonomy, but this is always circumscribed by the available technologies and expertise, by economics, and by the expectations of their audience’ (Shuker, 1994, p. 99). In this case we can say Lennon and McCartney were necessary but not sufficient to the creative process they engaged. The field, that is, the ‘complex network of experts with varying expertise, status, and power’ (Sawyer, 2003, p. 124) were also a necessary part of the creative process as well. Fields like the one they were part of are constituted by ‘the group of intermediaries that determine what’s accepted and disseminated’ (ibid.).

The Relationship with the Field The very act of the field making decisions about what is acceptable or not had a mediating effect on the creation of Lennon and McCartney’s songs. For example, changes within the broader field of contemporary Western popular music in the late 1950s facilitated and enabled their endeavours as songwriters:

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Popular recording artists such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra typically sang songs that were written by commercial songwriting teams but artists such as Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly in the 1950s were part of the emergence of another tradition in commercial songwriting: the singer-songwriter. These artists and self-contained groups wrote and performed their own songs. (Thompson, 2019, p. 50)

The emergence of singers and performers who were also songwriters contributed to a shift in focus from publishing or production houses to those who were actually performing on the record. The creative process of songwriting and performer–authorship eventually became ‘central to the musical style of rock in which artists, singer-songwriters and groups write the music and the lyrics that they perform on the record’ (Thompson, 2019, pp. 50–51). Paul McCartney not only learnt the rudiments of his instruments early but had also begun writing songs when he first acquired his guitar. He saw writing as a natural progression from learning to play others’ songs and, when he met John, he discovered that Lennon had too. As McCartney explains: My natural instinct was to sort of try and learn songs that I liked, little blues songs or, y’know, Skiffle songs. But beyond that, I tried to write little things myself and it turns out so did John…so we had just independently, having our guitars, it had struck us as a good idea to try and do something of our own. And they were pretty basic little songs but, when we got together, we used to go round to my house and we’d play these songs. We had that really just before Buddy and then when Buddy came along, the Everlys came along, we took a lot of their style and put them into our style but we had actually started to flirt with songwriting independent of one another, without major influences. Just the fact that we’ve got a guitar, we love this new kind of music and so we were having a go at it. (BBC, 2020)

As well as the wider field of songwriting, Lennon and McCartney had direct contact with the field, via a number of individuals. In the course of their career they were supported by a wide variety of individuals. These included Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, Alan Williams, Derek Taylor, Peter Brown and the engineers who played such a big part in their sound, that

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is Norman Smith, Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott and others. However, their manager Brian Epstein, and Dick James, their publisher, and, importantly, their record producer George Martin were crucial members of the field for Lennon and McCartney. This field interaction afforded The Beatles the possibility of doing what they did. These individuals and all four Beatles themselves who ensured the work was written and recorded, as John Lennon pointed out (The Beatles, 2000, p. 266). As Ringo Starr also pointed out, Brian Epstein ‘really knew his records’ (ibid.). Epstein had recognised their potential when he saw the enthusiasm they generated among their local fans and once he saw their charismatic stage performance for himself he ensured that the decision-makers in the field were on their side. It was his patronage and his contacts in the trade that eventually secured them a deal with EMI/Parlophone. This company was also essential to the emergence of the recorded songs. With their finances taken care of they then had the time and space to exploit the knowledge they had acquired of the space of works, the domain of songwriting. If the structures of the domain and field had not been in place, it is unlikely the innovative work they created would go on to be produced and be added to the space of works, which is the extended domain of songs. This is an essential point as it emphasises the notion that these structures, rather than inhibiting creativity, were all necessary in order for this creative activity to emerge (Wolff, 1981, p. 9). When Dick James set up Northern Songs as a publishing vehicle for Lennon and McCartney, he also shared a publishing partnership with them. As George Martin pointed out, ‘Dick worked like a demon after the record [Please Please Me] was released in January 1963’ (1979, p. 130). He continued to exploit every opportunity for them until he moved to sell Northern Songs. This caused some ongoing problems for the partners but without James’ efforts they may never have been able to continue to write the songs that did as well as they did. The power relationships that played such a critical part in their career, played out between them and those members of the field who had both direct and indirect effects on their ability to write songs, also played out more broadly across the entire field of popular music (McIntyre, 2008). However, it was the more intimate collaborations they had with their record producer, George Martin, which could be seen as vital. It has been

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suggested that ‘as soon as The Beatles signed with his Parlophone division of EMI Records on 9 May 1962, Martin became a fundamental part of the band’s sound and a key influence in their musical development’ (Peel, 2002, p. 21). He was an important and central member of the field and integral to The Beatles’ creative output. As he suggested: Certainly I would manipulate the record to the way I wanted it…and my role was to make sure they made a concise, commercial statement. I would make sure the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes, that it was in the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy, with the right proportion and form. (1979, p. 130)

In the early stages of The Beatles’ time in the recording studio they took part in an almost routinised process of ongoing and almost incessant touring, leavened by writing sessions in hotel bedrooms, cramming recording time into the few breaks they had and releasing albums in time to capitalise on the lucrative Christmas market. George Martin, as he explains: would meet them in the studio to hear a new number. I would perch myself on a high stool, and John and Paul would stand around me with their acoustic guitars and play and sing it – usually without Ringo and George, unless George joined in the harmony. Then I would make suggestions to improve it and we’d try it again. That’s what’s known in the business as a ‘head arrangement’, and we didn’t move out of that pattern until the end of what I call the first era. (ibid., p. 132)

Then things began to change. Initially, as McCartney claimed, ‘we wouldn’t even dare to ask to go into the control room. But as things loosened up, we got invited in and George gave us a bit of the control of the tools’ (The Beatles, 2000, p. 206). This situation was made possible because now they had leverage which came as a result of their performance in the marketplace. This arena of contestation where the creative work was produced and circulated in, was the place that their active audience built their power for them. The Beatles steadily acquired increased levels of social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital. As George Harrison explained, ‘it was obvious that we’d had success. They eased off

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on the schoolteacher approach’ (ibid.). Lennon insisted that ‘you could hear the progression as we learnt about recording and the techniques got refined’ (ibid.).

The Early Period As individual agents, that is, choice-making entities within this creative system, John Lennon and Paul McCartney shared the social and historical context of growing up in postwar Liverpool, a communal love for the same types of music and, importantly, had a common interest in songwriting. Each of these shared elements played a part, to one degree or another, in the development of this creative partnership. Three of the first songs that they wrote before The Beatles were ‘Love Me Do’, ‘One After 909’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. McCartney recalls: I saw her standing there, I had that and I showed him that. And we kind of co-wrote it, I’m not sure if I had it all finished, but I had the idea. But my second line wasn’t great, it was “she was just seventeen, she’d never been a beauty queen” and I said “I’m not sure about this beauty queen thing?” and he said, “No, that’s gotta go” [laughs]. So we’re thinking what can we do? She was just seventeen, een, een, wean, queen, no, no, no, no, no, you know what I mean? It was like “yeh, that’s it, great!” y’know, put that down, write that. Of course, it’s a much better lyric. (SiriusXM, 2020)

McCartney further remembers that they also wrote some songs that they thought weren’t very good: There were a few that were clearly young songwriters who don’t quite know how to do it. There was one called ‘Just Fun’ and it went: “They say that our love is just fun, the day that our friendship begun, well there’s no blue moon that I could see, there’s never been in history, because our love was just fun”…There was a lot of country influence in our early stuff. Eventually we started to write slightly better songs and then enjoyed the process of learning together so much that it really took off. (BBC, 2020)

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In both of these examples, where lyrical ideas are assessed and decisions are made whether a song is good enough, Lennon and McCartney can be seen to perform the function of the field in assessing each other’s contributions. This situation can be viewed first on an individual scale, and at the level of lyric writing, as McCartney employs the domain for his lyrical idea and then assesses it in relation to his internalised understanding of what the field expects. The creative system can also be viewed at the dyad, group or collaborative level where the idea is assessed, rejected or modified by the songwriting team. This idea that creativity can be viewed in a scaled way was dealt with more fully when we unpacked the creation of ‘Paperback Writer’, in some detail, as a recorded song. Here though, it is only necessary to recognise the levels, or scales, at which creativity may occur. It is also pertinent to recognise that Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership was built on friendship and a personal relationship of shared experiences, which was critical in creating an open atmosphere of collaboration where ideas could be honestly assessed, rejected or affirmed, as McCartney explains: John and me had like an electricity just born of the fact that we’d grown up together…So when we started writing together we developed together so we did okay songs, pretty good songs, rather good songs, very good songs, super songs and we were very lucky, it kept going. We ended up knowing each other so well that we could just to and fro’. Y’know, I’d go “it’s getting better all the time” and he’d go “couldn’t get much worse” and you’ve got to know someone to do that! If he was a little bit shy of me or a little bit embarrassed then he’d never throw that line in, but we knew each other so well that it was like, I mean, he knew that I might laugh and say “no way!” which would’ve been okay, but of course I love that, that was John, and that was the great thing that made us good together, is that we were sort of two sides of the same coin. (SiriusXM, 2020)

Sharing the love of the same music, and listening to the same records, helped to cultivate a shared understanding between Lennon and McCartney. This understanding extended to their communal knowledge of the field of songwriting and aided in establishing a collective vision for them of what a songwriting partnership should entail. It

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not only included partnerships like Phil and Don Everly and HollandDozier-Holland, as well as individual writers like Arthur Alexander, Otis Blackwell, Eddie Cochrane and Smokey Robinson, but they were ‘experimenting with genres far beyond the staple diet of Elvis, Chuck, Orbison and The Everlys. Doo wop, pop, soul and country right through to jazz standards and show tunes from Tin Pan Alley giants like Cole Porter, Gershwin and Irving Berlin were all there to be digested’ (Pedler, 2001, p. 33). As well as the writers from Motown and Stax Records (McCartney in The Beatles, 2000, p. 198), The Beatles were also paying attention to the many songwriters within what has been called the Brill Building tradition. Interviewed at McCartney’s newly purchased home in Cavendish Avenue in August 1966, Paul McCartney and John Lennon referred to a particular partnership within the Brill building: McCartney: I still like Goffin and King, ‘cause they’re the type of writers we set out to be. Those were what we wanted to be because they wrote all the big sort of hits at the time… Lennon: And they were all nice as well… McCartney: Always nice, sort of commercial, great, easy-to-sing and everything. Lennon: But not horrible, they were always sort of y’know… McCartney: Never sickly y’know? (Fordyce, 1966).

Situated on 1619 Broadway at 49th street in Manhattan New York, the Brill Building, and the songwriters associated with the publishing houses located there, was celebrated as a place where the writers combined ‘the best of Tin Pan Alley’s melodic and lyrical hallmarks…into R&B to raise the music to new levels of sophistication’ (Erlewine et al., 1995, p. 883). The Brill Building songwriters included the collaborative teams of Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Burt Berns and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Greg Shaw argues that these songwriters ‘gave us several hundred of the best songs that rock has produced’ (1992, p. 151) but, also noted by Lennon and McCartney, were the songwriting practices of these songwriting partnerships. The Brill Building writers were encouraged to ‘make demos of their songs, and take an active role in the production of their records’ (Barber,

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2016, p. 69). This situation brought a particular ‘aesthetic sense’ (Shuker, 2006) to the songwriting process that ‘went beyond simply composing lyrics, a top line melody and underlying chords for sheet music…this group of songwriters were increasingly conscious that they were writing songs that would be heard as a complete recording’ (Thompson, 2019, p. 49). The stylistic, industrial and creative influence of the Brill Building songwriters on popular music, and thus The Beatles, was important (Inglis, 2003, pp. 214–215). However, just like The Beatles and especially Lennon and McCartney, the ‘Brill Building writers cannot be regarded as a group devoting its talents exclusively to any one market or narrow range of artists…. [T]hey had different musical backgrounds, aspirations and opportunities’ (Fitzgerald, 2008, p. 60). Nevertheless, Ian Inglis maintains that ‘there are certain characteristics that allow us to define some commonalities in the approach to and execution of their work’ (2003, p. 217). As he notes ‘while they generally conformed both in their structure (utilizing the AABA form) and their subject matter (personal relationships), they were in other ways quite distinctive, employing relatively complex melodies and innovative harmonic progressions’ (ibid., p. 218). This model of songwriting certainly, like many many others, influenced the themes and lyrical ideas for Lennon and McCartney’s early work. Adhering, as the Brill Building writers did, to the dominant AABA form nearly all mainstream tunes from the early twentieth century conformed to, these writers were tapping into the same tradition Lennon and McCartney did. Brill Building songs typically used the AABA song structure (Scheurer, 2008) consisting of four eight-bar sections (Middleton, 1990). John Braheny (1990) points out that this is: a classic song form with a long and popular history. At one time it was considered the song form. It’s short, concise, melodically seamless and easy to remember. It’s still used in all styles of music, though least in hard rock. It’s also used more frequently in slow or mid-tempo ballads, since its 32 bars (four eight-bar sections) make for a very short song at fast tempos. There are variations which can accommodate faster tempos and the need for more room to tell the story…Hook/title placement is usually

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in the first or last line of the verse, but it can occur in both. In rare cases, the title will also be recapped in the ‘B’ section, though the object is to go to a new place in that section, both musically and lyrically. (Braheny, 1990, p. 57)

The B section is commonly referred to as the ‘middle-eight’ because it’s usually eight bars long and appears in the song to add interest and contrast. McCartney explains that: The second verse is nearly always the killer because you’ve often said it all in the first verse, but by pushing yourself you can actually get a second verse better than your first. It’s always more difficult because you mustn’t repeat yourself, you’ve got to take the idea somewhere else but it has to have the same metre and the same melody. That was often where [John] or I needed help. Then you have a chorus or middle. We used to call everything a middle eight, even if it had thirty-two bars or sixteen bars. George Martin used to point out, ‘Paul, hasn’t this got sixteen bars?’ ‘Yes, George, it has.’ ‘But you’re calling it a middle eight?’ ‘Yes, George, we are.’ ‘I see. Super!’ We called them middle eights, we heard musicians say ‘That’s a nice middle eight’ and we didn’t get the significance of the word ‘eight’. We just learned the word for it and that was what we called it: there were verse choruses and middle eights. (McCartney in Miles, 1997, pp. 176–178)

Timothy Scheurer argues that songs like Goffin and King’s ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’ (1962) are typical of the AABA style, ‘with a repeated opening theme and then a bridge, which often, like many Tin Pan Alley tunes, modulates to a different key’ (Scheurer, 2008, p. 91). Based on an analysis of all of the US Top 40 songs written by a number of the most successful songwriters or songwriting teams between 1963 and 1966 (which include Goffin-King, Barry-Greenwich, Bacharach-David, Smokey Robinson), Jon Fitzgerald found that Lennon and McCartney employed the AABA song form in 76% of their 34 hits (2008, p. 42). In the remaining 24% Lennon and McCartney employed the Verse/Chorus form. Dominic Pedler also makes clear in his extensive and penetrating analysis of The Beatles’ entire catalogue, that the AABA form, seen in songs like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘I Feel

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Fine’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and others, was interspersed with the ABAB form. Pedler notes that Lennon and McCarney songs using this ABAB structure include ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Help’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Let It Be’. Then there are songs that start with the chorus like ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ which exploits a CABAB/CABABCC structure. Pedler notes ‘these C-section intros are different from other chorus openings where a B-section is brought to the top (e.g. “Paperback Writer”, and also from those featuring a dedicated, once heard intro (e.g. “Help”)’ (2003, p. 735). It’s also possible that the C section intro to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ may have been a later tape edit made by George Martin to start the recording, the all-important first impression, with the excitement of this section, rather than being the work of the songwriters themselves.

The Mid Period It’s also tempting to highly systematise the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs, leading to a stereotypical view, with one taking the A section and the other providing the contrasting B section. However, the Playboy Magazine (1986) interview with David Sheff where John Lennon forensically analysed who wrote what for each and every song in the Lennon and McCartney catalogue, and the similar lengthy and detailed exercise McCartney took, song for song, with Barry Miles in 1997, demonstrates who did what on each song. The approach was however quite variable. A few songs, like ‘We Can Work It Out’, did work stereotypically though. As well as employing a contrasting rhythmic delivery of lyrics, Jon Fitzgerald notes ‘We Can Work It Out’: also provides an example of a song which involves a contrasting lyric tone between the A and B sections. The conversational nature of the A section lyrics (“Try to see it my way, do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on?”) contrasts with the more reflective, philosophical tone of the B section lyrics (“Life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting my friend”). (2008, p. 46)

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In his Playboy Magazine (Scheff, 1981) interview Lennon explained that he and McCartney composed the different sections for this particular song and underlined how the lyrics exhibited certain characteristics of each songwriter’s personality: Paul did the first half, I did the middle eight. But you’ve got Paul writing, “We can work it out/We can work it out”- real optimistic, y’know, and me, impatient: “Life is very short and there’s no time/For fussing and fighting”. (1981, p. 191)

Encapsulated in this one example are some of the ways in which Lennon and McCartney employed a different perspective on the same theme and integrated their individual approaches to melody, lyrics and lyrical phrasing to create a distinct contrast between the different sections of this specific song. As well as bringing different approaches to melody and harmony, Lennon and McCartney also had differing attitudes towards the songwriting process overall; a critical element that influenced their songwriting partnership. McCartney, for example, arguably brought a more disciplined mindset to songwriting, exemplified by his efforts to complete ‘Yesterday’ over a period of fifteen months (McIntyre, 2006). This desire to become an accomplished songwriter and all that entailed was very much in evidence during The Beatles’ middle period, which was marked by the albums Rubber Soul and Revolver . During this time McCartney was typically applying what he thought was the ideals, motivation and attitude of a professional songwriter. Lennon on the other hand had less inclination to follow this route: ‘Paul had a tendency to come along and say he’d written his ten songs, let’s record now. And I’d say, well, give us a few days and I’ll knock a few off ’ (Doggett, 2005, p. 93). While Lennon’s motivation may have been less intrinsically motivated than it was extrinsically competitive, the Lennon/McCartney collaboration was far more complex than this brief description implies. Songs like ‘In My Life’ emerged from what can be seen as a complex collaborative process but there is still some contention about who actually did what as they engaged in the songwriting process. Lennon claims he instigated the

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process of writing this song drafting lyrics describing ‘a bus journey from my house on 251 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place that I could remember…I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds – Tram Sheds are the depot just outside Penny Lane’ (Lennon quoted in Scheff, 1981, p. 157). He then revised these initial lyrics to illustrate ‘a more general reflection on memory and contemplation (as he considered the list structure of the song aesthetically uninteresting)’ (Strachan, 2010, p. 51). Like many of their mid-period songs, ‘In My Life’ was put together at John’s house in suburban Weybridge. McCartney takes up the story: I said, “Well, you haven’t got a tune, let me just go and work on it.” And I went down to the half landing where John had a Mellotron, and I sat there and put together a tune based in my mind on Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Songs like “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Tears of a Clown” had really been a big influence…And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyse it. I was obviously working to lyrics. The melody structure is very me. (quoted in Miles, 1997, p. 277)

Later, Ian MacDonald analysed the structure of the song’s melody and decided the ‘angular verticality, spanning an octave in typically wide, and difficult, leaps shows more of his [McCartney’s] touch than Lennon’s’ (MacDonald, 2005, p. 170). He also suggested that ‘the chromatic descent, via the minor subdominant, in the second half of the verse suggests Lennon. Perhaps McCartney did the first half of the verse, Lennon the second’ (ibid.). The suggestion is that the melody was more collaborative than McCartney’s memory of it indicates. In a similar way, Lennon also claimed a far more active part in the creation of ‘Eleanor Rigby’; one of McCartney’s most celebrated works in which: ‘the story element of the song was certainly McCartney’s conception; Lennon’s contribution was to edit the plot, help McCartney decide where the story was headed, and turn the events into characterisation as much as action’ (Doggett, 2005, p. 86). Comparing the list of songs and the claim of who did what on each song, as mentioned prior (Miles, 1997; Sheff, 1981), there were only two songs where Lennon and

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McCartney disagreed about who did what: ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘In My Life’. Although different elements of each song can be attributed, via analysis, to either Lennon or McCartney individually, it’s still important to note that the completed lyrics and melodies for each of their songs were also highly dependent on each songwriters’ interaction within the dyad, duo, group or songwriting team. As Sawyer suggests, group or collaborative creativity is: ‘unpredictable, collective and emergent’ (Sawyer, 2003, p. 79) and even if the song appears to be nearly finished by the individual, there are still numerous possibilities and variations that could emerge. This was the case when Lennon and McCartney brought their influence to bear on each other. It is still the case that the collective, rather than the solo effort, allowed something to emerge that was more than just the sum of the parts each brought to the process. During these interactions Lennon and McCartney, being largely autodidacts, also communicated through commonly understood symbols and signs, gestures and nods, smiles of approval and scribbled notes and so on, as they sat side by side at the piano. If they wrote on guitar as was common while they were touring they mirrored each other’s actions, one left handed, one right handed. As such, in Sawyer’s words, their interaction was ‘semiotically mediated’ (Sawyer, 2003). This last point underlines how critical Lennon and McCartney’s shared cultural context and previous knowledge was in influencing their interactions during the songwriting process. While each certainly contributed something of themselves towards the creative output of the song by using a shared symbol system to communicate those ideas, one defined within the parameters of the cultural and social context of Western popular song, we can see that each of those individual contributions to the duo was constrained by the structures they used to communicate with each other. In this case we can claim that creative individuals, like Lennon and McCartney, needed to have some working knowledge of the underlying structures of their craft in order to be able to make sense of musical or lyrical ideas and/or to contribute new ones. Without this prior knowledge of how things worked, which was gained from an immersion in the space of works, there would have been no possibility of understanding what they had on their hands as the musical

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and lyrical ideas flowed. The affordances these offered were thus critical to their process. To illustrate further, we can argue that the musical styles of popular music they had entered into provided the constraints for what was possible for Lennon and McCartney to contribute as popular songwriters working within these styles. Each creative contribution they made further constrained what was possible, with the next contribution, either at the micro or macro level of their work, doing the same thing. In this way, a distinct creative system can be viewed in operation, with notable interactions occurring in conjunction with both the domain and field. To push this set of ideas further, we can say that the musical style of the song they were working on sat inside the constraints and affordances provided by the possibilities offered within the broader symbol system of popular songwriting, which predisposed this team to select specific aspects of it, such as song form and structure, lyrical themes and so on. With their intimate knowledge of this symbol system, acquired as voracious autodidacts, Lennon and McCartney took this set of structures as a basis to meaningfully interact with each other. Using their prior experiences as a guide, they selected from a finite number of possibilities (Bourdieu, 1996; Toynbee, 2000) presented to them by the conditions of the field and the requirements of the genres in which they worked. To put this more broadly, all songwriters identify or ‘hear’ what is possible ‘according to (a) the perceptual schema of her/his habitus and (b) its point of intersection with the creative field’ (Toynbee, 2000, p. 40). This final point highlights the interdependence of agency and structure, even in improvised situations where there is a shared understanding between the songwriters of the expectations of the cultural and social context, and the symbol systems that operate within it, which both constrains and enables meaningful collaboration. As they were writing together, Lennon and McCartney exhibited all the traits and characteristics of a functioning collaborative creative system.

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The Later Period It was the Revolver (1966) album which proved instrumental in their move directly and permanently into the recording studio, as opposed to touring being their predominant form of musical expression. On this album they moved steadily away from traditional songcraft and, like Lieber and Stoller before them, their attention began to focus more squarely on the recording of the song rather than simply the lyric and melody of the song itself. As Paul Thompson explains: The Beatles had played their final concert at Candlestick Park in August 1966 and this allowed them to pursue record-making without the added expectation that it would be performed live in front of an audience…In creating music that was meant to be listened to as a recorded work (rather than a representation of a live performance), The Beatles needed to collaborate more directly with studio technicians and studio engineers to utilize their expertise and knowledge of studio technologies. (Thompson, 2019, p. 2)

After the debacle and life-threatening final tour of the USA, one mired in controversy as a direct result of Lennon’s statement on Jesus Christ that had so angered the religious right in America, The Beatles went on holiday from the collective entity they had worked incredibly hard to create. With ‘their masterpiece [Revolver] in the shops, The Beatles went their separate ways for a season, with each (except for Ringo) trying his hand at something new in a different far flung corner of the globe’ (Schaffner, 1978, p. 64). Lennon cut his hair, the symbol of Beatles unity, as he took on a role in the movie How I Won the War directed by the same director that had done the breakthrough A Hard Day’s Night film. The film was being shot in Spain. As well as being a break from touring this was an opportunity that served to convince Lennon ‘there was an independent life away from the Beatle-faced Hydra’ (Doggett, 2005, p. 93). Lennon had taken a portable tape recorder with him to Spain, offering only minimal sound quality. Surprisingly, despite the amount of free time he had at his disposal, he seems only to have written the bare bones of

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one song—although it proved to be one of the most important that he would ever compose. The early versions of this song were captured on this portable tape recorder where he performed (suitably enough) on a Spanish acoustic guitar, Lennon laid down the basic structure for the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ verse—though at the moment the song went by the title of ‘It’s Not Too Bad’, as he had not immediately made the connection with the Liverpool landmark from his childhood. Elements of the finished record were already recognisable, however: ‘not just the melody, but striking phrases such as “no one I think is in my tree” and “you can’t tune in”. He eventually taped six different versions of “It’s Not Too Bad” in Spain, slowly filling out the structure and content of the song’ (ibid., p. 92). For his part McCartney: lingered in London, composing a lush orchestral score (arranged by George Martin) for another film, the Boulton Brothers’ The Family Way. The generally overlooked soundtrack LP might be considered the first Beatle solo release. In his spare time he read widely, checked out “classical” composers from Bach to Stockhausen, took music lessons, and began dabbling in film-making. Then he embarked on a Kenyan safari with Jane Asher, a well-heeled young actress with a career of her own...under her genteel influence Paul was developing into the most suave and sophisticated Beatle, becoming both a social butterfly and a culture vulture. Paul got into the habit of checking out most of London’s theatrical productions and art exhibits. (Schaffner, 1978, pp. 64–65)

He noted at the time that ‘I vaguely mind anyone knowing anything I don’t know’ (quoted in Schaffner, 1978, p. 65). He told the London Evening Standard that ‘I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things that I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I must know’ (ibid.). The Beatles eventually regrouped at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on 24 November 1966 to begin recording what would become Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . McCartney had the idea for the latter album while on a flight back from the USA. For the first time, different versions of a song, in this case ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, were recorded with different approaches, different keys and different

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tempos. For Lennon, Take 7 was preferable. This version had a minimal arrangement but included what was to become McCartney’s distinctive Mellotron introduction. Listening repeatedly to this version, Lennon remained unhappy with it. He now wanted a full band arrangement as well as an orchestral performance. George Martin dutifully scored this version, but Lennon was still dissatisfied. He thought that both versions might be edited together. This presented a few problems. The two versions were at different tempos and in a different keys. George Martin and Geoff Emerick, the young and innovative engineer who had begun working with them, were challenged until they realised that an edit of the two versions was indeed possible by slowing down one version and speeding up the other. They found a precise edit point and cut and pasted both versions together. This gave an extra aural characteristic to the song complementing its dreamlike and uncertain lyrics. It is thus obvious that this was indeed a creative contribution to what was in fact a highly collaborative work (for an extended discussion see Thompson, 2019). Across their early and mid-period all four Beatles had come to rely heavily on each other. Creative suggestions were given and taken and the companionship they brought to the team was emotionally necessary. But now they started to drift apart. While they were writing what would become the Sgt. Pepper album, each partner was acquiring a distinct set of musical inputs that were on offer to them from a rapidly expanding domain of music. George Harrison had earlier been instrumental in introducing his friends to Indian music and also the Indian and Tibetan philosophies he found so convincing in his own personal life. His experimental Electronic Sounds album ‘put the possibilities of the Moog synthesizer in front of a huge new audience’ (Peel, 2002, p. 25). McCartney, on the other hand, lived a quick walk away from EMI’s Abbey Road studios in St John’s Wood. He introduced Lennon to the London art scene after becoming immersed in it himself through his connections with the Asher family. He attended exhibitions and first nights with Jane Asher and contributed, through his friend Barry Miles, to ventures like the underground paper the International Times. He was also instrumental in the emergence of ‘Carnival of Light’ which was described as an ‘unpredictable sound collage explosion’ (Peel, 2002,

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p. 46). He had been commissioned to produce a piece for a Roundhouse ‘happening’ but this avant-garde piece remains officially unreleased as a recording. It is often cited as a prequel to Lennon’s ‘Revolution 9’ from the White Album (ibid.). At this time McCartney was open to any experimental approach to making music. His ‘vegetable percussion’ parts on the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album are such an example. His mentor George Martin, had deep connections with radical experiments in tape looping and editing. He had, after all, recorded The Goons and was used to arranging music for orchestras in an avant-garde way. McCartney was also intrigued by the experiments in sound coming from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. McCartney was thus increasingly becoming entrenched in the dynamic art scene in London. Many of the ideas he encountered there surfaced in his musical input to ‘She Said, She Said’ off Revolver . Much of this surfaced in the tour de force that was ‘A Day in the Life; the penultimate track off the new Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Demonstrating how far Lennon and McCartney had drifted apart as writers, the song came into existence as two distinct pieces, stitched together. Lennon’s contribution formed the verses and chorus while McCartney’s contribution formed the middle eight. McCartney suggested the climbing orchestral crescendo that links these two almost distinct songs together. John Lennon, who was a long-time listener to BBC radio’s Goon shows, as were they all, suggested the random inclusion of the BBC broadcast of King Lear on ‘I Am the Walrus’. McCartney’s future collaborator and wife, photographer Linda Eastman, came into his life at this point of time. Lennon and McCartney were growing up and moving away from each other. Their competitive natures only appeared to intensify though. Their songwriting at this time seemed formed by this extrinsic motivator. Each would compete to see whose song would become the A side of each succeeding single release. Lennon had more credit on hit singles during the early part of their career but McCartney’s songs were steadily supplanting Lennon’s as hit single material. Lennon typically, and purposefully, ignored what was going on or dissembled as much as he could. This situation was very apparent during the recording of what became known as the White Album although Ken Scott, along with fellow engineers Chris Thomas

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and John Smith, remembered that the sessions, despite the developing acrimony, were still fun: Yes, there were the occasional eruptions but not very often…George [Martin] got uptight because they [The Beatles] weren’t listening to him anywhere near as much. It was their album, not his. He went on vacation, he went to the Greek islands and Chris [Thomas], a much younger producer came in, and his first production was the Beatles!’ (personal interview, 2021)

Along with Yoko Ono, who had appeared in Lennon’s life via his and McCartney’s art connections, and George Harrison, Lennon ensured their avant-garde sound collage ‘Revolution 9’ would make it onto the White Album. He also wrote the schmaltzy ‘Good Night’ for Ringo to sing. Yoko Ono was a performance artist based in New York. She was instrumental in rekindling Lennon’s faith in himself as an artist. It was not a coincidence that Lennon assumed the truth of the Romantic myth of the artist/genius model (for further discussion see Howe, 1999; Weisberg, 1993). He appeared to adopt it unproblematically and seemed to build his life around these myths. For example, he declared to Jann Wenner after The Beatles’ dissolution, when Wenner asked if he was a genius: ‘Yes. If there’s such a thing as one, I am one’ (Wenner, 1971). He was increasingly seeing himself as ‘an artist’ (ibid.), as Ono was wont to remind him he was. Doggett suggests it was Yoko On who: ‘deserves credit for altering the way in which John saw the world’ (2005, p. 210). Nonetheless his art school experience meant he was already primed to move in that direction. Despite the problems associated with the Romantic view, rock music had borrowed extensively from its connections with British art schools. Lennon was a product of this system which was attuned to Romantic philosophy and had emphasised ‘the autonomy of the artist, an ideal of honesty, upright behaviour and directness’ (Wicke, 1990, pp. 98–99). This Romantic ideal was taken on more readily by Lennon than it was by McCartney. He was not predisposed to but into the myth of the Romantic Artist. His upbringing and schooling saw him maintain a lifelong belief in professionally focused songwriting.

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His attitude was revealed earlier in his tightly constructed lyrics for ‘Paperback Writer’. As Leslie (2020) declares; If we see him as ordinary that’s partly his own doing. He has never cultivated the mystique of genius. Quite the opposite: there are few rock stars who have made such an effort to be ordinary. He lives the multipropertied life of a rich rock star, but he has stayed closer to normal life than most mega-celebrities. (Leslie, 2020)

McCartney’s disciplined approach to completing tasks was also often preceded by an abandoned, open-minded and playful attitude to creation, as was Lennon’s. The balance may have been slightly different but each was capable of bringing a complex personality to bear on their work. In this regard Csikszentmihalyi contends that creative individuals appear to tend towards complexity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 57). and that creative personalities exhibit often contradictory extremes that are present in all individuals but have been polarised in most (ibid.). This description does not correlate well with the author/genius model and, despite the later dismissal of the idea of genius figures by the research world (Howe, 1999; Sawyer, 2006; Weisberg, 1993), Lennon had nonetheless absorbed the myth of the Romantic artist, which left the door open for further changes in their relationship. While Lennon has been the subject of endless psychological analysis, McCartney has received far less attention, partly because he is generally uninterested in self-examination, or in being examined. Lennon fits our template for genius, but the thing about genius is that it has no template…We now understand, if we ever doubted it, that there were at least two creative geniuses in the Beatles…Lennon was clearly the driving force of the band’s early years, but his younger partner gathered momentum quickly and accelerated at warp speed once the band’s success was established. He wrote Yesterday in 1964 and kept it in his back pocket for a year, despite intense pressure to generate material, mainly because he couldn’t quite believe he was capable of writing such a classic-sounding melody. Once he realised that he had done just that, it must have been like being solemnly informed he was a

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superhero. From 1964 to 1968 McCartney’s development curve—musically, lyrically, artistically—is almost vertical, a rocket taking off. (Leslie, 2020). Engineer Ken Scott joined the White Album later on in the project and remembers that McCartney initially approached the White Album with the same mindset as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band : The White Album was a strange time for the relationship because Pepper was Paul’s album and the other three wanted something very different. They wanted more back to the roots, back to the rock’n’roll and that kind of thing...They got it eventually, it was just in the very beginning I don’t think he [Paul] got it. I think he realised that “no, this is going to be a different album so let’s get into the right frame of mind for the album it’s going to be”. (personal interview, 2021)

In preparing for the White Album project, McCartney along with the rest of the Beatles, did something they hadn’t done up until that point. They recorded a series of demo versions together at George Harrison’s Bungalow in the leafy suburb of Esher in Surrey. Having written a number of songs on retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi earlier in 1968, the Beatles had planned to rehearse some of these new songs but demo’d them in George’s home studio in late May instead. The ‘Esher Demos’ have now been commercially released as part of the deluxe 50th Anniversary reissue of The White Album, taken from Harrison’s original 4-track master tapes. George Martin’s son, Giles, who was commissioned to remix the 50th Anniversary White Album explained: ‘To me, it is like the Beatles unplugged. These are demos but they are good: they doubletracked themselves’. (quoted in Beech, 2018). Although the Beatles had individually created their own demos at home, this was the first time that the Beatles had demo’d their songs together and engineer Ken Scott, who found the tapes when working on George Harrison’s solo album All Things Must Pass remembers: The interesting thing was that I didn’t know that they’d demo’d everything because they came in as if they were teaching the song to everyone else. And so the fact that they’d already played the songs and recorded them, that blew my mind when I discovered those tapes. (personal interview, 2021)

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The Closing Period Once John Lennon began ‘devoting the bulk of his energies to his collaboration with Yoko, Paul once again assumed the role of leader’ (Henke, 2003, p. 38). McCartney, as had occurred after Brian Epstein had died when the Magical Mystery Tour concept was proposed by him as a way of keeping them focused, suggested they should go back to work. Without Epstein as their manager, ‘it was McCartney who became the driving force of the band. From 1968 onwards, he was virtually dragging the group along by sheer force of will as Harrison lost interest and Lennon became mired in drugs’ (Leslie, 2020). The Beatles despite the problems, still appeared to be a fully functioning creative entity in the studio though. Nonetheless, the business side of The Beatles was stirring up more acrimony. They had been advised they needed to do something to avoid the crippling British tax laws they were faced with. They started their own record label, and a number of other ventures, built around what was in effect a subsidiary of EMI, Apple Corp. Around the same time Lennon and McCartney lost control of Northern Songs, their own publishing company. It was with these things going on that they commenced the Let it Be project. Lennon contributed ‘Across the Universe’ which he had written when they were in India and McCartney seemed to be exorcising his concerns in songs such as ‘Get Back’, ‘Let it Be’ and ‘Long And Winding Road’. Lennon was not entirely satisfied and began work on a song called ‘Gimme Some Truth’ which eventually appeared later on his solo album Imagine. He had the title and a working melody but: the words had yet to come, as had all of the middle section beyond the phrase “money for rope” – and as the tapes made by the film crew prove, that entire sequence was composed by McCartney, not Lennon, though he was never credited for the contribution. (Doggett, 2005, p. 151)

By this time George Harrison’s faith in Eastern mysticism saw him write songs like ‘I Me Mine’, a short critique of egocentricity, which became one of his contributions to the Let it Be sessions. The Beatles’ time in the studio was becoming increasingly difficult (Emerick, 2006). As Ringo

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Starr had done before him, Harrison walked out of the sessions leaving the band as he did so. Doggett argues that this wasn’t: ‘as it suited him to believe years later, because of the argument with McCartney that was shown in the Let it Be film’ (2005, p. 151). There had been a distinct lack of respect given to his songs and the fact Lennon had treated him cruelly. Each morning: ‘Harrison arrived with promising new material. And every morning Lennon either mocked him or ignored him’ (ibid.). Harrison left and Lennon wasted no time in suggesting Harrison’s best friend Eric Clapton would be a good replacement. After thinking things through Harrison returned but bought their friend Billy Preston in with him to help establish a different mood as they were recording. The tapes from the Let it Be sessions were mixed by Glyn Johns but Phil Spector was later employed to produce them further. Unknown to Paul McCartney, Spector went about editing vocal tracks, adding choirs and strings in a style which McCartney abhorred. The atmosphere in the band was not at all pleasant at this time. George Martin by this time had also had enough of the acrimony and had quietly walked away from his role as producer. Surprisingly, at least to Martin, McCartney asked him to produce one more album with them. This final Beatles’ album was to be called Abbey Road (1969). McCartney followed Martin’s lead and set about creating a more orchestrally focused series of pieces for side two of the new album. His appropriation of lyrics from ‘Golden Slumbers’ built out of Thomas Dekker’s late sixteenth-century prose was typical (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 178). Harrison by this time was contributing masterful songs; ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ became his breakthrough pieces. Starr escaped into ‘Octopus’s Garden’ and Lennon went back to his extensive knowledge of Chuck Berry for the album opener ‘Come Together’. He also inverted the chords from Beethoven’s piano sonata in C#m, Opus 27, No. 2 (Moonlight Sonata) producing, with the help of his friends on harmony, the beatific ‘Because’ (ibid., p. 184). Unlike their early period of writing songs, Lennon and McCartney were in most cases bringing almost finished lyrics and melody for the rest of the band to begin arranging in the recording studio. Lennon and McCartney were still performing the function of the field in assessing and rejecting lyrics, verses, choruses or middle eights, but this extended

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to assessing or rejecting musical parts, musical embellishments and the overall arrangement. Because most of these songs had near-finished lyrics and melody, their creative partnership involved highlighting where their songwriting had become derivative rather than creative. In the same way that McCartney asked Lennon if he recognized the melody for Yesterday, McCartney also performed this field function for Lennon during the Abbey Road sessions’. He recalls: When John brought in “Come Together” it was really a Chuck Berry rip off and I had to sort of say to him “Woah, hang on that’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’!” and he said “Oh, yeh it is actually” so I had to like y’know calm him down and sort of say we’re going to do this a bit different and so we did like the arrangement it is now. The point I’m making is that I knew most of the songs he knew so I could just say “that’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ !” and he wouldn’t go “what do you mean?”…So, that was a very good governing factor, we could do that with each others’ and we could say “that’s a bit like that song” because we knew everything in common. (SiriusXM, 2020)

At this time Lennon and McCartney once again put aside their concerns and worked happily together on ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’. They also worked on the novelty song ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’. Neither of these songs was included on Abbey Road which was finalised over a six week period. On its release it received critical acclaim as well as reaching number one in both the USA and the UK. However, the partnership was seriously unravelling: Again John’s contributions were somewhat minimal, and in subsequent interviews he tended to dismiss the record, particularly what he called the “pop opera” on side two of the album. “I think it’s junk,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was just bits of songs thrown together.”…By that point, however, The Beatles had ceased to exist. (Henke, 2003, p. 39)

John Lennon, in one of their many business meetings, announced that he ‘wanted a divorce’ (ibid.). Allen Klein, their new manager, was alarmed and convinced Lennon to hold off on making an announcement until he had completed renegotiations for their contract with EMI Records.

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Lennon agreed. McCartney, however, had been very reluctant to accept Klein as The Beatles’ manager, and had slated his own solo album, his first, to come out, as it turned out, at the same time as The Beatles’ Let It Be. Lennon was annoyed and let the press know that the group had disbanded. But such is the enduring influence of McCartney’s creative partnership with Lennon, he noted in a recent interview to mark John Lennon’s 80th birthday that: ever since the Beatles broke up and we didn’t write together, or even record together, I think each one of us referenced the others when we’re writing stuff. I often do it, y’know, I’m writing something and I go “oh God, this is bloody awful”, y’know then I think “what would John say?” and he’d go “yeh, you’re right, it’s bloody awful, you gotta change it” and so, I’ll change it. (BBC 2020)

McCartney explains that this is because they grew to know each other and developed a shared understanding: If you know someone that long from your early teenage years to your late twenties, that’s an awful long time to be collaborating with someone and you grow to know each other and even when you’re apart, you’re still thinking about each other, you’re still referencing each other. (ibid.)

McCartney’s explanation here illustrates the complexity of the creative system they were both involved in and the ways in which it interacts with, and between, the creative agents within the system and the partnership that Lennon and McCartney had forged together. They were both influencing, and had been influenced by, each other at the same time. In this way McCartney had internalised Lennon’s criteria for selection, which has become part of his internalised criteria for selection by the field, both at the point of ideation and when the creative idea is externalised.

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Conclusion In focusing on the creative partnership of Lennon and McCartney we have shifted the focus from the individual in the system to the possibility of representing a group of individuals in the system. Their creative contributions within the process of writing a song are effectively dispersed within and across a collaborative milieu, a process sometimes defined as ‘distributed creativity’ (Gl˘aveanu, 2014; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). In this way, as Clydesdale argues, The Beatles ‘should not be seen as creative geniuses’ (2006, pp. 129–139). Instead we should see them socioculturally situated individuals working within a spatiotemporally located set of systems where what they ‘achieved was a function of their working team and the relationships between them’ (Clydesdale, 2006, p. 134), as well as a function of the knowledge systems that pre-existed them and which they had become immersed in. In conclusion, we can say that for Lennon and McCartney, their creative activity took place within the set of interactions they had learned through their immersion in the standards and traditions that formed the structured domain of musical knowledge they became immersed in. At the same time the many people who were part of the arena of social contestation that is the field of popular music, which included their publishers, managers, record producer, engineers and fellow musicians, as well as their counterparts in the songwriting process all contributed to this creative system. The evidence set out above tells us that Lennon and McCartney internalised a domain of knowledge presented to them by the space of works and they took their innovative rearrangements of that work to the social world, the field, that was formed around the symbol system they were immersed within. This was a non-linear process they were engaged in as they learned to create and accrue the necessary social, symbolic, cultural and financial capital necessary to their success. Within this partnership they assessed lyrical ideas, made decisions about whether a song was good enough and, in doing so, Lennon and McCartney performed the function of the field in assessing their contributions. Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership was built on a friendship and a personal relationship of shared experiences, which was critical in creating an open atmosphere of collaboration where

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ideas could be openly assessed, rejected or affirmed. In writing songs together, they employed their own idiosyncratic approaches, each with a different perspective on the same theme and integrating their individual approaches to melody, lyrics and lyrical phrasing to create a distinct contrast between the different sections of the song. Although different elements of each song can be attributed to either Lennon or McCartney, the completed lyrics and melodies for each of their songs are still influenced by the interaction between them as seen in the emergent nature of group creativity (Sawyer, 2003, p. 79). Such is the complexity of the creative system and the ways in which it interacts with, and between, the creative agents within the system, Lennon and McCartney were both influencing, and had been influenced by, each other at the same time. They had internalised each other’s criteria for selection to a point where they could assume what the other’s reaction might be to a creative idea. Many structural factors contributed to the creative work they produced. It is still worth noting, however, that Lennon and McCartney were two necessarily important agents, decisionmaking entities, who brought their unique but shared backgrounds into play in the collaborative system they were deeply involved in. As choice-making agents within this creative system, they were enabled and constrained by the structures, the domain and field, they interacted with. It was within this structured arena of social contestation that they produced some of its best work. In this case creativity must be seen, as Csikszentmihalyi (1988) had suggested, as far more Copernican, that is systemic, than it is Ptolemaic, or person-centred. This situation can be seen in some detail in the way McCartney approached his minimally explored work as a creative record producer.

References ATV Television. (1973, April 16). James Paul McCartney TV Special. Broadcast from the ATV Television Studios, Elstree. Barber, S. (2016). Will you still love me tomorrow: The Brill Building and the creative labour of the professional songwriter. In J. Williams & K. Williams

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(Eds.), The Cambridge companion to the singer-songwriter (pp. 67–77). Cambridge University Press. Bailin, S. (1988). Achieving extraordinary ends: An essay on creativity. Kluwer Academic. Bastick, T. (1982). Intuition: How we think and act. Wiley. BBC. (2020). Paul McCartney—Full interview with Sean Ono Lennon (BBC Sounds Exclusive). John Lennon at 80. Broadcast 4 October 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t4mx9 and https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=iCe8fdBeTCs. Accessed 12 December 2020. Beatles, T. (2000). The Beatles: Anthology. Chronicle Books. Beech, M. (2018). Beatles history rewritten as white album tapes reveal secrets. https://www.forbes.com/sites/markbeech/2018/09/24/beatles-history-rew ritten-as-white-album-tapes-reveal-secrets/?sh=61d63f351cb3. Accessed 2 November 2020. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Field of cultural production (R. Johnson, Ed.). Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Polity. Braheny, J. (1990). The craft and business of song writing. Omnibus Press. Clydesdale, G. (2006). Creativity and competition: The Beatles. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 129–139. Coleman, R. (1995). McCartney: Yesterday and today. Boxtree. Collins, M., & Amabile, T. (1999). Motivation and creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 297–312). Cambridge University Press. Connolly, R. (1981). John Lennon: 1940–1980. Fontana Paperbacks. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture and person: A systems view of creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives (pp. 325–329). Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 313– 335). Cambridge University Press. Doggett, L. (2005). The art and music of John Lennon. Omnibus Press.

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Emerick, G. (2006). Here, there and everywhere: My life recording the music of the Beatles. Gotham Books. Erlewine, M., Thomas, S., & Woodstra, C. (1995). All music guide to rock: The definitive guide to rock, pop and soul . Miller Freeman Books. Fitzgerald, J. (2008). Lennon-McCartney and the “middle eight.” Popular Music and Society, 20 (4), 41–52. Fordyce, K. (1966). John Lennon and Paul McCartney interviewed by Keith Fordyce for BBC Radio. Originally aired in August 1966. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=6sJ0qb1TwIs. Accessed 12 December 2020. Frith, S. (1978). The sociology of rock. Constable. Gl˘aveanu, V. (2010). Principles for a cultural psychology of creativity. Culture and Psychology, 16 (2), 147–163. Gl˘aveanu, V. (2014). Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual . Springer. Henke, J. (2003). Lennon legend . Chronicle Books. Hennessey, B. (2003). The social psychology of creativity. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Psychology, 47 , 253–271. Hennessey, B. (2017). Taking a systems view of creativity: On the right path toward understanding. Journal of Creative Behaviour, 51(4), 341–344. Hennessy, B., & Amabile, T. (2010). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 569–598. Howe, M. (1999). Genius explained . Cambridge University Press. Inglis, I. (2003). “Some kind of wonderful”: The creative legacy of the Brill Building. American Music, 21(2), 214–235. Keogh, P. (2010). Elvis Presley: The man, the life, the legend . Atria Books. Kerrigan, S., & McIntyre, P. (2010). “The creative treatment of actuality”: Rationalising and reconceptualising the notion of creativity for documentary practice. Journal of Media Practice, 11(2), 111–130. Leslie, I. (2020, December 8). 64 reasons to celebrate Paul McCartney. The Ruffian. https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paulmccartney. Accessed 29 January 2021. Lennon, J. (1971). Interview with Howard Smith. WPLJ-FM. Broadcast 10 September 1971. New York. http://urthepob.byethost24.com/pob/pob03. html?i=1. Accessed 11 January 2021. Lewisohn, M. (1988). The complete Beatles recording sessions: The official story of the Abbey Road years. Hamlyn. Lewisohn, M. (1992). The complete Beatles Chronicle. Pyramid Books. Lewisohn, M. (2013). Tune in—The Beatles: All these years. Little Brown.

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MacDonald, I. (2005). Revolution in the head: The Beatles’ records and the sixties (2nd ed.). Pimlico. Martin, G. (1979). All you need is ears. St. Martin’s Press. Martin, G. (1994). Summer of love: The making of Sgt. Pepper. Macmillan Press. McIntyre, P. (2006). Paul McCartney and the creation of yesterday: The systems model in operation. Popular Music, 25 (2), 201–219. McIntyre, P. (2008a). The systems model of creativity: Analyzing the distribution of power in the studio. Journal of the Art of Record Production, Issue 4: Supplement to ARP08, The Peer—Reviewed Proceedings of the 2008 Art of Record Production Conference, 4, 2008. McIntyre, P. (2009, July 8–10). Rethinking communication, creativity and cultural production: Outlining issues for media practice. In T. Flew (Ed.), Communication, creativity and global citizenship: Refereed proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand communications association annual conference (p. 161). QUT. McIntyre, P. (2010). Songwriting, creativity and the music industry. In R. Sickels (Ed.), The business of entertainment: The music industry (Vol. 2, pp. 1–20). Praeger. Middleton, R. (1990). Studying popular music. Open University Press. Miles, B. (1997). Paul McCartney: Many years from now. Secker & Warburg. Montuori, A. (2011). Systems approach. In M. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 414–421). Academic Press. Negus, K., & Pickering, M. (2004). Creativity, communication and cultural value. Sage. Nijstad, B., & Stroebe, W. (2006). How the group affects the mind: a cognitive model of idea generation in groups. Personal and Social Psychological Review, 10 (3), 186–213. Paulus, P., & Brown, V. (2003). Ideational creativity in groups: Lessons from research on brainstorming. In P. Paulus & B. Nijstad (Eds.), Group creativity: Innovation through collaboration (pp. 110–136). Oxford University Press. Paulus, P., & Nijstad, B. (2003). Group creativity: An introduction. In P. Paulus & B. Nijstad (Eds.), Group creativity: Innovation through collaboration (pp. 3–11). Oxford University Press. Pedler, D. (2001). The songwriting roots of the Beatles. In S. Rowley (Ed.), Total guitar. Future Publishing). Peel, I. (2002). The unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the avant-garde. Reynolds & Hearn. Pedler, D. (2003). The songwriting secrets of the Beatles. London: Omnibus Press. Runco, M., & Pritzker, S. (2006). Encyclopedia of creativity. Academic Press.

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Salewicz, C. (1986). McCartney: The definitive biography. Futura. Sarmiento, J., & Stahl, G. (2008, June 23–28). Extending the joint problem space: Time and sequence as essential features of knowledge building. In Cre8ing a learning world: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for the Learning Sciences, ICLS ‘08, Utrecht, The Netherlands, V2. Sawyer, K. (2003). Group creativity: Music, theater, collaboration. Routledge. Sawyer, K. (2006). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford University Press. Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Sawyer, K., & DeZutter, S. (2009). Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 81–92. Schaffner, N. (1978). The Beatles forever. McGraw Hill. Scheurer, T. (2008). The beatles, the Brill building, and the persistence of Tin Pan Alley in the age of rock. Popular Music and Society, 20 (4), 89–102. Scheff, D. (1981). The playboy interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Putnam Publishing Group. Shaw, G. (1992). Brill building pop. In A. DeCurtis & J. Henke (Eds.), The Rolling Stone illustrated history of rock roll (pp. 143–152). Random House. Shuker, R. (1994). Understanding popular music. Routledge. Shuker, R. (2006). Understanding popular music (2nd ed.). Routledge. Stillinger, J. (1981). Multiple authorship and the myth of solitary genius. Oxford University Press. Strachan, R. (2010). From sea shanties to cosmic Scousers: The city, memory and representation in Liverpool’s popular music. In R. Strachan & M. Leonard (Eds.), The beat goes on: Liverpool, popular music and the changing city (pp. 43–64). Liverpool University Press. SiriusXM. (2020). Paul McCartney interview with Alec Baldwin. SiriusXM . Broadcast 14 October 2020. https://blog.siriusxm.com/hear-paul-mccart ney-alec-baldwin-honor-john-lennons-80th-birthday-plus-more-exclusivespecials-on-the-beatles-channel/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ vegVPcjN7Q. Accessed 1 October 2020. Thompson, P. (2019). Creativity in the recording studio: Alternative takes. Palgrave Macmillan. Toynbee, J. (2000). Making popular music: Musicians, creativity and institutions. Arnold. Urish, B., & Bielen, K. (2007). The words and music of John Lennon. Praeger. Wallas, G. (1945). The art of thought. C.A. Watts & Co.

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6 Paul McCartney as Record Producer: Complete Immersion in the Creative System

So far, we’ve explored Paul McCartney’s creative practice as a musician, as a performer and as a songwriter. McCartney is a figure often viewed romantically as a ‘genius’ in the recording studio and the following chapter explores his often-overlooked creative practices as a record producer. We examine how he took the knowledge and experience he had acquired in the various areas he worked in—musicianship, singing, songwriting, studio practice, promotion—and applied it to the work of others and, then, eventually to his own solo recorded work. Paul McCartney’s process of record production can be seen as a considered and judicious set of applied practical procedures, whether it was working with Mary Hopkin, the Black Dyke Mills Band, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Badfinger or his own numerous productions postBeatles including works such as ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and ‘Band on the Run’. We argue McCartney’s creative practices stem from a dynamic system of interactions of personnel in the recording studio that includes the artists, engineers and McCartney himself. This process involves, of course, the social dynamics and power relationships that function in the studio on a larger scale than that of the single individual. This view © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_6

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moves well beyond conceptualising aspects of the creative process in the recording studio as inexplicable or as a form of idealised Romanticism. Instead it can be seen that McCartney’s experiences of music listening, collaborative performance and composition all contributed to his exceptional songs as well as his musical direction on stage and in particular his little-recognised role as a record producer. At times it is difficult to distinguish any of these from his fundamental musicianship. Where McCartney the musician ends and McCartney the producer begins is difficult to discern. He typifies what Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding (2011) call the ‘musician-producer’ but even assigning this description to McCartney is problematic as his engineering skills developed as the need arose. Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding argue that: ‘whether their skills develop in either area [engineering or producing], it is common for the quality focus of the producer to be honed in either on the music and the musician or more biased to the engineering’ (2011, pp. 7–8). As we will see in this chapter, McCartney’s record production focus is on the music rather than biased towards audio engineering and the evidence also suggests that he developed as a producer through a process of mentorship, a thorough immersion into studio practices, as well as the absorption of many informal musical lessons as a prolific songwriter (McIntyre 2006, pp. 204–205). McIntyre argues that: ‘Access to this lengthy song tradition through the wealth of material he had come into contact with… afforded McCartney a deep immersion in the domain of the popular music of the day’ (ibid., p. 205). It was through an extended knowledge of these song traditions, the accumulated heritage of the field of works, that he developed an ear for what would work and what wouldn’t in a recording. McCartney’s immersion into the domain of record production took place as he developed as a musician acquiring skills in arranging and production; skills he would use again and again as a musically focused record producer, whether he was working in London, New York, Lagos, New Orleans, Nashville or in the Virgin Islands. Wherever he was, he was part ‘arranger, musician, recording engineer, songwriter, and A&R rep’ (Watson, 2007, p. 166) who also relied on a field of critical experts that made up the field of record production for him. This field included fellow record producers,

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engineers and certainly other musicians, all of whom had some understanding of the knowledge system they shared, making judgements about the novelty and appropriateness of the variations McCartney presented to them. However, no single factor that has been previously discussed is, in itself, sufficient to fully explain McCartney’s creative practice as a record producer. It is more likely a combination of factors that disposed him to operate as a record producer, one who was intrigued by the possibilities that this rich and creative musical world afforded him. As such McCartney’s collaborative and creative endeavours in the recording studio, like his songwriting and his musicianship, can be seen to stand in contrast to the Romantic view of creativity.

Creativity and Record Producers Although Keith Negus and Michael Pickering have argued that a ‘critical interrogation of creativity should be central to any understanding of musical production’ (in Hesmondhalgh & Negus, 2002, p. 147), the scholarly research that focuses specifically on musical production and its relationship to creativity is somewhat limited (Shuker, 1994, p. 99). There have been a few notable attempts to do just this though. For example, as part of his book Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (1996), Negus grasped that many music creators were ‘not unique individual geniuses but synthesists working at the fuzzy boundaries where generic codes and stylistic conventions meet and create new musical patterns’ (Negus, 1996, p. 146). Simon Frith, eschewed the idea that creativity was deeply connected to an external muse, realising that ‘skill and creativity are the result of training and practice’ (1978, p. 75). He argued in the latter part of his work, though not precisely in these terms, that creative individuals need to be immersed in the structures of a domain of knowledge in order to be creative. Peter Wicke, in his book Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology (1990) also denied the Romantic view of creativity. He argued that this view enabled the ‘criticism of commerce, which was seen as the opposite of creativity and communication’ (1990, pp. 98–99). However, in making an argument

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that contributed to a refutation of the art versus commerce dichotomy, Wicke still pursued the idea that the constraints of the culture industry, as set out by theorists such as Theodor Adorno, were problematic for creativity and actually prevented it developing. However, working from a sociological perspective, Richard Peterson argued that structures such as the music industry and the way it is organised have a significant effect on the form and content of musical products and are critically important in supporting their development: These [structures] are primarily social in character and he lists them as law, technology, industry structure, organization structure, market and occupational careers (Peterson, 1985, p. 64). He argues that “the nature and content of symbolic products are shaped by the social, legal and economic milieu in which they are created, edited, manufactured, marketed, purchased and evaluated” (ibid., p. 46) in an increasingly complex network of influence (ibid., p. 45). (McIntyre 2012a, p. 54)

This position accounts for the constraining and enabling, that is, the ‘constrabling’, factors (Criticos, 2019) that bring creativity into play (Wolff, 1981). As Peterson asserts, they are present in those institutional, legal, technological and market-based structures musicians necessarily deal with. The existence and importance of these structures forms evidence that romanticism, as the basis for understanding creativity, may be misleading. As indicated in the prior literature review, Antoine Hennion also took these ideas well beyond the individualist Romantic and inspirationist understandings of creativity. He presented evidence for what he called the ‘creative collective’. He argued that: the final product, consisting of highly disparate elements that can be considered individually and as a mixture, is the fruit of a continuous exchange of views between the various members of the team; and the result is a fusion between musical objects and the needs of the public. (Hennion, 1990, p. 186)

Similarly, Jason Toynbee, in his book Making Popular Music: Musicians Creativity and Institutions (2000) also sees forms of musical innovation as

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collectively produced but, unlike Hennion, he gives some agency to individual music producers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas Toynbee contends that people like record producers use the musical possibilities that are presented to them from a radius of possible choices that pre-exist them. These choices arise from their interaction with what he calls the ‘field of works’, a term Toynbee indicates was applied by Bourdieu to mean all the works completed to this point in a given field. We use a slightly different term which we believe helps avoid some confusion with the other major term Bourdieu used, that is the field. Taking our lead from the Random House edition of The Rules of Art (1996, pp. 233–235), translated by Susan Emanuel, we use the term ‘space of works’ instead. For us the space of works, that is the accumulated heritage which presents itself as a set of possible constraining and enabling choices, intersects with a musician’s habitus to present the possibility of action and, as Toynbee argues, it is this combination of structural factors and human agency that produces musical culture. This musical culture is important but, as Roy Shuker argues: a central role must be accorded to those who actually make the music. This is not, however, to concede full validity to the “creative artist” view of cultural products, which sees “art” as the product of the creative individual, largely unencumbered by politics and economics. Those involved in making music clearly do exercise varying degrees of personal autonomy, but this is always circumscribed by the available technologies and expertise, by economics, and by the expectations of their audience. (1994, p. 99)

Importantly, it is: ‘a question of the dynamic interrelationship of the production context, the texts and their creators, and the audience for the music’ (ibid.). Peter Tschmuk, in his book Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry (2006), provides a similar set of ideas, arguing that creative action is possible only through ‘a pre-structured social and cultural reality’ (2006, p. 201) and argues for an ‘integrated concept of creativity’ (2006, p. 204). This integrated approach to creativity may be found in the idea that the phenomenon of creativity as an emergent property of a system in operation (McIntyre, 2008, 2011, 2012b). In

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synthesising the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1997, 1999, 2014) with that of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1993, 1996) it is possible to see that creativity results from the interaction, or confluence, of a multiple set of factors at play. McIntyre concludes, based on the evidence of his ethnographic studies into the recording environment, that: a record producer’s agency, the ability to make and effect decisions, is dependent on the structures, principally the domain and field, they encounter and surround themselves with. As such their freedom to act is relative to the domain and field they work in. (McIntyre 2009, p. 7)

Furthermore, ‘it is in the interplay between the components of the system, and the power that each enacts, that creativity in the studio is produced’ (ibid., p. 8). In his book Creativity in the Recording Studio: Alternative Takes (2019), Paul Thompson drew from these ideas in employing a systems perspective of creativity to explore the creative practices of various record producers. He concluded that the interaction between the elements of the creative system can be seen at different levels, working on different scales from which various creative practices emerge. For example: The creative practice of “eliciting a performance” required Sylvia Massy to draw on her technical, musical and sociocultural domain knowledge to create both a comfortable and an uncomfortable atmosphere for Tool’s vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Massy also had to assess the vocal performances with reference to the expectations of the field of commercial record production ensuring the performances were both musically and technically acceptable. The creative practice of A&R too requires that the producer employs their musical and sociocultural knowledge to select appropriate musical material and bring together a suitable mix of personnel. Rick Rubin used his extensive domain knowledge of rock and hip-hop in concluding that “Walk This Way” could be reimagined with two of the original members of Aerosmith and the members of RunDMC. Rubin appraised this idea with reference to his knowledge of the field’s selection criteria and, in particular, fans of hip-hop and other audiences of popular music. (2019 p. 228)

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In terms of a popular understanding of creativity in the studio, it is often perceived as centred solely on artists or musicians. However, there has been a movement across time where the role of the producer has changed from an organisational and technocratic one towards a recognition that they also have a central concern with creativity. As Russ HepworthSawyer and Craig Golding in their book What is Music Production?: A Producer’s Guide: The Role, The People, The Process (2011) explain, this core studio functionary has moved from ‘being a fixer (booking artists, musicians, and studios), A&R (Artist and Repertoire), plus the ultimate manager of time and resources’ (2011, p. 3) towards a role where the function of producers has been to ‘develop and nurture the creative and musical forces’ (ibid., p. 4) within the studio. Albin Zak adds that the act of transforming musical expression into electrical or digital signals, by its ‘very nature, requires an intervening aesthetic sensibility which may, in turn, impinge on the final result’ (Zak, 2007, p.1). This transformation, as Toynbee (2000) identifies, depends upon the ‘mode’ of production and the philosophy surrounding the intended aesthetic of the recording in which technology and production methods affect the musical product. In putting this idea forward he identifies three distinct production ‘modes’ within the development of record production: ‘documentary, ventriloquism and virtual sonic environments’ which characterise the intended recording aesthetic. In this way: Recording is not a simple process of “packaging” already fixed sounds. Far from it, studio technology and the sound engineers’ professional skill are an integral part of the active production of recorded music. (Vignolle, 1980, p. 87)

It is via the transformation of musical action, through the conduit of technology, and the intended aesthetic, through a chosen method of sound recording, that the record producer becomes an integral part of the creative process. George Martin explains: Before and even after the Beatles arrived, the record producer was basically an organizer. Of course, he could make decisions about what should be on record, and he could advise artists on how to best put over their

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performances. But it was the advent of stereo recording which first truly made him what he has become today – a creative person in his own right. (1979, p. 104)

Note that some of the more traditional skills that record production borrowed from other domains of musical knowledge, such as songwriting (McIntyre 2009), became less than important: Just as a songwriter needs to think like a songwriter, there are thought processes and perspectives that are unique to a producer’s job. A producer should be able to envision several kinds of production for a given song, hear various instrument parts and harmony arrangements in her head, and have a good idea how everything will work together in the studio. As a producer, it’s your job to know how different tempos, time signatures, grooves, effects, recording techniques, and many other elements will affect the impact of a song on listeners. A producer has to be equal parts arranger, musician, recording engineer, songwriter, and A&R rep. (Watson, 2007, p. 166)

In fulfilling this complex brief, the contemporary record producer employs a multitude of critical skills that range from ‘musical skills, to audio engineering, consultant, counselor, financial manager, project manager, and so on. The creative input of the producer is unquestionable’ (Hepworth-Sawyer & Golding 2011, p. 6). The producer’s creative input could involve: providing a critical ear on performances or overseeing the production process and ensuring it runs to schedule, and some recording projects require the producer to be intimately involved with songwriting, arranging and engineering or even performing...Producing can therefore be extremely wide-ranging record producers often need an extensive bank of musical, technical, sociocultural and sometimes commercial knowledge to operate in the field of commercial record production. Producers must also cultivate relationships within the field and learn the criteria for selection that operates within it. (Thompson 2019, p. 202).

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Richard Burgess has classified these different approaches as ‘typologies’ of producer, which are categorised according to a producer’s background and function in the recording studio. These six broad categories include: ‘artist-producer, auteur-producer, facilitative-producer, collaborative-producer, enablative-producer and consultative-producer’ (Burgess, 2013, pp. 19–20). Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding reduce the classification of record producer to two main types, that is, musician producers or engineer producers because, they argue, ‘it is common for the quality focus of the producer to be honed in either on the music and the musician or more biased to the engineering’ (Hepworth-Sawyer, & Golding 2011, pp. 7–8). In order to provide some evidence for the veracity of these positions, we argue that Paul McCartney’s experiences of listening to a wide variety of music from a young age, his ongoing collaborative musical performance and his abilities and experience in musical composition, all contributed to his outstanding work in the studio, his musical direction, and in particular, his little-recognised role as a record producer.

Immersion in the Domain and Field: Mentoring and Learning to Become a Record Producer Phil Ramone is a notable record producer and has worked with artists like Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson, Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Liza Minelli, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, Gloria Estefan, Sinead O’Connor, Brian Setzer, George Michael and many others. He was involved with Paul McCartney on the 1971 Ram album where he engineered many of the tracks during his transitional period of becoming a record producer. In terms of his own symbolic capital, he now has a significant number of Grammy Awards, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences honours and has been awarded multiple Honorary Doctorates. Ramone has stated that his own skills as a record producer and engineer initially came from listening and watching in the studio:

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My training came from engineers such as Bill Putnam and Bill Schwartau, and producers such as John Hammond, Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, Ahemnet Ertegun, and Milt Okun. As mentors, they taught me to engineer and produce the same way that they’d learned – by doing. The men [sic] who influenced me were masters of their craft. Their work ethic, attention to detail, and high standards affected me deeply. What I saw in them became the blueprint for the way I work. (Ramone, 2007, p. 23)

In much the same way Paul McCartney was well placed to become a producer himself. He had one of the most successful mentors in the business who, in many ways, set the standard for what a record producer has come to be regarded as. McCartney’s studio mentor, George Martin, took the time to supply McCartney not only with the skills and basic knowledge of what it is to be a record producer but he went further and modelled a standard and style of behaviour that was ‘intentional, nurturing, insightful, supportive [and] protective’ (Bey & Holmes, 1990, p. 5). Good mentors like Martin go beyond simple training through observation and emulation and further provide the opportunity for their student, in this case McCartney, to use reflection as a tool for self-development. In these situations, ‘the mentoring relationship is voluntarily entered into and warmly regarded by both the protege and the mentor’ (Bey & Holmes, 1990, p. 8). Eventually this relationship moves to its final stages where the mentor student relationship can often be one of ‘mutual enquiry’ (Brookes & Sykes, 1997, pp. 17–28) where both the mentor and the protégé realise the relationship has changed and that there is a need to then search further afield for fresh input. As Bey and Holmes (1990) argue, it is this process that sets the student up for their lifelong learning process. Each of these elements can be seen in the way Paul McCartney approached his initial production ‘lessons’ with George Martin and then gradually moved away from his mentor to become a successful record producer in his own right. McCartney had worked closely with Martin from the early part of his career and, as a result, developed a social as well as a working relationship. Dave Harries, who was a technical engineer and studio manager at Abbey Road, and famously contributed to the recording of ‘Strawberry Fields

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Forever’,1 explains: ‘George and Paul were very close for years and years, they really were…and they’re very sympathetic to each other in a musical way’ (Personal Interview, 2011). During his time recording with The Beatles, McCartney also watched his mentor George Martin experiment with numerous experimental tape techniques, as Harries describes: Well Paul had the best teacher in George Martin didn’t’ he? Paul used to come to the studio with bits and pieces of tape and play them to George. Paul or Geoff or Richard Lush would then put them together if they thought they were any good. There was a lot of that going on all the time. I mean George used to raid the EMI sound effects department. They used to nick bits of records and put them in backwards, all that sort of thing. (Personal Interview 2011)

Martin and McCartney also worked collaboratively on string arrangements. In one famous incident (elaborated on in McIntyre, 2006, p. 212) in which McCartney went ‘round to George’s house and we had a pleasant couple of hours, had a cup of tea, sat there with the manuscript paper on the piano’ (quoted in Miles, 1997, p. 206), McCartney surprised Martin by insisting on an innovative use of a particular blues note in the arrangement for ‘Yesterday’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 59). This process also worked well when the two worked closely together on the Boulting Bros movie The Family Way where McCartney’s memory of northern brass bands formed the core of the movie’s musical feel. Later, Martin introduced his protégé to further classical techniques. For example, counterpoint would begin to feature heavily in songs like ‘Help’ and was used extensively in the vocal arrangements for ‘She’s Leaving Home’. This training was invaluable. McCartney had become so versed in accompaniment, arrangement and orchestration that when it came time to meld these skills with his songwriting abilities, he proved quite adept. For example, in one of his collaborations with his songwriting partner John Lennon (McIntyre, 2011, pp. 239–252), he saw how well a scrap of one of his songs could be used as the middle eight in the verse

1

See Thompson (2019) for an extended discussion.

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and chorus Lennon had written for ‘A Day in the Life’, the song that completes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . ....it had nothing to do with John’s song at all, nothing at all. And Paul wisely then said, “Well, OK let’s put these bits together but let’s not put them too close together, we’ll separate them by 24 bars of rhythm which we’ll fill in later.” And it was a radical thought and I thought to myself, what the hell are we going to fill those 24 bars with? I thought it was a long time by anyone’s standards, for a guitar solo or anything like that. And I asked them what they thought about it, and they wanted to use a symphony orchestra. They said, “If we get a symphony orchestra into the studio, we’ll just tell them to play what we like.” Of course, you can’t do that and I gently explained that to them. Paul went away and thought and came back with this wonderful, wacky idea of getting them to play a huge climax, starting with their lowest note, finishing with their highest note – over 24 bars – it was a revolutionary thought. It was Paul’s idea to do that, and it made the song into something that was absolutely unique. I think they were incredibly inquisitive about what could be done. (Martin in Barrow & Bextor, 2004, p. 82)

McCartney’s contribution to the production process when recording with the Beatles was also noted by The Beatles’ first engineer, Norman Smith, who explained: Production of the Beatles was very simple, because it was ready-made. Paul was a very great influence in terms of the production, especially in terms of George Harrison’s guitar solos and Ringo’s drumming. It was almost like we had one producer up in the control room and another producer down in the studio. (Smith quoted in Buskin, 2008)

McCartney’s Early Record Productions McCartney’s domain acquisition as a record producer appeared to develop through a process of osmosis, simply by being fully immersed into studio practice. This, coupled with his desire to be involved in all

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things musical, gave McCartney the necessary knowledge and motivation (Csikszentmihalyi 1997) to move into record production. One of McCartney’s early attempts at producing, and one that was independent of both Martin and The Beatles, was with The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Neil Innes from the band had met Paul on the set of the Magical Mystery Tour film and McCartney had made it known that he liked The Bonzo’s Gorilla album. Innes had written ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ as a potential single at the request of the record company they were signed to. They had tried cutting it with their manager/producer who insisted on working quickly in the studio to save money. But The Bonzos, being art students, wanted to relax and see what happened. The producer was bemoaning this fact to McCartney who suggested ‘“Well, I’ll come and produce it”’(Innes in Barrow & Bextor, 2004, p. 76), which he did. Vivian Stanshall from The Bonzos had sent him a number of the band’s songs and when McCartney heard ‘Urban Spaceman’ he said ‘“That’s the one. I’ll come and do it, you fix up the studio”’ (Stanshall in Giuliano 1986, p. 189). McCartney arrived at Chappell Studio in Bond St for the session and immediately set about relaxing the band since ‘part of your job, is to be the guy to say, “OK, let’s chill out for a while”’ (Filipetti in Massey, 2000, p. 4). To ease the band into the session McCartney sat at the piano and played ‘Hey Jude’ for them, a song that had yet to be released. McCartney, according to Innes: ‘was brilliant and he was very kind to me because I wasn’t the main singer’ (Innes in Barrow & Bextor, 2004, p. 76). McCartney had sung the song through and noticed corrections that could be made to the rhythm. ‘Larry [Smith, drummer] was tapping away a kind of energetic version on the drums and Paul said, “We’ll double-track the drums”’ (ibid.). As Innes explains: Larry was sort of doing on the drums a-boom-chick, boom chick, boomchick, and Paul said, “Yeah, that’s all right, we’ll do it like that, but give it a boom-dat-boom boom bap with the boom chick, boom-chick” which gave it a feel. Then he snatches up Viv’s ukulele and starts leaning into the microphone, Nashville style, to fade it, live fade and fade out, tinkydinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dink, and the whole thing is taking off. And it’s totally down to Paul. (Innes quoted in Sounes 2010, p. 233)

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Innes insists that the ‘unique kind of McCartney feel came through the production…it had taken eight hours’ (Innes in Barrow & Bextor, 2004, p. 76). In this time McCartney was open as a producer to the band’s experimentation, something he was very used to with The Beatles. As Innes explains: Viv got out his garden hose with the trumpet mouthpiece and wanted to whirl it around his head. The engineer said, “You can’t record that thing!” and Paul said, “Why not? Just put a microphone in each corner of the studio.” It was wonderful to have the power he had over convention. (quoted in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 190)

However, the band did not want to use McCartney’s name on the record so he graciously agreed to be credited as Apollo C. Vermouth. The record entered the charts, stalling at number 17, and the management of the band insisted at that point that they reveal who the producer was. Once this piece of information was divulged to the public it propelled the song to number 5 in the charts. As Innes explains, ‘even though Gus Dudgeon did the final mix it’s all Paul’s musicianship and flair’ (Innes in Barrow & Bextor, 2004, p. 76). Around this time McCartney was also asked to record the theme for a London Weekend Television programme starring Stanley Holloway. McCartney wanted a theme that would take the listener to the north of England and so recorded the tune ‘Thingumybob’ with the well-known brass band, Black Dyke Mills Band (Wikipedia, 2011). They recorded in Saltaire near the northern industrial city of Bradford. McCartney used this opportunity to record a version of ‘Yellow Submarine’ in the big echoey hall in the village for the B side of the single but the main theme was recorded outside to create a different aesthetic, as McCartney explains: ‘I wanted a really different sound so we went out and played it on the street. It was lovely, with very dead, trumpety sounding cornets’ (McCartney in The Beatles, 2000, p. 289). The band released the theme as a single under the name John Foster & Sons Ltd Black Dyke Mills Band and they were photographed with McCartney and his sheepdog Martha for the picture sleeve. This single became one of the initial batches of singles released by Apple Records, the record company set up

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by the band and EMI. McCartney worked with the Black Dyke Mills Band later in his career on the Wings album Back to the Egg in 1979. McCartney had absorbed his lesson well, observing and emulating his mentor George Martin at work. The advent of Apple Records, the company set up by The Beatles themselves on the advice of their accountants, saw McCartney take on record production for other artists. He approached this in what has become known as the traditional way, a tradition Martin himself had inspired (Hepworth-Sawyer & Golding, 2011). McCartney explained that ‘Mary Hopkin was the main artist whom I produced at Apple’ (in The Beatles, 2000, p. 289). He had been alerted to her by Twiggy, a long-term friend, who had seen Mary Hopkin on the television programme Opportunity Knocks. ‘So I watched her and I thought she really had got a lovely Welsh voice; it was very well pitched’ (McCartney in The Beatles, 2000, p. 289). McCartney had come across the song ‘Those Were The Days’ much earlier while watching an American duo perform it at a nightclub in London. It had been adapted from a Russian folk tune and McCartney had catalogued it in his mind as a probable hit. He had his people at Apple find the duo who had performed the song and once a lead sheet was made through Essex Music, the publishers, they procured an arranger and Paul proceeded to produce Hopkin singing it: They went into the studio in mid July 1968. Paul showed Mary how he thought the song should be done. “I thought it was very catchy, it had something, it was a good treatment of nostalgia. She picked it up very easily; as if she’d known it for years.” At first she sang it as if she didn’t mean it, and in fact it must have been difficult for a seventeen year old to sing ‘those were the days’ convincingly since she had no adult past; the song was intended for an older singer. Paul: “After a few tapes. I kept showing her the way she should sing it and generally worked on it and suddenly she got it and we just put a tambourine on it”. (Miles 1997, pp. 455–456)

Mary Hopkin herself enjoyed working with McCartney in the role of producer and describes his sympathetic production style:

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He was a good producer because he was very diplomatic, which is important. Being a performer himself, he understood my hang-ups. He was very easy to work with, but that was partially because I had no definite ideas of my own. (Hopkin, as quoted in Salewicz 1987, p. 203)

Ken Scott, who engineered the album explained that McCartney’s production style was like George Martin’s with the central premise that: Talent is put into the studio to do one thing and that’s to create. Now Paul was a creator but he wasn’t bossy. He wasn’t a Tony Visconti-type, he was more of a laid-back George Martin kind (Personal Interview, 2021).

McCartney proceeded to record the B side ‘Turn Turn Turn’ in one take and he then ‘used his influence to get Mary on the Ed Sullivan Show in the USA and David Frost in the UK’ (Miles 1997, p. 456). The single reached number 1 in the UK and number 2 in the USA held out by The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’. McCartney then went on to quickly produce foreign language versions for the European market (Miles, 1997) and then set about producing an album of material for Hopkin. He had been, as is the case with many producers, cataloguing ‘millions of great songs’. And still to this day, I keep them filed in the back of my head in case I’m ever producing a young act, and they say, ‘We haven’t got a song’. I can go, ‘Wait a minute! Try this one. It’s an old rock and roll thing, but it’s got something’ (McCartney quoted in Mulhern, 1990, p. 18). Demonstrating his familiarity with the space of works (Bourdieu, 1996), the accumulated heritage of popular music, Hopkin’s album, Postcard , was populated by McCartney with a number of older songs he was familiar with, mainly through his father’s influence. He also included a number of songs Donovan had written that both Donovan and McCartney played acoustic guitars on. One song was specially written by Harry Nilsson at McCartney’s request. McCartney also organised the cover photo and then launched the album with a reception on top of Post Office Tower with Jimi Hendrix and Donovan and a coterie of others in attendance (ibid) indicating his ease of acting within the field or social network (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) of popular music.

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A similar production process occurred for Badfinger, formerly known as The Iveys, a Swansea band, that had been noticed by Mal Evans, an important member of The Beatles’ road crew, while The Iveys were playing at the Cavern in Liverpool. Evans bought them under the Apple Records umbrella. McCartney had written a song called ‘Come and Get It’ and had demoed it at the Abbey Road studios prior to a Beatles’ session. He lived close to the studio in St John’s Wood and used the time in the knowledge that the room The Beatles had booked wouldn’t be occupied and: ‘all the stuff would be set up – and I’d use Ringo’s equipment to put a drum track down, put some piano down, quickly put some bass down, do the vocal, and double track it’ (McCartney in The Beatles, 2000, p. 289). As Mark Lewisohn documented in his comprehensive book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988) on Thursday 24 July at 2.30 pm in 1969 McCartney sang and played piano live, with Phil McDonald engineering. As the session tape reveals, he called up to McDonald in the studio control room ‘“OK, give us it on headphones and I’ll track it”’ (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 182). McCartney put down a double-tracked vocal, then added maracas, drums and then bass guitar. Lewisohn then states that ‘it was mixed for stereo. A copy of that mix was made for Paul to give to Badfinger, and the job was done. All in one hour!’ (1988, p. 182). On August 2 McCartney ‘also produced the Badfinger recording, done at Abbey Road in one day on 2 August’ (ibid.). This master recording was ‘virtually a note for note copy of his version, with only a slight increase in tempo being responsible for timing differences: Paul’s version being 2’32”, Badfinger’s hit (number four in the charts) 2 21 ’ (ibid.). I said to Badfinger “OK, it’s got to be exactly like this demo,” because it had a great feeling on it. They actually wanted to put their own variations on, but I said, “No, this really is the right way.” They listened to me (I was producing after all) and they were good. The song was a hit in 1970. (McCartney in The Beatles, 2000, p. 289)

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The Production of McCartney’s Own Records Working across all the instruments himself was a particular talent that McCartney used to his advantage when he self-produced his first solo album, McCartney (now known as McCartney I ), which was also released on Apple. McCartney had a Studer multitrack machine installed in his house and he set about recording, tracking and overdubbing all the parts himself to a number of songs, experimenting with a number of unusual styles and recording techniques as he went (Peel, 2002, pp. 70–73). This experimentation resulted in McCartney not only improving his domain skill in audio engineering and reacquainting himself with Abbey Road studios for a few of the tracks, but it also began to contribute to his style of production: He was definitely a more musical producer although he used to do everything else as well. He’s a great musician and a great songwriter and he used his musical leanings in his production almost certainly. (Dave Harries, Personal Interview, 2011)

After working primarily by himself on his last album, McCartney took the more traditional route for his production of the next one. For the Ram album, in which Paul and Linda McCartney were credited as producers, he hired a few highly experienced engineers, one in particular who was also a producer himself, Phil Ramone. He also hired reputable session players such as ‘Hugh McCracken (guitar), Dave Spinozza (guitar) and Denny Seiwell (drums)’ (Elson, 1986, p. 104). McCartney and his wife Linda completed the core set of musicians and this small but versatile ensemble were complemented by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for two songs, ‘Long Haired Lady’ and ‘Back Seat of My Car’. They recorded the complete album in New York City but when McCartney returned to London he set about producing and recording an experimental but fully realised version of the same album. He replaced ‘all vocals, guitars and keyboards with orchestral instruments’ (Peel, 2002, p. 81). In a textbook case of how the field of recording works, Tony Clark engineered the sessions having been employed earlier by McCartney on the successful ‘Come and Get It’

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production for the Badfinger project. The production took place over three days at Abbey Road and Herbie Flowers remembers that he was ‘on bass because he [McCartney] was producing or playing piano’ (quoted in Peel, 2002, p. 84). The album, called Thrillington, was ‘very much the forgotten bridge between The Family Way – the 1967 George Martin soundtrack collaboration – and McCartney’s 1990s orchestral works’ (Peel, 2002, p. 81) such as the Liverpool Oratorio, Standing Stone or Ecce Cor Meum. In the case of Thrillington McCartney had made the decision to work quickly, efficiently and collaboratively and not release the work under his own name. Instead he invented the character of Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington, a man about town, and advertised himself discreetly in the classified pages of the London Evening Standard . McCartney had decided to produce an instrumental version of the Ram album and decided Richard Hewson, who had worked on Mary Hopkins recordings, was the best person to rearrange Ram into a pure lounge version. Hewson hired a small group of players to help record the album. These included Herbie Flowers, famous for his bass part on Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. From these sessions Flowers developed a deep respect for McCartney and continued to work with him stating that, ‘McCartney is brilliant. He always was a class act, everything about the man. We were good buddies and I felt very honored that the world’s greatest bass player would sometimes ask for some bass playing from me’ (quoted in Peel, 2002, p. 84). The other players were Clem Cattini on drums and Vic Flick playing guitar, Roger Culan on keyboards and, oddly, the Dolmetsch family on recorders. Hewson also drafted in the Mike Sammes Singers as well as strings and brass from some of the London-based orchestras. As well as Richard Hewson and Tony Clark, Alan Parsons worked as an assistant on the project, setting him up for his later career. As Peel explains, ‘all three were overseen throughout the recording session by McCartney himself, who remained firmly in the producer’s role and resisted the temptation to perform on the album in any way’ (2002, p. 82). Decisions like these were part of his now versatile and idiosyncratic way of working. Tony Visconti, who produced Marc Bolan and David Bowie among many others and who also contributed string arrangements to McCartney’s later Band on the Run album, commented that the most ‘important thing about record production is making the decisions’ (in Tobler & Grundy, 1982, p. 175). Over the period of one recording

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session that may be up to ten hours in length, Visconti asserts that ‘the producer can find, if he bothers to count, that he has made literally hundreds of decisions. Major and minor ones’ (ibid.). Similarly, George Martin has asserted that: When the producer is working with a group, he is creating in the studio. He uses his own thoughts and those of the group, collating and assembling them and rejecting the ones that are no good. So another element in the make-up of a good producer becomes the ability to choose: to choose between what works and what does not work – and what is most important to choose quickly. (Martin 1979, p. 254)

In this regard, as McCartney explained, there was an ‘interesting moment’ as he was self-producing the recording session for ‘My Love’, the lead single off the next Wings album, Red Rose Speedway. A snap decision had to be made: Instead of piecing it together and overdubbing I wanted to record it live with an orchestra. Everyone was ready in Abbey Road studio two, we knew exactly what we would be doing, and then just before the take Henry [McCullough] came over and whispered in my ear, ‘Do you mind if I try something different on the solo?’ I had to make one of those decisions – to stick with what we’d rehearsed or to run with his new idea. At the risk of messing the thing up I went with his idea and he pulled a great new solo out of left field. (McCartney 2002, pp. 53–54)

Richard Lush, one of the engineers McCartney used on Red Rose Speedway, also tells the story of McCartney’s decision-making abilities in line with his propensity to recognise and use serendipitous moments. As McCartney sang ‘Get on the Right Thing’ his headphones socket came loose at 3.01 and he proceeded to sing about it in the middle of what was a perfectly good vocal performance. McCartney decided this impromptu vocalising would stay on the final recording as for him, as producer, it added a certain spontaneity to the track. A similar decision had been made during the recording of ‘C Moon’, a Wings single from the same period, where McCartney missed his vocal entry, ‘scatted’ over it until

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the point came around again, and was astute enough as a producer to keep it as a memorable introduction to the song. In this regard McCartney’s main concern as a producer appears to be musical rather than having his chief interest in the technical aspects of electronics like a number of producer–engineers. As Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding suggest ‘a musician producer might spend much more time concentrating on the musical development of the artist and subcontract the engineering to a trusted partner they’ve worked with before’ (2011, p. 8). Like Martin, McCartney works best when he trusts the engineer he has hired to do their job, because a producer of this type: Must be able to see the whole picture and make a value-judgement as quickly as possible. But when you are playing about with equalization knobs, trimming limiters and compressors, varying the amounts of echo or reverberation time, and involving yourself in a million other technical activities, you tend not to listen to the music. (Martin 1979, p. 249)

Working Within the Field: McCartney’s Collaboration in Production and the Success of Band on the Run Surprised at what appeared to be a snap decision by guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell to leave Wings, McCartney’s major 70s band now consisted of the tight nucleus of McCartney, Denny Laine and Linda McCartney to record the new Wings album. Fortunately for McCartney Geoff Emerick, the engineer who worked on much of the latter series of The Beatles’ albums, including Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , was available to engineer when it came time to produce the Band on the Run album. Emerick concedes that ‘he and I always had a good rapport and worked so well as a team, plus Paul, like the other three Beatles, always liked having a familiar face around’ (2006, p. 336). McCartney had decided to use EMI’s studio in Lagos, Nigeria, primarily as a financial venture, and both he and Emerick were somewhat surprised at the conditions they found there. The head office

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of EMI in London had decided that all its studios around the world would supply the same equipment to each of their clients: The difference was that outlying studios often had older, secondhand gear because company policy was to send discarded equipment from Abbey Road to the studios in third world countries. As a result the console at the Lagos studio was actually pretty decent – it was the standard EMI console, a smaller version of what they had at Abbey Road – and the monitors were exactly the same ones I had gotten used to during my years at EMI. (Emerick 2006, p. 339)

The microphones, however, came stored in a cardboard box. ‘There were a couple of decent Neumann’s in there, but the rest of the microphones were run-of-the-mill, inexpensive models, and none of them looked like they were in particularly great shape’ (ibid.). The studio backed onto a record pressing plant, accessed through the studio door, the control room was air-conditioned but the main room wasn’t, there was no drum booth and there were no studio baffles for instrument separation. But it was the multitrack record machine that proved to be a nuisance. It was eighttrack but only had four playback sync heads which meant overdubbing while listening to what had previously been recorded was extremely problematic. ‘What that meant was I could only ever play back four tracks when we were overdubbing…the sync amps could be swapped around easily enough – but it was quite a limitation’ (ibid.). Despite this, and many other difficulties, McCartney was confident Emerick was up to the task as he had worked with him successfully many times before. ‘For all the technical limitations and bizarre surroundings, we managed to get a good sound out of that little studio’ (ibid.). Not only did McCartney rely on an engineer of the calibre of Geoff Emerick as a critical part of his creative team but he, as previously demonstrated, would often incorporate the work of arrangers and orchestrators as well as specialist musicians into that team. After recording the basic tracks for Band on the Run in Lagos with Wings members Denny Laine and Linda McCartney as his major musical collaborators: ‘that autumn Paul went into AIR in London to add strings and horns to Band on the Run, hiring Howie Casey, whom he had known back in the days

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of Derry and the Seniors, to play sax on several tracks, most winningly on ‘Bluebird’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 313). Ginger Baker, formerly of Cream, had also played some percussion in Lagos for the album, hoping to convince McCartney to use his own studio there. However, Fela Ransome-Kuti, an important musical figure in Lagos, was convinced that McCartney had come to Nigeria to steal their rhythms and so McCartney worked to diplomatically extricate himself from this situation and get back to the UK to continue work on the album. Once back in London he hired Remi Kabaka, a Nigerian musician working in the UK, to ‘do a percussion overdub on the song “Bluebird”’ (Emerick, 2006, p. 349). In addition, Tony Visconti, who was not directly credited on the album, was also hired by McCartney to write the orchestrations for the album and conduct the orchestra: He was dead keen for me to work with him, and I did seven arrangements in two days, which meant I stayed awake for forty-eight hours. I showed up at the studio about ten o’clock in the morning to face about fifty or sixty musicians and I had great bags under my eyes. I conducted the orchestra for eight hours, and Paul was just full of praise and admiration for me, and came to my house two weeks later to play me the final mixes, and really wanted to know my opinion, and if there was anything I could add to it. (in Tobler & Grundy, 1982, p. 181)

Not only was McCartney dependent on his creative team in the studio but also on the crucial members of the field who were now a critical part of his operation. ‘His manager was entertainment world veteran Brian Brolly, his American lawyer New-Yorker Lee Eastman…He also delegated important decisions concerning the merchandising of his songs to Capitol Records’ Al Coury’ (Gambaccini, 1976, p. 105). Coury was Capitol Records’ West Coast promotion man and he had a keen ear for a hit single as well as an awareness of the social and cultural capital that leant a certain distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) to McCartney’s recorded output. I must not take the credit on Band on the Run. Al Coury, Capitol’s ace plugger, rang up and told us, “I persuaded Pink Floyd to take ‘Money’ off Dark Side of the Moon as a single, and you want to know how many

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units we sold? We want ‘Band on the Run’! We want ‘Jet’! We want ‘em off?” He’s such a good spieler, this fella, that I’ll say, “it sounds like sense. No skin off my nose, try it” and it just kept coming back up, much to my delight. (McCartney quoted in Gambaccini 1976, p. 105)

Band on the Run became ‘the most successful solo album by any of the exBeatles, making the US number 1 spot three times’ (Doyle 2013, p. 122). In the same year, McCartney flew to Nashville and as well as soaking up this famous musical city’s heritage, he produced a single of a song his father had written called ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’. This single was released under the band name The Country Hams. During his time in Nashville McCartney also met many country music stars including Johnny Cash and also stayed at Junior Putnam’s house. Putnam was the writer of ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ and McCartney wrote and produced the next single ‘Junior’s Farm’, backed with ‘Sally G’, as a result. After producing ‘Liverpool Lou’ for his younger brother Mike and The Scaffold and the subsequent album released as McGear , and using the members of Wings as the session musicians, McCartney’s next production move was to venture to New Orleans, steeped in American musical history, to work in Allain Toussant’s studio. This is where he produced the bulk of Venus and Mars. This album ‘was completed in the Wally Heider Studio in Los Angeles’ (Elson 1986, p. 117) where Wings new drummer, Joe English, joined them. McCartney’s inclusive side to his personality was on display in the studio: Paul made it so if you wanted to come in every day and be part of the recording, mixing, ideas and putting it all together, you could. He really gave everyone a lot of freedom. Of course if he thought something should be played a certain way, he’d tell you to do it, and ninety-nine percent of the time I’d go along because it was usually the right thing. (quoted in Giuliano 1991, p. 196)

Dave Harries also acknowledged this aspect of McCartney’s collaborative instinct when working in the recording studio:

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He never discounted the fact that everyone was involved; he was a team player. He always needs people around him, I think. You know, I don’t think he’s a loner. (Personal Interview, 2011)

After this album went to number 1 in the USA and the UK and other territories, and after its year-long accompanying world tour, McCartney flew back to Britain to produce his most successful single, ‘Mull of Kintyre’, written by himself and Denny Laine. Originally, Paul came to me with this verse, and I said, “I love that.” And he went “Oh really?” He hadn’t got any great ideas to do anything with it. I said, “I love that and that would be fantastic with the Campbeltown Pipe Band maybe.” I injected my enthusiasm and his eyebrows went up. Well, Paul’s not really a big drinker, but he does like his Scotch and Coke, so we got through a bottle during the course of this one afternoon, sitting on the wall outside the cottage [in Scotland]. I threw in most of the lyrics which Paul finished off later. (Laine in Giuliano, 1991, p. 368)

Laine had been a long-term collaborator with Paul McCartney, central to all the Wings recordings from Wild Life through to Back to the Egg , providing the necessary creative foil McCartney seemed to need. They had shared a musical life in the early days with Laine’s band The Moody Blues signed to Brian Epstein’s NEMS company. As a result, the Moody Blues supported The Beatles on a number of tours across the north of England. Laine had also penned and sung one of Paul’s favourite songs of the mid-sixties, Go Now. When they co-wrote ‘Mull of Kintyre’, McCartney took this nascent hit into the barn of his own farm near Campbeltown in Scotland which he had set up and labelled as Rude Studios: I did a demo in Rude Studio and worked out how the final version could include bagpipes. The bagpipe is an ethnic instrument from way back and I was aware that they can’t play every note, so I invited the leader of the local pipe band to come to the farm. His name was Tony Wilson and he arrived with his bagpipes. We were sitting in the kitchen and I asked him to play me something while I tried to work out some guitar chords, and he said, “We’d better go in the garden – the bagpipes are very

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loud.” [p130] He started playing, and I could see that a lot of what he was playing was in the key of D. This meant that I could use A, and I worked out a scale that seemed to be all right. Actually, I didn’t work it out well enough. When we made the record I got the pipe band to play the chorus; had I asked them to play the verse there was one note they couldn’t have made. (McCartney, 2002, pp. 129–130)

They overdubbed the full Campbeltown Pipe Band onto the basic track at McCartney’s High Gate farm using EMI’s Abbey Road mobile studio (McCartney, 2002, p. 129). In this regard, McCartney’s production approach was, once again, embedded in his links to his halcyon days at EMI. In fact, he was so taken with EMI’s Studio Two at Abbey Road, a place he has returned to again and again for his productions, that he had a replica built for himself of its control room. As George Martin has explained, ‘the choice of recording studio is a matter for the artist and the producer. Every producer will have his own favourite, one in which he can work happily’ (Martin, 1979, p. 252). McCartney himself declared, ‘I wanted to mix an album and have all that equipment. I was putting a mobile in my basement, so I actually rang up the feller who designed control room Two and said “could you design a movable control room with exactly the same features?”’ (Southallet al., 1997, p. 111). Which he did. McCartney explained why he liked that room and in particular the gear it held: One thing I’ll never forget at EMI was the “pop”/”classical” switch on the right-hand-side of the console! And the control knobs were great big RAF things, that was the state of the technology then. We used to like them though, and actually they were much better than the fiddly little things these days because then if you put treble on you actually heard treble come on. Now you put treble on and it’s nothing. I really do think those valve machines were more fun to work with. A lot of people think that, I know Geoff Emerick does, and I still keep some valve equipment myself because it gives you a record-y type sound. That’s why a lot of people won’t go to digital. Analogue is warmer, and you can defeat the machine…They’re harder than ever to defeat now. They’ve thought of all that. If you’re going to work in the red now there’s a little computer

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that comes in and says “Limit!”, stops it and brings it back. They’re all so clever these days and you can’t actually screw up. (Lewisohn, 1988, p. 11)

Not that McCartney was ever averse to experimenting with new equipment. His McCartney II album, which he once again produced and played by himself, was in many ways his attempt to come to grips with the possibilities that the introduction of, what were then, new instruments afforded. ‘McCartney II was originally just to see what synthesizers could do and to see if there was anything I liked about them’ (quoted in Hutcheon, 2011, p. 79) explained McCartney some years later. This approach was in deep contrast to his late Beatles’ mode of producing records where he took a less traditional approach to producing records by writing songs and then ‘recorded them bit by bit, feeling his way into them as a constructor/producer rather than an architect/performer; 10 years on, he was being led by technology’ (ibid.). McCartney’s next two solo albums Tug of War (1982) and Pipes of Peace (1983) were both produced by McCartney’s familiar mentor George Martin. These albums were recorded with a long list of musicians including long-time collaborators Linda McCartney, Denny Laine and Ringo Starr, stars such as Stevie Wonder, Carl Perkins and Michael Jackson and a host of session players such as Steve Gadd, Dave Mattacks, Stanley Clarke and Ernie Watts as well as the Pestalozzi Children’s Choir. Eric Stewart from 10cc contributed as well. These were polished albums that were recorded at AIR Studio in London, a venue Martin was of course very familiar with, as well as Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles and McCartney’s own Sussex farmhouse studio at Hog Hill Mill. However, despite the success of these productions, in 1985 Martin declined McCartney’s request to produce his next solo album. It was before the sixth solo album Press to Play (1986) that Martin suggested McCartney should try something different (Stewart in MTV, 1986).

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Maturing as a Complex Record Producer and Coping with Critical Failure Both Paul McCartney and George Martin realised that McCartney was working now well beyond the student/mentor relationship they had both profited from. The need to search further afield for fresh input had become obvious (Brookes & Sykes, 1997) but instead of working as the sole producer for Press to Play, McCartney chose a co-producer for his creative team. Eric Stewart, like Denny Laine, was a successful songwriter and performer in his own right and had been part of the team that had helped Paul and producer George Martin realise the Tug of War album. As well as being part of the highly successful 10cc and a member of the songwriting team who had written and produced ‘I’m Not in Love’ and ‘The Things We Do For Love’, Stewart was also a producer and engineer in his own right. Stewart had been invited down to McCartney’s own Hog Hill Mill studio to ‘bring your acoustic and we’ll have a bit of a plonk’ (McCartney quoted in Norman, 2016, p. 600). Stewart was to be a co-writer and co-producer on the album but when he arrived he discovered that McCartney had also employed Hugh Padgham as part of the production team. Working with Hugh Padgham, who had gained a significant reputation producing records for The Police, Peter Gabriel and Human League, allowed McCartney to occupy distinctly but also flexible roles. As he explains: I wanted to co-produce this with Hugh really, so then he could be free to work on the sound side of it, because I think that’s his specialty really, and then I would work more on the artistic decisions and sorting out the songs, although we’d do a bit of that each. (McCartney interviewed for MTV 1986)

Despite the initial uncertainty over their roles, Eric Stewart and Hugh Padgham got on well. That, as Philip Norman notes, ‘was the trouble’ (2016, p. 600):

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Early in the session, Stewart felt that one of Paul’s vocals wasn’t as good as it could be, so he switched on the intercom and said so. When Paul asked Hugh Padgham’s opinion, Padgham was at first reluctant to criticize such a colossus but, under pressure, admitted that he agreed with Stewart. “Hugh, when did you last make a number one record?” Paul inquired coldly. (Norman 2016, pp. 600–601)

Eric Stewart bowed out of the production a few days later, shocked at the way McCartney had put down the young sound engineer, thus ending another fruitful creative collaboration (ibid.). Paul selected the rest of his creative team carefully. He went on, overseeing all aspects of the recording, including the songwriting, the performing and the production within what has been labelled by Paul Thompson (2016) a micro-system of record production. The underlying production processes and principles observed at EMI’s Abbey Road, as they worked their way through the tracking process, after moving from Hog Hill Mill studios, were displayed in McCartney’s initial philosophical approach to making the album. He selected the musicians capable of producing the sound he wanted, including Eddie Rayner, keyboard player from Split Enz, Carlos Alomar on guitar and Jerry Marotta on drums, and then allowed the creative process to take place. As Jerry Marotta explains ‘he sorta gathered the people together who he thought that he wanted to use, put them all together and you make the record’ (Marotta interviewed for MTV, 1986). McCartney had, in essence, returned to making records in the manner to which he was most accustomed, as part of a band. He insisted that: ‘it’s something to do with the chemistry of the people getting together, any group of people like that’ (McCartney interviewed for MTV 1986). With Carlos Alomar on guitar also contributing to these collaborations, the studio band reflected the production sentiments that McCartney had displayed during the production of Venus and Mars. Alomar indicated that: As a producer he’s very spontaneous but he’s also controlled. I mean the amount you can actually put in is based on what’s already there. But he, himself, allows the individual to come out. I mean it’s ridiculous to call somebody in to do his [sic] specialty and try to tell him what to do, I mean he’s learnt that from (I’m sure) experiences upon experiences.

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There’s no rush for anything that he’s doing in the studio and the input I put in was actually my own, he actually allows you to listen. He allowed me to listen to the song and I was able to say well, “I’d like to play on this one, I don’t want to play on that one, I don’t think it needs this, I don’t think it needs that, this one needs so and so you know”. (Alomar interviewed for MTV, 1986)

Even the accompanying star musicians, Pete Townshend and Phil Collins, were recorded as part of the band for the track ‘Anger’. McCartney knew that they were ‘great pros in the studio’ and with Townshend on guitar, Collins on drums and McCartney himself on bass, ‘there was no messing really. We just got right down to it so that’s a pretty spontaneous rhythm track’ (McCartney interviewed for MTV, 1986).McCartney’s style of production in the recording studio is also described by Eric Stewart: He’s a very complex producer, complicated in a way because I’ve never met a person with so many ideas in my life. And when you think about the amount of material that he has recorded in his life, must be thousands of great songs, great tracks, all the Beatles albums, you’d think that something like that has got to dry up at some time but, no. You get in the studio, you’re putting an idea down that you know is good he’ll say “hold on, I’ve got a better idea” and it is and he tops it and it’s very stimulating to work with somebody like that because that also fires you and you think “I’ve got to come up with something better now. Bloody hell, what am I going to think of next”. So you bounce off on the musical production side and it’s fantastic. (Stewart interviewed for MTV, 1986)

Dave Harries not only confirmed Stewart’s view of McCartney as an artist with a multitude of musical ideas but describes his positivity and disciplined work ethic, a critical commodity in realising any recording project: He was the best ideas man…Paul was like the bloke who rolled his sleeves up and got on with it. He was just so keen. You never saw McCartney down in the dumps, and I never remember him being like that at all. (Personal Interview, 2011)

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However, Hugh Padgahm’s experience of working with McCartney proved less than ideal. He soldiered on across the lengthy period it took to complete the album ‘with a growing feeling of being able to do nothing right’ (Norman, 2016, p. 601). Eric Stewart, later asserted that the principal objective was to ensure they had a record that was ‘hotter and earthier’ than either Pipes of Peace or Tug of War . According to Stewart, McCartney’s initial aim was to revisit an approach he was familiar with from his early Beatles days: There’s an adrenaline feel on some of those early tracks, we wanted to try and achieve that sort of feel again so we sat down in the studio with myself on acoustic or electric, Paul on acoustic or bass, Jerry Marotta on the kit and just played the backing track through the three of us to retain that lovely spontaneity you can get that way. (Stewart interviewed for MTV, 1986)

But, in also using the synthesisers and the sampled drums that typify Press to Play and mixing the album to within an inch of its life, a creative fissure had developed between Paul’s initial desire to have the feel of musicians working live together and to also produce an album that reflected the then fashionable highly produced sound of the 80 s. In the studio McCartney moved between being creatively autocratic and creatively accommodating. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, there is a hesitancy on his part in writing about creative personalities since ‘creativity is a property of a complex system, and none of its components alone can explain it’ (1996, p. 56). However, he suggests that creative people tend towards complexity showing: ‘tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated’ (ibid.). They contain contradictory extremes. Instead of being an “individual” they are a “multitude” …They tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic…a creative individual is likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits

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that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is “good,” whereas the other extreme is “bad”. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 57)

Just like John Lennon, Paul McCartney was capable of a withering and acerbic disdain for those he thought didn’t measure up and also the deepest empathy for many of those around him. Csikszentmihalyi adds: A creative personality does not imply neutrality or the average. It is not some position at the midpoint between two poles. It does not imply, for instance, being wishy-washy, so that one is never very competitive or very cooperative. Rather it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires. Perhaps a central position, a golden mean, is the place of choice, what software writers call the default condition. But creative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict. (1996, p. 57)

The Press to Play album was released in 1986 and ‘reached number eight in Britain but failed to make the American Top 20 and, at fewer than a million copies, was the poorest-selling McCartney solo album’ as of 2016 (Norman, 2016, p. 605). As Luca Perasi writes, ‘some critics spoke favorably about the album, thanks to the experimental flavor of many songs. But generally, the response was unenthusiastic’ (2013, p. 260). Anthony DeCurtis from Rolling Stone dammed the album with faint praise writing that ‘Press to Play plants McCartney firmly in the present. Padgham supplies the album with an electronically dense contemporary sound and Stewart pushes McCartney in some new directions’ (Perasi, 2013, p. 261). McCartney then became intent on regaining some critical ground. For his next album, Flowers in the Dirt , McCartney began writing with Elvis Costello. Costello had made his name as a new wave artist recording for Stiff Records. Costello’s first album, My Aim Is True, used the American band Clover for backing and was released in 1977. It was a critical success and Elvis Costello proved himself to be an adept and acerbic lyricist who wrote well-formed and hook-laden songs. Just like McCartney he exhibited a deep immersion in the domain of songwriting and record production. He felt that ‘it was always good to be reminded that music

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didn’t begin in 1977 or 1965 or 1954. I saw no sense in living in the past, but less still in denying that it had existed. There was too much to learn and too much to love’ (Costello, 2015, p. 415). Costello’s knowledge of the accumulated heritage of songwriting, the possible choices presented to him by an extensive space of works coming to him from across time on recording after recording, made him a perfect choice of collaborator for McCartney. He knew his songs and he knew his records. He was to co-write and co-produce the new album. As Howard Sounes notes though, ‘the old problems soon re-emerged. Paul wanted to do things his way, and Elvis was pulling in a different direction’ (2010, p. 414). Hamish Stuart, a journeyman musician from Scotland, was hired early as a session guitarist for the project. He had achieved chart success with the Average White Band and observed at the time that ‘it was pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that it wasn’t going to work as a co-production’ (quoted in Sounes, 2010, p. 414). Elvis soon left the building (Sounes 2010, p. 414) and Stuart, along with Robbie McIntosh from The Pretenders on guitar and Chris Witten on drums, formed the core of the studio band, with the later addition of Wix Wickens on keyboards. These players went on, along with Linda McCartney, to form the touring band Paul used to promote this and the next few albums. To help him once again achieve a contemporary sound, Paul also employed several notable producers of the time including, among others, Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson, Mitchell Froom and Neil Dorfsman. In collaboration with these producers there were many experiments performed in terms of both arrangements and mixing approaches. For example, ‘How Many People’, adapted a loping reggaeinfused arrangement which then sat well with the fact it ‘was dedicated to the memory of Chico Mendes (1944–1988), a Brazilian trade union lead and environmentalist who fought for the Amazon rainforest and was assassinated on December 22nd, 1988’ (Perasi 2013, p. 273). Numerous overdubs were also added ‘including percussion played by Jamaican musician Jah Bunny, whom Paul had produced a few years back’ (ibid.). One of the last songs to be completed for the album was one of Paul’s favourites, ‘Motor of Love’. He’d recorded a demo of it and then produced the first version during the earlier sessions for the album but wasn’t satisfied with what he’d produced. He then took the song to Chris

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Hughes and Ross Cullum, producers who had worked with Tears for Fears, a successful keyboard-based band from the 80s, for a fresh perspective on the instrumentation and sound. Their approach was ‘high-tech – more than any other song on the album’ (Perasi, 2013, p. 289). McCartney wanted the song to sound a little like The Cars’ ‘Drive’, ethereal, almost cold, but compelling. Hughes and Cullum called in The Cars keyboard player, Greg Hawkes, and they set to work using a Fairlight computer, inputting the basic form and chord structure McCartney had supplied to them. They also set up a rhythm track. When McCartney arrived in the studio to see how things were progressing, he observed the song needed a bridge section. After sitting at the piano for a quarter of an hour he had composed the bridge but needed to complete the lyrics. Working on the song for a few days in London ‘we moved to his windmill studio in Sussex. Paul would come in every 2–3 days. At the time he was still working on some songs with Mitchell and in a third studio with an engineer mixing other tracks’ (Hawke quoted in Perasi, 2013, p. 289). The arrangement for ‘Motor of Love’ was changing considerably. In the middle of the second week, when it was time for Paul to do his vocals, it was funny because he still hadn’t finished the lyrics to that bridge! He said, “Ok, wait a minute!” And fifteen minutes later he got the words written...it was so much fun seeing him doing it. There’s sort of a “B-section” on the song, “I won’t steal anything from you”…which on the demo went on a kind of shuffle groove…It was kind of an Eddie Cochrane thing… And we thought it was better to have a more pop feel. Paul also played piano, bass and electric guitar, the Epiphone Casino, I think. (ibid, pp. 289-290)

As Perasi notes, ‘the guitar arpeggio in the coda with its looping effect, seems to suggest an eternal, never-changing divine place’ (2013, p. 290). Once complete the album appeared to return McCartney to critical favour, and then: he undertook world tours that opened up a new phase of his career. The next decade saw novel demands on Paul’s time, whether it was full blown classical commissions like the Liverpool Oratorio or his commitment to

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The Beatles’ gargantuan Anthology. And between those planet straddling tours he made another studio album, 1993’s Off the Ground . (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 130)

Transitional Work Off the Ground used his then current touring band. These were the players he had assembled for Flowers in the Dirt , with the exception of drummer Chris Witten who had been hired by Dire Straits, and so Witten was replaced by Blair Cunningham. Off the Ground was not well received by the critics, receiving mixed reviews from the gatekeepers of popular taste, especially in the UK. Gatekeeping, a filtering process involving flows of information ‘which contain gate areas, where decisions are made, under the influence of various favorable or unfavorable forces’ (McQuail, 1994, p. 213), is a central concept in Paul Hirsch’s filterflow model of the ‘“raw materials” of popular music passing through the music and radio industries’ (Negus, 1996, p. 67). Keith Negus, realising the limitations of the term, gives preference to Bourdieu’s term cultural intermediary and sees the role of critics in the press and radio, and TV programme directors as ‘a series of interactions and mediations as people in particular occupations connect together and play an active part in the production, distribution and social consumption of popular music’ (Negus, 1996, p. 67). At the time Flowers in the Dirt was released the writers in the popular press, like the programme directors on radio and television, still formed a significant part of the field, or social organisation, that mediated popular music. Jon Stratton, however, has argued that ‘it is hard to say what degree of influence the music papers have on the sales of any particular record but the record companies certainly believe it to be significant’ (Stratton, 1982, pp. 268–269). But as Roy Shuker asserts: fan-oriented music magazines play a major part in the process of selling music as an economic commodity while at the same time investing it with cultural significance…They form an important adjunct to the record companies’ marketing of their products, providing the record companies

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(and artists) with critical feedback on their releases. In the process, they also become promotional devices, providing supportive quotes for advertising, and forming part of press kits sent to radio stations and other press outlets. Both the press and critics are not, at least directly, vertically integrated into the music industry (i.e. not owned by the record companies). A sense of distance is thereby maintained, while at the same time the need of the industry to constantly sell new images, styles and product is met. (Shuker 1999, p.12)

Matt Brennan argues further that ‘receiving the right kind of music criticism at the right time has become an integral step in the business of selling records and sustaining a musical career’ (2006, p. 222). He also asserts that while ‘music critics exert a surprising amount of influence on the livelihoods of musicians’ (2006, p. 229) it is problematic to overly ‘generalize about the relationship between musicians and the press, because the press performs different functions according to the career status of the musician in question’ (Brennan, 2006, p. 233). McCartney, at this stage of his career, was fortunate to be able to pick and choose who he granted interviews to. Needless to say, his PR team at MPL tried to create a buzz around the album but, on release and following a series of mixed reviews in the press, it did not sell well either in North America or the UK. The next album, Flaming Pie, was largely produced by Paul McCartney and Jeff Lynne, famous for his work in ELO and for his contributions to the revival of George Harrison’s career on Cloud Nine. Lynne was also a member of the highly successful Travelling Wilburys and had just produced The Beatles’ Anthology related singles ‘Free as A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. McCartney also brought in his long-term Beatles mentor, George Martin, as well as the former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. This production team used Abbey Road and AIR studios in London, the latter of which was set up by Martin in the late sixties when he became one of the first independent record producers in the music industry. Tracking sessions also took place at Sun Valley Studio in Idaho and, as had become a regular practice for McCartney, at his own studio, The Mill, in Sussex. This album saw McCartney focus on songs first and

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foremost to produce a collection that resonated well with his past work. He noted that: I came off the back of The Beatles Anthology with an urge to do some new music. The Anthology was very good for me because it reminded me of the Beatles standards and the standards that we reached with the songs. So in a way it was a refresher course that set the framework for this album. Watching the Anthology also reminded me of the time that we didn’t take to make an album and of the fun we had when we did one. The Beatles were not a serious group. So I wanted to try to get back into some of that, to have some fun and not sweat it. That’s been the spirit of making this album. (McCartney quoted in The Beatles Bible, 2021)

McCartney also brought in old colleagues like Steve Miller and Ringo Starr. It was also the last time Linda McCartney was to perform on one of Paul’s albums. Linda had been his partner and collaborator from the late sixties to this period, having first met at the time of the release of Sgt. Pepper. As well as working as a freelance professional photographer she went on to co-write a number of songs with him and also co-produced the Ram album. Paul invited her to play in his new band Wings and after a baptism of fire she learned to be an adept musician taking on keyboards and backing vocals. Just like Paul himself and many other musicians before and since, Linda moved from being a complete amateur to being a fully seasoned professional after long years on the road and in the studio. Long-term band members like Denny Laine and Wix Wickens admired her and liked her company and others like Elvis Costello found her ‘welcoming and kind’ (Norman, 2016, p. 706). She was not only Paul’s life partner but also his muse until her death, when, like his mother, she passed away from breast cancer. Songs like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ from McCartney I through to ‘Somedays’ on Flaming Pie gave listeners an understanding of how much he appreciated and needed her collaboration and love. She was a forthright and necessary sounding board for his ongoing creative practice, protecting his flame and introducing him to many new ideas. She was also the entrée to McCartney’s long-term professional relationship with his trusted legal advisor John Eastman, Linda’s brother, who, as a member of the field, had steered Paul through the long legal battles triggered by the Apple Records crisis,

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the dissolution of The Beatles and his suits with Allen Klein. To bring the story full circle, Flaming Pie was released on The Beatles’ old record label Parlophone in the UK and on another subsidiary of EMI, Capitol, in the USA. It met with approval from his amassed fan base. Driving Rain, the next in the line of the studio albums, was coproduced by David Kahne and used two members of McCartney’s new touring band, Abe Laboriel and Rusty Andersen, among others. It was recorded quickly just like Run Devil Run, his recent collection of rock and roll tunes. ‘Freedom’ his impromptu reaction to the terrorist attack on New York on 9/11 was not added—we will come back to this single shortly—and the pre-release campaign for the album may have affected sales, which were weak. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard , a return to critical acclaim, was traditionally produced. McCartney placed himself, as an artist, in the hands of producer Nigel Godrich and, after considering working with the full band, Godrich insisted he works with McCartney alone as a multi-instrumentalist. The album did well. Memory Almost Full appeared to be a transitional album for Paul. He worked with David Kahne as the sole credited producer and the album produced songs such as ‘That Was Me’, which saw Paul reflecting on his early career as a young and successful musician from Liverpool, and ‘Dance Tonight’, a simple, catchy, almost throwaway song, instigated by the purchase of a mandolin and which was centred around that instrument’s musical characteristics. Since it was tuned the same as a violin, McCartney had to learn to play different chord formations on it and in doing so, as was common for him in his ongoing creative practice, this exercise triggered a new song. When the album was nearly done, McCartney hired mastering engineer Bob Ludwig to master the final product. Mastering is a little known and yet crucial part of the recording process. Don Bartley, one of the foremost mastering engineers in Australia, states: The word mastering originated from the early days of shellac and vinyl records. Mastering describes the process of creating a production master to facilitate manufacture of the final mass-produced product…It wasn’t until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that the transfer of audio started to be processed. Equalizers and compressors were used to obtain a more

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musical result which enhanced the detail of the recording making the end result louder and more exciting. Nowadays this processing has become more akin to audio post-production with the use of a multitude of effects and mixing devices to make the music shine within this highly competitive industry. (Bartley 2006, online)

Jeff Murphy asserts that ‘mastering is the final creative stage in the production of your recording and can be the difference between sounding like a professionally released disc and an amateurish-sounding, homespun effort’ (Murphy, 2002, online). Reinforcing these ideas, Bob Katz asserts ‘mastering is the last creative step in the audio production process, the bridge between mixing and replication’ (Katz, 2002, p. 11). For Memory Almost Full , ‘the quality of the album’s mastering caused a harsh debate between McCartney’s fans over various forums and websites. The heavily compressed sound of Memory Almost Full was considered by many as part of the infamous “Loudness Wars”’ (Perasi, 2013, p. 401). For Robert Taylor: Hyper-compression presents one of the most challenging issues facing Western mainstream popular music in the 21st Century. Historically, loudness has been utilized as a mechanism to influence consumer behavior, taking advantage of the non-linearity of the human hearing mechanism. This process has been described as the “louder is better” paradigm. This paradigm conforms to an underlying belief that listeners consider louder music, both preferred and perceived, as sonically superior to that which is softer. During the so-called “Loudness Wars” artists actively sought means to render their recordings as loud as possible, at times exceeding the medium’s limitations. Digital audio technology presented opportunities to significantly increase loudness levels, enabling the average level of an audio signal to be hyper-compressed, resulting in a greater perceived loudness when reproduced. This excessive use of compression, that is hyper-compression, can intercalate a range of undesirable artefacts such as non-linear distortion as various studies have shown. There is now a distinct tension between agent’s notions of loudness as a commercial imperative, its aesthetic intent, and the integrity of the audio signal. (Taylor, 2018, p. iii)

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When asked who was responsible for the excessive use of hypercompression on Memory Almost Full , Bob Ludwig responded that ‘the final CD is exactly the way Paul and the Producer wanted, every note’ (quoted in Perasi, 2013, p. 401).

The Next Phase Paul McCartney’s productions now increasingly saw him undertake the role of co-producer, as he searched for ways to remain innovative as tastes changed while satisfying his long-term core audience. Despite the credit listings for each album, it would be hard at this point in his career to separate McCartney’s production work from his songwriting and performances on record. In fact, largely due to his extensive cultural and symbolic capital, he would be the final arbiter of any decision being made, no matter whether he had formal oversight or not. The business was also changing and had moved into a new phase. The music world was no longer transitioning to digital—it was now the dominant form. The next in the long line of studio albums realised by Paul McCartney was recorded, as was now customary, in a variety of studios in Los Angeles, New York, London and of course at The Mill Studio, near his Sussex home. One of the interesting things about the New album was that it was released by his own company MPL on Hear Music and on Universal International. We will explore these moves within the field of popular music more fully shortly but for now we can say that Paul, once again, used a variety of producers as he worked on New. Giles Martin not only produced a number of the tracks but was also credited as executive producer, meaning he had overall responsibility for the execution of the complete album. Giles Martin, the son of George Martin, had worked on Beatles-related projects, most notably the Love sessions, and observed that: My concern about working with Paul on New, was that he might be jaded, that everything I ever suggested he must have done hundreds of times before. But he treats everything like it’s the first time. He’s not scared of putting a guitar through a Leslie speaker just because The

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Beatles did. After all, everyone else does it. There’s one on New – ‘I Can Bet’ – if you made a record without using the tricks The Beatles used, it would be complete silence. But he never looks back, and he always wants to try new things. (Gilbert, 2013, p. 79)

Mark Ronson, famous for his work with Amy Winehouse and big hits like ‘Uptown Funk’ with Bruno Mars, was recruited after he DJ’d at one of Paul McCartney’s parties. Ronson was very familiar with the experimental works on McCartney II and observed: You forget what a great drummer he is, and that it’s him on a lot of his solo stuff and a few Beatles tracks. There’s a certain kind of rhythm on, say, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ which is also on ‘New’. But it’s really hard to get it right, to get the right feel, because it’s Paul’s own personal groove. In the end we had to get his live band in to play on the track because it’s so difficult to follow. Once he picks up that bass his rhythmic sensibilities also kick in – that’s why I like the beat heavy Beatles tracks like ‘The Word’. Watching him in the studio was a master class in musicology, in harmony and arrangement. (quoted in Gilbert, 2013, p. 75)

Ethan Johns is another scion of a famous father, Glyn Johns. Glyn Johns was an engineer–producer who recorded hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton and The Faces as well as Crosby, Stills and Nash, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Ryan Adams and many others. Glyn Johns had been given the unenviable task of mixing the first unreleased version of The Beatles’ Let it Be album and also worked with McCartney briefly on Red Rose Speedway before a difference of opinion over the use of marijuana in the studio forced Johns out (Johns, 2014). Glyn’s son, Ethan, who co-produced New, grew up steeped in sixties music lore. Ethan suggests that ‘the hardest thing for an artist to do is open themselves up, but Paul’s early solo works are very important, shining a light for artists looking for courage. The boldness of them is up there with the great recordings’ (quoted in Gilbert, 2013, p. 72). As far as McCartney’s creative practice on New was concerned, Johns stated that:

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I don’t like to pre-plan, I like to follow inspiration, as the things that come out of that have the biggest emotional impact. Paul’s the same…We did two songs, both incredibly quickly – four or five hours for each one. He played harmonium, put a double bass part down in, ooh, 10 minutes. But he also likes to experiment with abstract stuff - in fact, some of the tape loops he did for ‘Hosanna’ were done on the same machine he used in The Beatles days, which he carries around with him. He had me singing into it with him, making chanting loops. I had a great time, he’s a very inspiring guy. One of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century and beyond. (quoted in Gilbert, 2013, p. 72)

Paul Epworth was the fourth producer to work McCartney on New. With five Grammys to his credit, it was Epworth’s work with Adele that drew McCartney’s attention to the young producer. Epworth coproduced three tracks for New and co-wrote ‘Queenie Eye’, the second single from the album, with Paul McCartney. ‘Queenie Eye’ started out with me on drums and him on Moog, and it sounded like Death from Above covering a Fall song. His vocal reminded me of Mark E. Smith, but I did not turn around and say that, because you realize that everything recorded in music in the last 50 years was probably designed by him. Paul has this great energy and swagger. Whatever he does musically has a swing and feel that most modern records don’t have, and striking that balance was a challenge. I’m quite a rudimentary musician compared to him, but I can use modern production tricks to make up for that – he didn’t have that luxury 50 years ago, he had to be the best at what he did. His music has its own characteristics: by playing something particular on the piano or by switching a chord, he suddenly made it sound like a McCartney song. He would add these little notes to a chord or pluck harmonics on the guitar to find a vocal harmony. It was the most amazing education as a producer. (quoted in Gilbert, 2013, p. 76)

Paul McCartney is also credited as a producer on Egypt Station, along with Greg Kurstin, Zach Skelton and Ryan Tedder. However, the bulk of the production work was undertaken by Greg Kurstin, with Paul McCartney—as the one paying for the recording—contributing significant decisions. After McCartney had tested Kurstin’s strengths on

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recording the soundtrack for a short animated film, Egypt Station was completed ‘in little blocks of time in between [Paul’s] tours and stuff like that. It would be two weeks here and then another two weeks there’ (Kurstin quoted in Greene, 2018). At times they were working together in studios in the USA and at times in Britain and this process took place over a couple of years. One of the tasks a producer must take on board is the fact they have to critique the artists’ work in order to improve the songs. It can be inhibiting, especially when the artist is of the stature of Paul McCartney. Kurstin noted the strangeness of it as they worked together on Egypt Station and at the same time his reaction reveals a great deal about McCartney’s approach to this part of his creative practice: It is strange, but I know that’s what he really wants from me. I just have to take a breath and say it. Sometimes it might not go over very well, but he was always really cool. I remember a couple of times where I might have suggested something that might have been challenging. I can’t remember specifically, but I remember him just sort of carrying on and I’m wondering, “Did he hear me?” Then maybe half an hour would go by and I’d say, “Hey, Paul, what about that idea I mentioned a little while ago?” He said, “Oh, I heard you. I was just pretending to ignore you.” We’d just laugh about it. Then sometimes two days later he’d try the idea and I’d be like, “Wow, OK.” I thought I failed miserably with the idea, but he came back to it and really tried. I think he’s always listening, always absorbing. I did have to think a couple of times before I’d say something. But then after I got more comfortable with him and got to know him better, I just couldn’t think about it. I’d just throw out an idea and he’d be cool with it. Sometimes I would have to mention something two or three times if I really believed in it. If he challenged me and wasn’t into the idea, I would realize, you know, that this is coming from a Beatle. He’s tried everything at this point. He’s done experimental albums. He’s done pop albums. Anything I could possibly ever want to do in the studio, he’s been there and tried it. (Kurstin quoted in Greene, 2018)

Paul had no such collaborative process in place for the production of McCartney III . This album spent its first week of release at number 1 and it has received what Metacritic.com, an aggregator of critical

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reviews from magazines like Uncut, as universal acclaim. The bulk of this album was made by McCartney working at his own in Hog Hill Mill studio during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Britain in 2020. McCartney III was modelled on the prior two solo recordings, that is, McCartney I and McCartney II . Paul’s home studio was well equipped. Despite the claim that the work was done entirely by McCartney himself, producing and playing, he relied on engineer Steve Orchard and his longterm Technical Manager Keith Smith to take care of the technical aspects of recording this experimental album. Once his team at MPL were aware he was doing some recording during the lockdown they encouraged him to keep working on it and so what began as a way of cataloguing ideas, a habit McCartney has maintained since his early Beatles days, became the next major record project. Keith Smith noted: He’s always writing, Paul. He’s forever recording or scribbling down little bits of ideas, riffs and lyrics and he’s collected them for years and years. Sometimes he has a big purge, and we document them all and store them. He just started to come in with some of these ideas and said, ‘Let’s work on it’. It was literally demos for a bit of fun. He loves writing and recording and it was just something to occupy his time. We did that for 10 weeks, and seriously, we didn’t start thinking about an album until the three of us started thinking ‘There’s 10 really good songs here.’ We started joking about a lockdown album, then Paul took a break for a couple of weeks and he’d talk to other people about it - friends, family and even management I think and they just kind of jumped on it. It turned into an album after it had virtually all been recorded and mixed. He came back and we did some little tweaks and that was it. (quoted in Williams, 2020)

Many record producers are not only reliant on a knowledge of rhythm, melody, harmony, song structure, arrangement and instrumentation, but they also need some form of an understanding of psychoacoustics and the properties of sound in order to effect some change to the emotional characteristics of a performance. They also need to gain a knowledge of what constitutes a good performance. Increasingly, though, they also need to have some knowledge of the techniques used for getting the most out of the technological apparatus available to them in the studio. It

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is in the latter area that McCartney tends to rely on audio engineers more than any other. But engineers have been largely overlooked within the creative process of record-making. As Thompson points out: ‘songwriters, recording musicians and, more recently, record producers are all, to some degree, thought of as the creative force behind the production of a record. Engineers are almost forgotten in the story of record-making’ (2019, p. 175). This lack of recognition of engineers is often associated with the hierarchies that have developed around art and craft, hierarchies premised largely on Romantic and inspirationist views of creativity. As this chapter has shown, engineers make a valuable creative contribution to the production of recordings and so the ‘anachronistic distinctions between art and craft’ (ibid, p. 197) should be challenged and the task of engineering should also be presented as a creative endeavor that contributes to the broader creative system of commercial record production’ (ibid., p. 197). As one example, Thompson notes: The creative practice of microphoning results from the engineers applied knowledge of microphone characteristics, the acoustics of the room, the techniques of the performer and the sonic properties of instruments. The engineer carefully balances each of these elements against the expectations of the immediate field and the wider field in order to achieve the resultant recorded sound. The creative practice of mixing too requires the engineer to employ their musical, technical and sociocultural knowledge to balance, process and combine the various elements of the recording with an aesthetic sense of the artist’s history to meet the expectations of both the immediate field and the audience. (Thompson, 2019, p. 197)

Audio engineers’ creative tools are technological and highly material. In this regard, Vlad Gl˘aveanu has asserted that a lot of ‘creative work is anchored in the physicality of the world’ (2014, p. 49) and this connection to materiality ‘both facilitates and constrains action’ (ibid.). The choice and use of certain techniques used by engineers to operate the technological apparatus available in the recording studio provides the affordances creative action relies on. As Bruno Latour has argued, technological objects ‘might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible forbid and so on’ (quoted in

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Gl˘aveanu, 2014, p. 59). In fact, the circle of creative influence of the broader field is widened since ‘objects themselves are not void of intentionality [because] objects bear the mark of the intentionality of their maker and users and, as such, it is impossible for us to separate them from human understanding and human activities’ (Gl˘aveanu, 2014, p. 60). This situation applies not only to musical instruments, how they are assembled, who created them and who uses them, but also to the technology these instruments are processed through by audio engineers. Paul McCartney’s audio engineer on McCartney III , Steve Orchard, comments on the Hog Hill Mill studio and its array of equipment, a set up that not only connects this recording to the field of popular music but, in the process, also provides McCartney and his engineers with a wealth of affordances and recording possibilities: It’s an amazing setup we’ve got here. It’s centered around a 60-channel Neve V Series desk, then we’ve got some vintage Neve preamps: 1081s and 1064s, we’ve got 10 channels of those. Then we’ve also got 10 channels of Focusrite ISA 110 vintage modules too. So that’s the bulk of the preamps, then we’ve also got some Helios and Chandler units as well. There’s a very good mic collection, a nice live room, everything is set-up, mic’d-up so we’re always ready to record and mix at the same time. It just depends on what we’re doing, often tracks will change. Paul will decide what he wants to do, so we have to be ready for any eventuality. (quoted in Williams, 2020)

Pro Tools, a digital software package that has become ubiquitous within the music industry, installed in high-end studios and bedrooms across the world, sits at the heart of the recording system at Hog Hill Mill studio, but so do the instruments Paul has collected over the many years he has been a player. The drums used on the McCartney III album are a replica of the Ludwig Legacy Maple kit Ringo Starr has been using and Paul was very familiar with them—Ringo having loaned the original to him for a lengthy period. As Keith Smith indicates ‘there’s not a lot of point in giving him stuff, when he thinks drums, he thinks of that kit and he loves it’ (quoted in Williams, 2020). Among the many keyboards used on the album, a feature of his experimentation on McCartney II , are a Steinway Baby Grand piano and a

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classic Moog synthesiser, which as his Technical Manager Keith Smith points out, ‘was probably bought for a Wings tour. There were two of them: one that went on the road and this one…I’ve got one guy I know who can fix them and keep it going! It’s not easy, it’s getting harder now!’ (quoted in Williams, 2020). For acoustic guitars Paul primarily used a Martin D28 which he has owned for approximately 30 years. ‘He’s used that for everything, recording, live. We’ve got a couple, we’ve just got a new-ish one and he’s got an older one, a’64 D28 that lives at home with him’ (ibid). There are also many guitars sent to him by manufacturers and a number he has picked up while in his office in Soho Square. ‘In London, he often goes for a little walk past Hobgoblin Guitars and they often have left-handed guitars in there’ (ibid.). His team tends ‘to have a guitar in the control room at all times so he can pick it up if he needs to work something out’ (ibid.). For electric guitars he keeps returning to an all original’57 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop which he uses for a rock sound. He also uses a rare 1949 Gibson ES-5 left-handed guitar which has a very specific warm tone to it. For cleaner guitar sounds he favours a mint condition, 1954 left-handed Fender Telecaster ‘which is rare as hen’s teeth’ (ibid.). ‘He sticks the guitar straight into the AC-30 and gets the sound’ (ibid.). The Vox AC-30 amplifier ‘was born in 1975, again, for a Wings tour. He’s got two of them, the spare is in really nice condition too. But this one that he uses now is his number one. It’s getting a little bit crackly here and there, but it copes well with what he throws at it’ (ibid.). Given his recognition as a pre-eminent player, the bass is also important to Paul. On this album he used Elvis Presley’s bass player Bill Black’s Kay upright bass, which was made in 1952–1953 and was given to him by Linda as a birthday present after buying it from Scotty Moore’s family. Scotty Moore was Elvis Presley’s original and highly innovative guitar player. The upright bass is ‘still strung right-handed for Bill Black, Paul just turns it around and plays it the other way round! It’s a lovely sound’ (ibid.). However, a large proportion of the McCartney III album was recorded with Paul’s number one bass, the model most identified with him and his career, that is, the Hofner 5001. It is interesting to note, especially in regard to a creative engineer’s accumulation of cultural,

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social and symbolic capital and their connection to economic capital, that when Neil Dorfsman was working on Flowers in The Dirt he tried very hard to get The Beatles’ bass sound but could not do it. He got quite frustrated declaring that it was the ‘same instrument, same player, same everything. The Hofner bass is not considered a very punchy or powerful one but in The Beatles it is like that. I remember asking [The Beatles engineer] Geoff Emerick how he recorded it and he didn’t want to tell me’ (quoted in Perasi, 2013, p. 287). McCartney’s engineer on McCartney III , Steve Orchard, suggests that: It doesn’t sound like any other Hofner. Sometimes they can be quite hard to record, Hofners. They can be really subby without a lot of tone to them, it’s all woof. But there’s something unique about Paul’s one, maybe it’s just the amount of music that’s gone through it from his fingers! It’s like a good old acoustic guitar, there’s something about how the wood absorbs all of those frequencies. (quoted in Williams, 2020)

Keith Smith goes on to assert that: Paul’s got other Hofners, and he’s got other basses. He’s got his Rickenbacker - the Ricky from the 1970s and a Wal five-string and a couple of other things that we’ll occasionally drag out if he wants to try something different. But 9 times out of 10, he’ll pick up the Hofner. When he plays the Hofner you can tell it’s just part of him. It’s so organic and such a natural feel and sound for him, and it always sounds phenomenal. (ibid.)

Keith Smith also senses that there is a subtle difference between each instrument McCartney uses: I think I’ve noticed with the Rickenbacker - it doesn’t change his playing style - but maybe because he’s experiencing a very different sound from the Ricky than from the Hofner he’ll maybe use some slightly different techniques. But it’s almost irrelevant because his number one, go-to is the Hofner. (quoted in Williams, 2020)

For the singer’s instrument, the voice, each microphone chosen will alter the color of the recorded vocal. For Paul’s voice Orchard tends to use

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‘a Telefunken valve 47, which is an old one. Then we’ve got a Wunder CM7, which is their sort of valve 47. And then I’ll use an SM7 sometimes, depending on what the song is’ (quoted in Williams, 2020). Those microphones will be run through an array of preamplifiers, all of which, importantly, will also add a certain tonality to the voice and are chosen specifically for that purpose. The preamplifiers used on McCartney III , included ‘Focusrite ISA 110 preamps, and then we’ve got a couple of Fairchild 660 compressors, so I use those and it sounds great! No EQ, just straight in’ (ibid.). Orchard asserts that overall, for McCartney, there are also very few rules to his work patterns. If he’s got a song that’s fully formed then he’ll sit down and put it down with whatever instrument he’s written it on. Sometimes with a click, sometimes without depending on how it feels. But really it just depends. With some of the songs that were more constructed, like ‘Deep Deep Feeling’, we’ll use Pro Tools like a canvas, almost. Throwing ideas at it, moving things around, changing tempos, keys, and seeing what gels together. (Orchard quoted in Williams, 2020)

Smith observes, as far as which takes are given the go ahead, that: Quite often it’s the original take, and if it feels right that’s the most important part. Paul will go out in the live room and say, ‘Doesn’t matter what it sounds like, let’s just do it!’. But then that’ll often end up being the final part, so it’s got to be right. Everything matters! It’s part of Paul’s process and creativity, I think. He doesn’t like the interruption of having to get things technically brilliant. He’ll often say, ‘It doesn’t matter!’. He’s focused and in the vibe, and he really likes to keep going. He doesn’t like hanging around for much! it has to be really fluid. Because distractions can really hamper a process…Once he’s in the vibe, he doesn’t want to stop. A phone call or something not working is a distraction to this enjoyment he’s getting from building something that was in his head (Smith quoted in Williams, 2020).

Smith’s comments point to McCartney’s psychological state in which he aims to become immersed in the process, or as Csikszentmihalyi terms it, a state of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). The state of flow is described

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as one where: ‘the person is absorbed in their activities and when actions follow smoothly from their thoughts…Attention is available to negotiate outside tasks and people feel in command of the situation’ (Larson, 1988, p. 163). The state of flow typically occurs when participants have a clear idea of their aims and objectives and a realistic understanding of how these aims and objectives can be accomplished (Larson, 1988). Those in the state of flow therefore know what they want to achieve and have a clear understanding of how they intend to achieve it. Furthermore, mechanisms of feedback are also important, whether they are internal or external, because the individual requires some direction in determining whether they are correct or incorrect. Fundamentally however, is the balance between the individual’s skill and the apparent challenge of the activity (Larson, 1988). If the activity is too challenging then the individual becomes anxious and the activity is not challenging enough then boredom sets in. These ideas have been illustrated by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) in which the state of flow is achieved by balancing the level of challenge and the level of skill. McCartney aims for a state of flow by removing any technical concerns from his performance or production process and working quickly to enhance his instinctive reactions. McCartney likes to work quickly in the studio, therefore everything technical must be set up and ready to go as Orchard explains: ‘There’s been times where he’s done a piano track, I’ve pressed stop on Pro Tools, looked up into the live room and he’s already behind the drums going “Come on!”’ (Orchard quoted in Williams, 2020). Keith Smith also confirms that Paul ‘never looks for the obvious harmonies’ (ibid). After Paul finishes a vocal part ‘he’ll go out in the room sometimes and he’ll hear the harmony in his head’. He never has gone for the obvious one—if you listen back to him and John on Beatles stuff, it was always the one that makes you go ‘Ooh, that was a bit weird, but it’s lovely’ (Orchard quoted in Williams, 2020). Having worked closely with him, Steve Orchard summarises his own understanding of McCartney’s creative practice: I find it astonishing that he’s never fallen into any working patterns. He’s never complacent about anything, even if he’s out there doing a shaker part, he’s really getting into it, performing it. Or if he’s doing a guitar

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part, he’ll figure out all the different inversions and work out which suits the part best. So it’s always stemming from that raw performance place…He’s so prolific, I find myself thinking ‘Yeah, it’s another Paul McCartney song’. Then I think ‘No, it’s another Paul McCartney song!’. But to him it just pours out, and it has done ever since I’ve known him, it’s amazing…It’s what he’s good at and it’s what he really enjoys. He loves being in the studio and creating. (Orchard quoted in Williams, 2020)

Conclusion At times, and from the evidence presented above, it has been hard to distinguish where McCartney the musician ends and McCartney the producer begins, especially in the latter part of his career. Perhaps this is because, as a producer, he has typified what Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding (2011) call the ‘musician-producer’. Even assigning this role to McCartney is problematic as his engineering skills have developed as the need arose, although he tends to rely on others to engineer for him. However, whether a producer’s ‘skills develop in either area it is common for the quality focus of the producer to be honed in either on the music and the musician or more biased to the engineering’ (Hepworth-Sawyer & Golding, 2011, pp. 7–8). In this case, and in response to what we’ve presented here, it can be claimed McCartney’s production focus has certainly been on the music as a necessary extension of his songwriting and performance skills. The evidence also suggests that he developed as a producer through the processes of mentoring, immersion into the domain and field studio practices, as well as absorbing many informal musical lessons as a prolific songwriter (McIntyre, 2006, pp. 204–205). ‘Access to this lengthy song tradition through the wealth of material he had come into contact with… afforded McCartney a deep immersion in the domain of the popular music of the day’ (ibid., p. 205) and it was through an extended knowledge of these song traditions, the accumulated heritage of the field of works (Bourdieu, 1996, Toynbee 2000) that he developed an ear, a feel or sens pratique (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 5), for what would work and what wouldn’t. In this case we can claim that for McCartney, immersion in the domain of record producing also took place for him as he

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developed as a musician acquiring the arranging and production skills he would use again and again as a musically focused record producer. Additionally he was part ‘arranger, musician, recording engineer, songwriter, and A&R rep’ (Watson, 2007, p. 166) who relied on a field of critical experts who constituted the field (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999) of record production for him. This included his co-producers, and certainly other engineers and fellow musicians, all of whom had some understanding of the knowledge system they shared. Each of them was making judgements, tacitly or overtly, about the novelty and appropriateness of the variations McCartney presented them with. His own idiosyncratic experiences, operating as he did within the rarefied atmosphere of being an ex-Beatle and a musician and songwriter of some considerable renown, has also played its part in his creative practice. However, no single factor that has been previously discussed is, in itself, sufficient to fully explain McCartney’s creative practice as a record producer. It is more likely that a combination of all these factors, operating within a system of creative action (McIntyre et al., 2016), disposed him to operate as a record producer, one who was intrigued by the possibilities that this rich and creative musical world afforded him.

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McIntyre, P. (2009, November 13–15). Songwriting and studio practice: The systems model of creativity applied to “writing records”. The 5th Art of Record Production Conference, University of Glamorgan, Cardiff S. Wales. McIntyre, P. (2011). Systemic creativity: The partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Musicology Australia, 33(2), 239–252. McIntyre, P. (2012a). Creativity and cultural production: Issues for media practice. Palgrave Macmillan. McIntyre, P. (2012b). Rethinking creativity: Record production and the systems model. In S. Frith & S. Zargorski-Thomas (Eds.), The art of record production (pp. 149–161). Ashgate. McIntyre, P., Fulton, J., & Paton, E. (Eds.). (2016). The creative system in action: Understanding cultural production and practice. Palgrave Macmillan. McQuail, D. (1994). Mass communication theory: An introduction. Sage. Miles, B. (1997). Paul McCartney: Many years from now. Secker & Warburg. MTV. (1986). Press to play documentary Pt.1. Youtube.com. http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=ERdd-DfRYlA. Accessed 17 April 2016. Mulhern, T. (1990, July). Paul McCartney. Guitar player (pp. 16–33). New York. Murphy, J. (2002). The secret in making your CD sound great! Geargenie.com. http://www.geargenie.com/articles/jeff_murphy_0516022.html. Accessed 16 October 2002. Negus, K. (1996). Popular music in theory: An introduction. Polity Press. Norman, P. (2016). Paul McCartney: The biography. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Peel, J. (2002). The unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde. Reynolds & Hearn. Perasi, L. (2013). Paul McCartney: Recording sessions (1969–2013)—A journey through Paul McCartney’s songs after The Beatles. L.I.L.Y. Publishing. Ramone, P. (2007). Making records. Hyperion. Salewicz, C. (1987). McCartney: The biography. Queen Anne Press. Shuker, R. (1994). Understanding popular music. Routledge. Shuker, R. (1999). Teaching popular music: Issues and approaches. Metro Education, 19, 9–13. Sounes, H. (2010). FAB: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Harper Collins. Southall, B., Vince, P., & Rouse, A. (1997). Abbey road: The story of the world’s most famous recording studio. Omnibus Press. Stratton, J. (1982). Between two worlds: Art and commercialism in the record industry. Sociological Review, 30 (2), 267–285.

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Taylor, R. (2018). Hyper-compression in music production: Why does the myth persist despite scientific evidence to the contrary? (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Newcastle, NSW. Thompson, P. (2016). Scalability of the creative system in the recording studio. In P. McIntyre, J. Fulton, & E. Paton (Eds.), The creative system in action: Understanding cultural production and practice (pp. 74–86). Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, P. (2019). Creativity in the recording studio: Alternative takes. Palgrave Macmillan. Tobler, J., & Grundy, S. (1982). The record producers. BBC Books. Toynbee, J. (2000). Making popular music: Musicians, creativity and institutions. Arnold. Tschmuck, P. (2006). Creativity and innovation in the music industry. Springer. Vignolle, J. (1980). Mixing genres and reaching the public: The production of pop music. Social Science Information, 19 (1), 75–105. Watson, C. (2007). Songwriting: Everything you need to compose, perform, and sell great songs. Adams Media. Wicke, P. (1990). Rock music: Culture, aesthetics and sociology. Cambridge University Press. Wikipedia. (2011). Black Dyke Band. Wikipedia.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Black_Dyke_Band. Accessed 10 April 2016. Williams, S. (2020, December 18). Once he’s in the vibe, he doesn’t want to stop. MusicRadar.com. https://www.musicradar.com/news/exclusive-rec ording-mccartney-iii. Date accessed 20 January 2021. Wolff, J. (1981). The social production of art. Macmillan. Zak, A. (2007). Editorial. Journal of the Art of Record Production, 2, http://arp journal.com/the-art-of-record-production/. Date accessed 21 April 2016.

7 Paul McCartney’s Multiple Creative and Business Ventures

As a creative person, Paul McCartney is a risk-taker. Not only has he maintained a strong connection to his long-term audience, who have followed him through a whole series of creative twists and turns, but he has ventured into territory that many other creative practitioners working in a similar vein would avoid altogether. And he appears to have done so for the sheer thrill of being at the cutting edge. Even in his Beatles days, he was not averse to putting his and his fellow band members’ reputations on the line. He introduced music hall numbers, Broadway show tunes, some Tin Pan Alley, and along with the others, a little bit of jazz, soul and country to what was ostensibly a rock’n’roll band. Each album in this early period of his and the band’s creative practice built upon what they had done together previously. Their fans did not expect Rubber Soul , let alone Revolver or Sgt. Pepper, the latter based on an idea from McCartney’s own fertile imagination and one pursued with vigour by him and his colleagues at the time. As a creative person operating in the harsh glare of his own astounding fame, he has often thrown caution to the wind while at the same time maintaining his position as a hitmaking songwriter and a highly successful concert drawcard. And yet © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_7

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his status, particularly in his home country, is often seen in a similar way to a ‘a light entertainment celebrity who once hosted a game show’ (Leslie, 2020). This dismissive attitude is odd but understandable—only to a degree. As Ian Leslie wrote: ‘McCartney’s reputation has never fully recovered from the shredding it took when The Beatles broke up’ (Leslie, 2020). One reason for this may be a product of the times because, as Ian Leslie notes, in that period, the story of who and what The Beatles represented was shaped by young male rock critics whose personal beliefs were tied up with those of the baby-boomer generation who were coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies. These were supposedly revolutionary times. It was the case that ‘the men who edited and wrote for Rolling Stone and NME in the 1970s had a particular view of the world—a sense that the straight world was corrupt and dying about to be swept away by mind-expanding, rule-breaking radicalism’ (Leslie, 2020). John Lennon was seen as iconoclastic by this group of cultural intermediaries, that is, those people in particular occupations, such as rock critics, who ‘play an active part in the production, distribution and social consumption of popular music’ (Negus, 1996, p. 67), and he was canny enough to capitalise on this situation. Lennon - hugely entertaining, highly opinionated - had the mic more or less to himself, and effectively shaped the story of The Beatles for decades to come. John portrayed himself as the creative life force of the band, with Paul as his musically accomplished but conservative and shallow sidekick. Lennon’s interviews were riddled with contradictions, falsehoods and exaggerations, but he spoke with such verve that journalists took what he said as gospel - as Weber puts it, they mistook Lennon’s emotional honesty for truthfulness. Critics and biographers took up Lennon’s theme, and his horribly premature death, in 1980, sealed the deal. (Leslie, 2020)

Paul McCartney, despite his portrayal by Lennon as a PR machine, did not do justice to himself and his own public image at the time of The Beatles break-up. McCartney withdrew from the critical fray, giving very few interviews and becoming known by NME as ‘the hermit of St Johns Wood’. At this time, he rarely talked about or played Beatles material, until much later when it became a staple of his professional life. At

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the same time, he presented himself as a dedicated family man. He was depicted on the cover of LIFE magazine on his farm in Scotland, a place he had withdrawn to, with his new family, Linda, Heather and Mary, to get away from the daily grind of the business of separation. The album jacket of McCartney, his first entirely produced solo album, saw him on the back cover with his baby, Mary, wrapped warmly and protectively inside his bomber jacket. It is easy to under-estimate quite how bizarre this image-making was for a rock star. It was at the height of the counter-culture’s contempt for the family man and his petty narrow, blinkered life. Rock stars were meant to be shining examples of a lifestyle liberated from the shackles of bourgeois convention. Revelling in domesticity wasn’t cool. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing a genius did. (Leslie, 2020)

And yet McCartney remained true to his own idiosyncratic vision. He demonstrated the worth of family, a position Lennon himself eventually came to embrace with songs like ‘Beautiful Boy’ which extolled the pleasure and worries parenthood, domesticity and family life bring. But there are other stories to be told. Probably if you asked most people who know a little about The Beatles to say who they found most interesting, John would be the most common answer. If you surveyed Beatles nerds I suspect they would be more likely to say Paul, since the more you learn about the band the more stunned you are by what he brought to it. You also begin to realise that he is an odder and more complex character than he lets on. Lennon’s personality – his dysfunction along with his wit and charisma - was always on full display, which is part of his enduring appeal. McCartney’s personality is occluded, folded and layered. The thumbs-ups cheeriness is not false, but it is only a part of who he is. (Leslie, 2020)

Paul McCartney’s Personas and Outside Creative Projects Paul McCartney, Paul Ramon, Bernard Webb, Apollo C. Vermouth, Percy Thrillington and The Fireman are only some of the many personas

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McCartney has inhabited (ibid). As Leslie further attests, McCartney ‘is more interested in being multitudinous and multi-vocal than in being himself. He wants to live all the lives, play all the characters, be everyone’ (Leslie, 2020). It is this series of personas, as well as the experimental work and other creative risks McCartney has taken in the domain and the field of popular music, that we want to take up here in this final chapter before we end with what we have so far of the story of Paul McCartney’s creative practice. Going back to March of 1965, at the same time as Paul and Jane Asher were holidaying in Switzerland, Jane’s brother Peter Asher and his musical partner Gordon Waller, known professionally as Peter and Gordon, released their single ‘Woman’. Asher eventually became head of A&R at Apple Records and moved from there to a successful career as a record executive in California but at this time Paul McCartney was writing songs especially for them. The first ‘World Without Love’ had been a commercial success and McCartney had also written ‘Woman’ for them but ‘the songwriting credit was given to one Bernard Webb, said to be an English student at college in Paris’ (Salewicz, 1986, p. 177). This ploy, and the secrecy surrounding it, was certainly a commercial risk but one McCartney insisted on as he wanted ‘to test whether the record would be a hit without record buyers knowing he’d written it: it was the duo’s first record to fail to enter the top twenty’ (ibid). This was an able demonstration to Paul that his symbolic capital, his ‘accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or honour’ (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 7), which he had successfully acquired in the field to this point, was indeed important in converting reputation into economic capital. But McCartney had other reasons to use differing pseudonyms. Ian Iachmoe, for example, was the ‘secret’ name McCartney used for his friends. It was the sound of his own name played backwards and he advised his friends to use it when writing to him so he could distinguish between them and the overwhelming number of fan letters he received. Barry Miles, one of those friends, states that McCartney used it himself; ‘the original manuscript of “Paperback Writer”, which was written in the form of a letter, ends with “Yours Sincerely, Ian Iachimoe”’ (Miles, 1997, p. 238). In late 1966 McCartney also became involved in preparations for a festival of electronic music entitled ‘A Million Volt Sound and Light

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Rave’ which was to be held in the old Roundhouse at Chalk Farm. This performing arts and concert venue was an old railway turntable building where bands like Soft Machine and Pink Floyd performed at the launch of the International Times, an underground paper edited by McCartney’s friend Barry Miles. McCartney had been interviewed for its first edition and also supported the paper financially. The Festival was to be held in the new year and would feature a psychedelic light show pieced together by Ray Anderson who’d had the experience of similar events held at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in San Francisco. Music would be supplied by Unit Delta Plus, which consisted of Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff who were affiliated with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop specialised in avantgarde electronic music used as soundtracks on radio and television. The most notable work was on the ‘Doctor Who Theme’ which was the first broadcast in the UK in 1964. Paul McCartney was intrigued by all of the innovative musical foment that was going on in the British capital and was commissioned to compose a piece of music for the festival. This promise was featured on the posters for the event that began to pepper the streets of London. In preparation, Paul visited the studio of Peter Zinovieff. Zinovieff, ‘an Oxford-educated mathematician whose previous job was in nuclear physics, showed them a shed in his garden in which he had built his recording studio using ex-army electrical components including filters, noise generators, ring modulators, signal analyzers, and 384 oscillators’ (Turner, 2016, p. 391). They listened to some of the experimental work Zinovielff and Derbyshire had completed, through an array of speakers built into the ceiling of the shed, which one participant described as being played ‘at such intense decibel frequencies that many parts of my anatomy (including internal organs began to perform an involuntary dance. I could only describe it as “ecstatic twitching”’ (ibid). McCartney then knew what he needed to do. “Carnival of Light”, recorded at EMI by The Beatles on January 5, 1967, after a “Penny Lane” session, wasn’t so much “composed” by Paul as initiated by him. It was a fourteen-minute musical freak out where John, George and Ringo were encouraged to hit, blow, shake, and strum whatever they came across in the studio in whatever fashion they chose. There

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was no organizing principle. The idea of avant-gardism seems to have been confused with mere cacophony and randomness. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, one of the few outsiders to have heard the so-far unreleased tape, has described it as “distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds”, “distorted lead guitar”, “a church organ various effects…and voices” and “various indescribable sound effects with heaps of tape echo and manic tambourine”. (Turner, 2016, p. 390)

While this piece presaged ‘Revolution 9’ from the White Album, Mark Lewisohn himself declared that it was the voices which were most startling, with ‘John and Paul screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like “are you alright?” and “Barcelona!”’ (Lewisohn, 1989, p. 92). It was played a number of times at the Sound and Light Festival but it has not been heard since, except by a very select few who have been privy to the original tapes. Paul tried to have it included in the Anthology series but the idea was vetoed by George Harrison. However, in an interview in Word magazine in 2002, extracted online in The Beatles Bible, McCartney stated that: I actually have a project I would like … I’m involved … One of the many things I did, I did a thing called The Grateful Dead Photo Film, using Linda’s snapshots and making them move, dissolving between them and making them into a film, a short art film, which I showed at festivals and things. And I’m actually in the process – although everything else and its uncle is holding it up – but I’ve got a Beatles photo film on the go and I would love to use it as part of the soundtrack of that (McCartney quoted in The Beatles Bible, 2021).

Later, in 2000, Paul was dabbling in experiments with noise again. This time he wrote a piece to accompany Peter Blake’s pop art exhibition, which was called the ‘Liverpool Sound Collage’ and ‘mingles snippets of the Beatles studio banter with snatches of Liverpool street talk, abstract washes of sonic distortion and slow, loping beats’ (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 133). While this was likely ‘the least accessible record of McCartney’s career’ (ibid) he went on to produce ‘Twin Freaks’ with EDM producer and DJ Roy Kerr who performed as Freelance Hellraiser. The work they

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produced was a mash-up of Paul’s earlier recorded work and was used as ‘a curtain raiser for the 2004 European tour’ (ibid). Working on his Ram album earlier with Linda and Phil Ramone, the memory of one of his past pseudonyms, Paul Ramon, triggered an idea for one of McCartney’s newer songs for this collection. Phil Ramone recalled how they had been light-heartedly discussing Phil Ramone’s name in relation to Paul’s stage persona for The Beatles’ very first tour. McCartney had dubbed himself Paul Ramon and he was riffing in a jocular fashion on the similarities with his Ram collaborator’s name. That evening McCartney went back to his accommodation and returned the next morning with the song ‘Ram On’ written and ready to record (as told to author). Ramone was impressed with ‘Ram On’ written by Paul Ramon. But it is what he did after the Ram album was completed that demonstrates not only the adoption of another persona but a hugely risky reworking and reframing of the entire album. This was Paul’s use of the Sir Percy Thrillington nom de plume, and the production of an album, which would signal the genre of lounge music (see previous chapter). In addition to the unusual promotional campaign that surrounded the alternate album known simply as Thrillington, McCartney also seemingly plucked the name Apollo C. Vermouth from the ether when earlier asked to produce the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s single (as discussed in Chapter 7). This is not surprising as his penchant for mimicry in conversation, coupled with a multitudinous range of characters that populate his songs, from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ through to ‘Magneto’ and ‘Titanium Man’, suggests a very fertile and playful imagination. Always looking for creative stimulation, he also took creative opportunities as they came to him. His performance work with the poet Allan Ginsberg on ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’ was one such case in point. Ginsberg was most famous for the poem ‘Howl’ and for being a central part, along with Jack Kerouac and William Borroughs, of the so-called ‘beat generation’. They were a cultural precursor to the hippies and Ginsberg had spent time in the sixties with McCartney, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Barry Miles. On one occasion they discussed ‘Eastern mysticism and the Beat poets. While they talked through clouds of smoke and pot-induced hyperbole, McCartney painted a shirt which

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he presented to Ginsberg on leaving’ (Peel, 2002, p. 151). They stayed in touch and Paul, Linda and Ginsberg occasionally met up during the nineties as ‘they shared an interest in haikus, naturalistic mini-poetry, and Ginsberg would look over the McCartneys’ writings and offer advice’ (ibid). When Ginsberg was to take part in the Return of the Forgotten poetry festival in London in 1995, he planned to read a new piece. He was 70 years old and in declining health. He had less than a year to live. But Ginsberg managed to stay culturally and politically relevant, right up to the end. The poem was first published in 1995. The American political climate from which it arose bears a striking resemblance to the one we’re living in today. “I started it,” Ginsberg told Harvey Kubernik of The Los Angeles Times in 1996, “because [of ] all that inflated bull about the family values, the ‘contract with America,’ Newt Gingrich and all the loudmouth stuff on talk radio, and Rush Limbaugh and all those other guys. It seemed obnoxious and stupid and kind of sub-contradictory, so I figured I’d write a poem to knock it out of the ring…The skeletal imagery was inspired by the Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, and takes a playful poke at the vanity of human desires. (Springer, 2012)

Ginsberg wanted to read his new poem accompanied by musicians, as was typical of the beat poets. He asked Paul for the name of a young guitarist who might be adept enough to improvise under the poem. McCartney offered some names but then said ‘But as you’re not fixed up for a guitarist, why don’t you try me, I love the poem’ (quoted in Peel, 2002, p. 152). McCartney rehearsed with Ginsberg at his place and then arrived for the soundcheck the following afternoon. He’d purchased a box for Linda and his four children and they all watched the show until it was time for Paul to perform. He had not been advertised as the accompanist so took his place on stage for the performance. McCartney was announced as the accompanist ‘and then the roar went up on the floor of the Albert Hall, and we knocked out the song’ (ibid). The head of Mercury Records was in the audience and was impressed with the poem and the performance. He offered to record and release it on Mercury’s poetry arm, Mouth Almighty. McCartney said to Ginsberg that if they did decide to record it to let him know. Ginsberg recorded the basic track in New York with David Mansfield and Mark Robot with Lenny

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Kaye playing and producing. They then brought in composer Phillip Glass to overdub piano and sent the tapes to McCartney who added drums, keyboards and percussion. As Peel explains, Ballad of the Skeletons: ‘became a surprise hit—enough for MTV to request a video from Mouth Almighty’ (2002, p. 155). This was put together by director Gus van Sant for a modest budget and the clip became popular on MTV ‘and received a showing at the Sundance Film Festival’ (ibid). But McCartney’s career never travels in a single direction. For every “Honey Pie” there was a “Helter Skelter”, and for every “Blackbird” a “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” In a few years either side of Kisses on the Bottom [his tribute album to his roots in the American songbook], he was making further experiments in noise with The Fireman and challenging himself with long-form compositions such as Ecce Cor Meum, in 2014 he recorded a score for the video game Destiny, soon after that came singles with artists far beyond his ordinary orbit, Kanye West and Rihanna. (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 136)

McCartney and West wrote the major portion of the song ‘FourFiveSeconds’ together with credits eventually going to eight other writers as well. It is closer in typical style to Paul’s songwriting than West’s, who untypically sang rather than rapped, and Rihanna also contributed an atypical vocal performance that sat outside her normal oeuvre. Co-produced by McCartney and West, the files were sent back and forth across the Atlantic and when West received Paul’s contribution, it was in a lower key and somewhat slower than the final mix. Once the track was sped up, the mix took Paul’s vocal into a much higher register rendering it unrecognisable, save for a few snatches of lyric. Nonetheless, the song went into the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 4, and number 1 on the Billboard R&B charts and the trio performed the song at the 57th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. But this venture was also not unusual for McCartney. Across his career, he has worked with a vast array of musicians, performers and sound and remix artists. These have included Art of Noise, Arthur Baker, Brothers in Rhythm, The Chemical Brothers, Super Furry Animals, Nitin Sahwney, Dave Grohl and many others. And of course, there was also Youth.

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Youth and the Fireman Youth, a pioneer in the field of ambient house, a subgenre of techno, was originally born in South Africa as Martin Glover. While he eventually became a highly respected musician and producer, he initially played bass with punk band Killing Joke. When this band ended, he began ‘seamlessly merging dance and rock music with experimentation’ (Peel, 2002, p. 128). It is part of Youth’s own story that The Beatles were a major influence on what he did. They were the soundtrack to his own childhood. But after Killing Joke disbanded, he moved on to working in the club scene in London where he formed The Orb with like-minded souls and supplied chill-out and ambient soundscapes to venues like the Heaven Club as part of the rapidly growing dance culture scene. The music The Orb produced was ‘largely a beat-less collage of 12 singles and found sounds. It was far from classical avant-garde in that these long-form soundscapes were not predetermined or planned but DJ’d and improvised’ (ibid). Youth also remixed work for The Sugarcubes, The Wonderstuff and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which was very well received. This success then led to remixes for INXS, Sting and U2. He also worked with Dido and produced tracks for The Verve including ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ which earned him the accolade of Producer of the Year at the Brit Awards in 1998 (ibid). It was in the early nineties that Paul McCartney, working on his Off The Ground album, approached Youth to complete a number of dance mixes for tracks of this album and Youth agreed. Moving down to McCartney’s studio in Sussex, the project took a slightly different direction. Youth saw that a remix approach was not called for and suggested creating new music by using samples from Off the Ground as the source material. Writing on sampling as a form of cultural production, McIntyre and Morey (2012) concluded from their case studies of sampling composers that, like other creative practitioners: These producers…exist in a very specific historical and geographical context that is part and parcel of the world they inhabit. They bring to that world their own idiosyncratic social and cultural trajectories and as such act as choice making agents who are predisposed to act in ways that

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are not mechanically determined. Instead, they are predisposed to choose what they do within the constraints and possibilities afforded them by their existence within the world of sampling. In short, they are individual agents who act within a field of like-minded operatives and they make changes to the stored information that pre-exists them. They are structured into this, and use, all the unifying forces of history. They remain motivated, and are united, by their shared love of music. (McIntyre & Morey, 2012)

Once the samples had been collected, Youth and his engineer ‘drafted McCartney back into the studio to add some original content. In a short five-hour session, Youth recorded McCartney playing banjo, flute and whispering’. (Peel, 2002, p. 131) Basically we spent a few days with me getting him to do something in the studio live, looping it up, taking a few loops, and then getting him to play over it with some other things. And then we’d start jamming over it, us playing different things. Him playing most of it and I’d occasionally get on the bass or something like that. He’s got an amazing studio. He’s got a lot of the original Abbey Road kit in it and a lot of the original early Wings, late Beatles gear, Mellotrons…So we just worked our way through it basically. (Youth quoted in Peel, 2002, p. 131)

Youth collated all of the ingredients and told McCartney that he would mix it all on the last night. ‘Paul was blown away because he was hearing his album in a totally new context. And he also saw how we mixed— using the desk and an instrument and playing the desk’ in a manner very similar to the mix The Beatles, Geoff Emerick and George Martin had performed for The Beatles track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Once Paul had listened to the finished mixes, instead of seeing these as complements to the Off the Ground album he realised this as a complete album in its own right. Youth was hesitant and felt that these were good mixes for 12 singles but he hadn’t envisaged them as an album. McCartney insisted and dubbed the project The Fireman, in recognition of his father’s role in war-torn Liverpool, and the new album was dubbed Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest . Having just re-established his profile with his mainstream audience via albums like Flowers in the Dirt , the recordings were released under The Fireman’s name.

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I think Strawberries was like the worst selling result of anything he’d ever done and I was like “Yeah!” I thought it was quite an achievement! I think he really appreciates being able to do that stuff when he knows what it’s like to be in a creative prison of sorts from your own success and other people’s expectations. I think for him it must be very hard to find people to work with who are going to give him challenging feedback and not just go with whatever. Despite that, just because he is who he is, there’s obvious limitations around what you can and can’t do, timespan and things like that. But those don’t seem to really kind of enter into that Fireman world for some reason. (Youth quoted in Peel, 2002, p. 141).

Martin Glover/Youth went on to say: He’s proved over the three albums we’ve made together [two of them anonymous] that he’s fearless with his art. That’s part of what makes Paul McCartney so unique, and one of the greatest composers of the last 100 years. He’s not afraid to do whatever he wants to do whether a ballet, classical piece or kid’s cartoon soundtrack. (quoted in Hutcheon, 2011, p. 86)

We All Stand Together: Children’s Songs, Films and Anthems As the sheer volume of his work attests, McCartney works hard. He is willing to try his hand at most things and is generally ‘confident in his abilities’ (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 286). He readily takes up a challenge and, apart from learning a wide variety of musical instruments, he’s taken on a multitude of activities ‘from swimming and driving to skiing, sailing, horse-riding, animal-rearing, studio-building, filming, painting, poetry, ballet, computer music, symphonies, electronica, calypso or thrash metal’ (ibid). Even if he doesn’t succeed, he is resilient enough to say ‘at least I had a go’ (ibid). He has ‘had a go’ at semi-abstract portraits using acrylic and oil paints and has done so for a number of decades. His exhibitions have been limited, however. His first was a low-key affair in Germany in 1996, and in 2016 he exhibited again at the Walker Art Gallery in his hometown,

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a gallery he and John Lennon had meandered around as teenagers. After hearing Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Keith Moon from The Who on their anarchic radio show while driving to Scotland with Linda, McCartney attempted radio as well. His program, entitled Oobu Joobu, was broadcast in America and the fifteen shows ‘teemed with rarities, soundchecks and out-takes’ (Du Noyer, 2015, p. 290). As he is a lyricist he also felt poetry was within his grasp. Doing English Literature at school I always liked it. Me and John liked Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and it was a big part of what we ended up doing. Then a friend of mine died [Ivan Vaughan], and I found myself writing a poem about it. It seemed the only way to say it, it didn’t seem right in prose, so I just started getting a little collection together (ibid).

He was also asked to design a set of stamps for an Isle of Man series and has written a children’s picture book called Hey Grandude. It was illustrated by Kathryn Durst and published by an imprint of Penguin Random House, Puffin Books. An audio book was also produced which Paul wrote the soundtrack for. It received mixed reviews, but it is his series of children’s songs that has often not garnered much credibility with his core adult audience. The Beatles had done ‘Yellow Submarine’ which was received with gusto as a novelty song so beloved of English radio listeners, but when McCartney released ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ with its exquisitely reworked melody immediately after the banned ‘Hi Hi Hi’ the newly established ‘rock’ audience, with all its artistic predilections, suspected he’d ‘gone soft’. But these songs were not intended for that audience. They were written to please his own children, or more broadly to reach a much younger demographic, and it was one he was well-attuned to. Like any number of children in postwar Britain, Paul had grown up with the character of Rupert the Bear, a product of Alfred Bestall’s imagination. The character appeared as a cartoon strip in the Daily Express and Paul still ‘possessed a Rupert Christmas annual he had been given aged ten and it was proudly transcribed with his name and address’ (Norman, 2016, p. 454). Once McCartney realised his own children were also enamoured of this childhood favourite, the scene was set for

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Paul to realise another long-held ambition. He wanted to animate the childhood stories he knew so well. He contacted Geoff Dunbar to help him with the full feature-length film and began writing songs. The first was ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ which eventually found a home on Red Rose Speedway. Paul had tried to get this film project off the ground in the 1970s with animator Oscar Grillo co-leading the project but the venture was shelved and still remains unreleased. ‘The songs for the feature length film were recorded in 1978 all in one day (although some demos from the songs were recorded in the early 1970’s by Paul McCartney and Wings)’ (ibid). One of the songs dated came from The Beatles sessions for the Let It Be album in 1969 ‘while many others were recorded from 1974 onwards. “Sea Melody” eventually appeared on Paul McCartney’s 1997 album Standing Stone’ (ibid). For ‘We All Stand Together’, he based ‘the idea of the song (and animation) on a picture drawn by Alfred Bestall, that appeared in the 1958 Rupert Bear Annual’ (ibid). The song was performed by Paul McCartney and what he dubbed the Frog Chorus, which was an amalgam of St Paul’s Choir and the King’s Singers. The ‘Humming Version’, released as a B side was done by Paul and the Finchley Frogettes, another persona adopted by Paul himself. “We All Stand Together” was eventually released in November 1984 and reached number 3 on the UK charts. The video was released simultaneously and became the biggest selling video of 1985 as well being nominated for the “Best Music Video – Short Form” at the Grammy Awards in 1986…The making of the short film began in 1981 and ended in 1983. In 1984, the year of its release, it won a UK BAFTA (British Academy Award) for Best Animated Short Film. The film was also released theatrically as an accompaniment to Paul’s feature film “Give my Regards to Broad Street.” (Blank, 2004)

Just as ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, a film based on one of Paul’s ideas, was savagely panned when another type of work altogether was expected and having been given an inappropriate time slot on BBC TV—the Boxing Day film—the audience for ‘Give my Regards to Broadstreet’ was expecting something far more traditionally entertaining. McCartney, however, believed he was covering that traditional movie audience. The film was not well received by the critics either. As Howard Elson writes:

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When the movie was eventually released in the autumn of 1984, it came in for some severe criticism from all sections of the press, both in America and Britain. The Washington Post said: “You don’t have to play this movie backwards to know Paul is dead.” Rolling Stone called it “disastrous”. In Britain, the Daily Mail advised: “Don’t see it. Send a wreath and condolences to all concerned.” The Daily Express called it “a home movie”. (Elson, 1986, p. 164)

While the ‘Give my Regards to Broadstreet’ film project failed to lift McCartney’s stature in the film world, this did not stop him from traversing down other creative avenues. Many years later he took a similar if not more immediate risk. After witnessing the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, as he had been on a flight taxiing for take-off at JFK airport that morning, he was then unable to leave the USA. He followed the news as it unfolded and ‘to see the heroism of the firemen. And it reminded me that my dad had been a firefighter [during the German blitz of Liverpool in the Second World War]’ (quoted in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 246). His father had told stories of incendiary bombs raining down on the city and when Paul visited the New York firefighters, ‘this all brought it home to me. I thought of him going into buildings’ (ibid). McCartney felt helpless. ‘I wanted to do something but, and there was nothing you could do’ (ibid). At that point, he started writing another song. The word ‘freedom’ was being used liberally by the American media and politicians and this became the topic. For McCartney and many others, the terrorist attack had become ‘an attack on America’s freedom, freedom of choice, freedom for women to have equal rights, these things were all mentioned. So this idea of being free in a free country, unlike repressive regimes, became important to me’ (ibid). Once the Concert for New York was organised, which was to occur some five weeks later at Madison Square Garden, McCartney wanted to perform his new song. At rehearsals, a number of people tried to talk him out of playing this new piece but he was adamant he needed to perform it. He did not want to take the safe route and play ‘Let It Be’ as they had suggested.

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They said “you and Mick [Jagger] and Pete [Townsend] should discuss the idea.” So I went in and was trying to sell it, had to play it on a backward guitar [i.e. right-handed] the only one I could grab. This was terrifying. “This is my right. Chink, chink, chink…Freedom!” And Mick’s going [Cockney accent] “Nah, Paul. I dunno mate. People don’t like new songs. Stick to the old stuff.” And Pete’s going, “Hmm well…” And Pete was funny, he said “Paul, you’re a brave man. D’you mean you’re gonna workshop a new song in front of a hundred million people?” I said, “Ah, if you put it like that, Pete, I do see the insanity of it now. (quoted in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 247)

As McCartney insisted, he thought ‘No, I just know it’s going to work’ (quoted in Grimshaw, 2004, p. 12). ‘We just did it and, sure enough, people just picked up the chorus—I mean it’s not a hard chorus— “FREE-DOM”—kinda easy to learn… I tried to do it from the point of view of an ordinary citizen… it ‘s very simple’ (ibid). Paul had seen that Americans, like everybody else around the world, just wanted to live as freely as they could. ‘A lot of people in America, a lot of their ancestors, came here to escape that kind of thing. This is the “give me your huddled masses,” where a lot of people came to get out of Hitler’s Germany and places like that’ (ibid). For McCartney, he also had a virtually new band to play the song with but they, like McCartney, were highly experienced and resilient players also willing to take on a challenge. Paul had toured with Wix Wickens, and Brian Ray and Abe Laboriel had played together, but not with the others. Rusty Anderson had never played with any of them. Also, Brian Ray, a guitarist who had not played bass, was expected to deputise for Paul on bass when McCartney was at the keyboards. Their first real gig was to be at Madison Square Garden at the Concert for New York. This was a risky proposition as Wix Wickens noted ‘we hadn’t played a note together, so that was a new experience and challenging… frightening’ (quoted in Grimshaw, 2004, p. 18). Paul realised over-rehearsing with this band would take the emotional edge off their performance. McCartney was more than pleased as it ‘went great. Everyone joined us, stomped their feet and clapped. That was exactly what I wanted to happen’ (in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 247). He also knew that this performance was an opportunity to do what his relatives had done so well during WWII. That is, lift the morale of the city through

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song: ‘I was having to come up with the brave wartime spirit, that I’d seen our folks do in Liverpool’ (ibid).

McCartney’s Move into Classical Music 10 years prior to 11 September 2001, in the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral that still bears scars from the bombings of WWII, McCartney was invited to contribute to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s 150th anniversary. The Cathedral is located opposite the playground of the school Paul McCartney attended as a child but, as a youngster, he had not been accepted into the cathedral’s choir. Now, many years later, Paul had been commissioned to write his first classical piece that would be performed in the same cathedral. While McCartney had worked with a number of orchestras before, firstly under the tutelage of George Martin, and then as a record producer in his own right, this was his first full-scale classical composition. It’s exciting for me… It’s something I’ve never done before. At the same time it’s what I’ve always done, because it’s still songs. But the nice thing is you don’t have to go: intro/first verse/chorus/verse/middle eight/chorus/intro/two choruses/fade, like more pop songs. What’s good is you can keep going. With serious music you never have to go back to the chorus if you don’t want. The form is very exciting. (quoted in Du Noyer, 2015, p. 151)

McCartney worked in collaboration with the US conductor and composer Carl Davis to produce the work. Davis had presumed he would receive equal credit with McCartney but was taken aback when Paul ‘said, quite emphatically, it was to be called Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio’ (Davis quoted in Sounes, 2010, p. 428). The work was to be ‘a semi-autobiographical story, split into eight movements’ (ibid, p. 152) that was based on Paul’s upbringing in Liverpool. After the misunderstandings were smoothed over, McCartney met regularly with Davis ‘supplying him with the essential story of the oratorio, humming and playing tunes for it on the piano’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 428). While Davis

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performed a role similar to that of George Martin (that is, turning Paul’s ideas into a fully written score that Paul supplied feedback and comments on), McCartney had to enter into the discipline of classical composing and become fully cognisant of the range and best key for each instrument and voice they were working with. Having generally sung in the key he had composed his songs in, Paul now had to think ‘about a tenor range from there to there or a mezzo-soprano’s range’ (ibid). He also realised how important structure was to the piece, as: It reminds me of Abbey Road and Pepper, we kind of structured them. We knew what was going to be coming here, knew what you needed here, knew that “Day in the Life” had to go there. There’s suddenly a lot of opportunity with the orchestra. I call it the ultimate synth. I went to see the Proms last year, and it was like you’re looking at the inside workings of a synth. The only difference is, there it is real. (ibid, p. 152)

Three months before the piece’s premiere, McCartney insisted on a fullscale rehearsal since ‘he had to hear a performance because he couldn’t get the music from the score. This way he could change anything he didn’t like’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 431). When the piece was ready, it was performed in the Cathedral by ‘the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Carl Davis, the featured soloists including two of the most famous singers in the classical world; Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and bass Willard White’ (ibid). McCartney knew this work would not be well received by the cognoscenti of the classical world, which it wasn’t, but performances were scheduled for London and from there other cities around the world. A CD release was organised by EMI. With this release, which reached number one on the classical charts, ‘Paul crossed the Rubicon from pop to the classical division of the old firm, the management of which commissioned him to write a new orchestral piece for its 1997 centenary. Classical music would be part of Paul’s music-making for years to come’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 433). These works included a further experiment with the punning title of Working Classical . The next, Standing Stone, went to number one on the UK and US classical charts in 1997. In 2001 a piece called Ecce Cor Meum, which had been commissioned by Magdalen College, was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre

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in Oxford.The piece was recorded in 2006 at Abbey Road with Gavin Greenaway conducting the Magdalen College Choir from Oxford, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, London Voices and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The soprano on this recording was Kate Royal. McCartney was also commissioned in 2011 by the New York City Ballet and, collaborating with Danish dancer and choreographer Peter Martins, produced his first piece for dance called Ocean’s Kingdom.

MPL Communication and Economic and Symbolic Capital On the day of the premiere of the Liverpool Oratorio, McCartney also met with the MP for Merseyside, Michael Portillo, and showed him around the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) in an exercise designed to bolster public sector backing for the institute (Sounes, 2010). LIPA, now successfully operating, was another outside project McCartney was intricately connected to and involved in. It was the institute Paul had attended as a boy and he had fond memories of it. However, it had fallen on hard times and, in order to save it, Paul became involved with a campaign to establish it as a ‘Fame’ school. He was its most public and influential patron. The Leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, was also in attendance and, using his extensive social and cultural capital, ‘Paul didn’t waste the opportunity to promote his vision for LIPA with one and all’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 432). McCartney kept a close eye on how LIPA was developing as a school of performing arts, attending every graduation to this point. As can be imagined, along with the wide variety of musical projects he was engaged in and with all of his extracurricular activity, his working life was in constant need of monitoring, organising and scheduling. All of this activity was handled by his various business managers and the staff he employed as part of his company, MPL Communications. The hub of his many business activities, the offices for MPL, founded in 1969 as Adgrove Ltd but with a name change to McCartney Productions Limited later in that year, now occupies a tall and narrow but unprepossessing art-deco building on London’s Soho Square. It is a brisk

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walk southwest across town to where Apple Corp originally had its offices on Saville Row in the late 60s and it’s only a few easy blocks east to Denmark St, the iconic home of music publishing, music equipment stores and small recording studios for many years. Of course, there are decades of McCartney’s life between the two business ventures of Apple Corp and MPL Communication. His fight to keep the income he had earned as a Beatle, when he had to sue his partners in that band in order to divest himself of the manager, Allen Klein, was supported by Linda’s father Lee Eastman and brother John. As this legal battle ensued, Eastman advised McCartney to go into music publishing, which he did, and in 2020 MPL Publishing held ‘25,000 original compositions, songs as diverse and famous as “Unchained Melody”, “The Christmas Song”, “Your Feets Too Big” and “The Ugly Duckling”, in addition to the Buddy Holly catalogue and a portfolio of hit musicals’ (Sounes, 2010, p. 434). Publishing proved to be lucrative for MPL. Early in The Beatles’ career The Beatles’ publisher, Dick James, had established Northern Songs as a vehicle for publishing Lennon and McCartney’s output. This songwriting team famously lost control of their lucrative catalogue when Northern Songs went public with a stock offering in 1965. Dick James sold his controlling share to Sir (now Baron) Lew Grade, a former dancer, talent agent, impresario and media proprietor, who owned Associated Television (ATV). Both Lennon and McCartney also sold the shares they each held to ATV but were still contracted to this publishing house until at least 1973. After Grade refused an offer from McCartney and Yoko Ono in the early eighties to purchase The Beatles’ catalogue, it soon passed to Australian businessman Robert Holmes á Court who took over ATV. He had a controlling share in ATV’s parent company. Holmes á Court then sold ATV and the associated Beatles catalogue to Michael Jackson, a move McCartney was very unhappy about as he had mentored Jackson into the publishing arm of the music industry and they had become friends after working together. Jackson then merged ATV with Sony Publishing for a very lucrative deal and Sony/ATV Publishing, the merged company, retained The Beatles catalogue. Jackson maintained a 50% share in that company.

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McCartney receives writers’ royalties which together are 33 percent of total commercial proceeds in the US, and which vary elsewhere between 50 and 55 percent. Two of the Beatles’ earliest songs—"Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You"—were published by an EMI subsidiary, Ardmore & Beechwood, before signing with James. McCartney acquired their publishing rights from Ardmore in 1978, and they are the only two Beatles songs owned by MPL Communications. (Wikipedia, 2021)

MPL Communications has published all of McCartney’s songs written after 1979 but there are more things that his team at MPL does for him. As one of the central figures for change in the songwriting field, McCartney has survived partially as a result of his deep connection to that field, both reacting to its changes and also, in many ways, stimulating and capitalising on those changes. As well as negotiating his wealth of songs through an often cooperative and at times confronting and competitive field of cultural intermediaries and fellow producers, performers and songwriters, he has, a number of times, eschewed the traditional promotional approaches and engaged with his audience directly through his own extensive website, email fan lists, webcasts, and the numerous podcasts available to his fans. His appearances on podcasts like Smartless, hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett and available on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and Sodajerker on Songwriting , hosted by Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor, themselves from Liverpool, are revelatory, as was his notable appearance on Carpool Karaoke. This online celebrity clip is hosted by James Corden as a part of his The Late Late Show with James Corden program, delivered via YouTube with 26 million subscribers. This edition had, as of 22 June 2018, 58,663,781 views (Corden, 2018). Corden revealed on Howard Stern’s online talk show, itself delivered to YouTube on 6 June 2019, that the Paul McCartney episode was his favourite. Corden noted, ‘I remember thinking while I was doing it, that “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such memories… If my grandad was here, he’d get a real kick out of this”’ (in Stern, 2019). The team managing the paulmccartney.com website also runs its own fanzine called ‘What’s That You’re Doing?’. As an example of the extensive work undertaken by his MPL employees, working collaboratively

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with the promotion team from Universal Music, Issue 1 Volume 9 from 2021 had the following information delivered directly to his fans’ email addresses. “When the cold days come and the old ways fade away”, it must be January! Here at PaulMcCartney.com, we saw in 2021 still riding a McCartney Ill high, celebrating its chart-topping success and playing our favourite tracks on repeat. The official McCartney lyric videos have now been released, featuring Paul’s handwritten lyrics animated for each track. Check out the full playlist on YouTube. Paul also continued to spread the excitement of McCartney Ill by chatting to Nile Rogers on his Apple Music radio show “Deep Hidden Meaning”. Listen back to their conversation here. Seen any snow this January? As the northern hemisphere experiences the cold weather season, Paul shared a #ThrowbackThursday photo featuring himself and Steve Miller in a very snowy Idaho in February 1995. Looks like those ’Flaming Pie’ recording sessions were the perfect winter warmer! Sadly, this month saw the passing of Paul’s friend and fellow Liverpool musician Gerry Marsden. Read Paul’s tribute to Gerry and his “unforgettable performances” here. Have you ever listened to a Paul McCartney, Beatles or Wings lyric and wondered “what on earth is that about”? With the regular PaulMcCartney.com feature “You Gave Me The Answer”, Paul answers fans’ long-pondered questions and gives an insight into the more niche aspects of his songwriting. This month’s question centred on a lyric in the song “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” - what is a “butter pie”? Find out what Paul said here, and remember you can submit your own question here, or via social media. Now, we’ll leave you with the updated “Sticking Out Of My Back Pocket” playlist that’ll put you in a lovey-dovey mood for February ... Yes, it’s a Valentine’s Day theme with a difference! This year we are looking at remixes, covers and alternative versions of love songs. Check it out here! And keep your eyes and ears out for more coming soon ... All the best! (email correspondence 1 February 2021).

Apart from his ongoing, high-grossing and extensive tours, a number of his performances are mounted as one-off events. As an example, the

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exclusive release entitled ‘Live At The ICA Festival’ was recorded at his 2007 show at the iTunes Festival in London and he has interrupted tours and taken the opportunity, as another example, to perform to the International Space Station crew who were orbiting 220 miles above Earth in 2005. He played ‘two songs “Good Day Sunshine” and “English Tea”, for NASA Astronaut Bill McArthur and Russian Cosmonaut Valery Tokarev’ (NASA News, 2005) while he was onstage during his live Anaheim California concert staged as part of his US tour. All of this went out on ‘NASA TV’s Public, Education and Media channels [which] are available on an MPEG-2 digital C-band signal accessed via satellite’ (ibid). His many recordings are made available as mp3 downloads from companies such as iTunes with hard copies of DVDs and CDs, all now being reworked and reimagined as archive collections and still available from Amazon.com but increasingly from his own website, paulmccartney.com. While he still has affiliations with the EMI subsidiary Parlophone, McCartney did at one point take on Starbucks, a company just starting to be known for its affiliation with the music industry, as a financial partner. Paul signed his first recording contract, as a member of The Beatles, with Parlophone Records, an EMI subsidiary, in June 1962. In the USA, The Beatles’ recordings were distributed by EMI subsidiary Capitol Records (Wikipedia, 2021). Around the time of the White Album, The Beatles signed again with EMI for a nine-year contract and also formed their own label Apple Records in 1968, ‘although the masters were still owned by EMI’ (ibid). Despite the breakup of The Beatles, McCartney’s music was still released on Apple Records in line with The Beatles’ contract with EMI, which was finalised in 1976. Once The Beatles partnership was formally dissolved in 1975 Paul ‘re-signed with EMI worldwide and Capitol in the USA, Canada and Japan, acquiring ownership of his solo catalogue from EMI as part of the deal’ (ibid). He then signed with Columbia Records for the USA and Canada in 1979 ‘reportedly receiving the industry’s most lucrative recording contract to date, while remaining with EMI for distribution throughout the rest of the world’ (Ibid). With Columbia losing money on this latest contract, McCartney ‘returned to Capitol in the US in 1985, remaining with EMI until 2006.

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In 2007, McCartney signed with [Starbucks’] Hear Music, becoming the label’s first artist’ (ibid). Then in 2016, Paul McCartney returned to the label he began his solo career with, Capitol Records. Forbes magazine reported that he would ‘work with the label for an unknown period of time’ (McIntyre, 2016). At the time, a media release from the record company announced that ‘a comprehensive plan for the artist’s catalogue is being conceived by Capitol and Universal Music Enterprises in conjunction with the artist and his management team’ (ibid). These arrangements were in recognition of the fact that while new albums were not the highest earners in the deal, his back catalogue was the valued prize since ‘his solo recordings are some of the most beloved— and most valuable—pieces of music ever made. Included in the deal are an incredible 15 top ten albums and 22 top ten singles’ (ibid). Each of these contracts gave McCartney access to much-needed funds to keep his organisation afloat. The essential point to be made here is that it is doubtful that Paul McCartney would have been able to do all the things he continues to do as a highly active creative practitioner without the level of income his business interests afford, the ability of his team to negotiate lucrative deals with the record companies he works with, and his promotional team leveraging McCartney’s social and symbolic capital. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has argued (1997, p. 325), works of art are not produced in isolation from the rest of the world. A source of income is vitally important. Without financial or economic capital to draw on, neither art nor science, as they are currently practiced in the West in the early twenty-first century, could take place. Money, access to it or the lack of it, has had a profound effect on many creative practitioners and what they are then capable of doing. It constrains and enables creative activity. It is a fact that ‘a huge number of talented and motivated artists, musicians, dancers, athletes, and singers give up pursuing their domains because it is so difficult to make a living in them’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 333). For active and successful creative agents like Paul McCartney, the money he earns from performance fees and the royalties coming to him from his many copyrights, as well as other sources of income, means he can hire an orchestra or

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a filmmaker or illustrator when it is necessary for his ongoing creative works. McCartney also has a team of people he has employed at MPL to ensure his connection to the field of popular music and his audiences are well maintained while he continues his lucrative creative practice. In fact, all of these factors we’ve mentioned so far are so heavily entwined with his abilities and talents that they form part of a self-supporting system of creative activity. This puts him at an advantage. The ‘Matthew Effect’, developed by R.K. Merton in his book Social Theory and Social Structure (1968), and based on the gospel of St Matthew where the rich get richer, is in operation as far as his musical talent is concerned. This process works via the principle of cumulative advantage (Gorny, 2007). His many musical talents simply build on each other and something very similar occurs for him in economic terms. W. Brian Arthur has successfully argued that there is a process of self-reinforcing behaviour that triggers positive feedback, in this case for McCartney, which magnifies the initial advantage they have and then ‘locks in’ over time. With increasing returns occurring, there will be even further advantage added which enables active agents in this system, like McCartney, to get even further ahead of where they ‘may then go on to dominate the outcome’ (Arthur, 2015, p. 17). All of this advantage, which has accumulated for McCartney within the system over time, is linked to his reputation and status in the field. This comes in the form not only of economic capital, but of social and symbolic capital as well. While he reportedly has a net worth of £800 million, as a result of his long-term creative efforts, he has also won many awards and accolades. Paul McCartney’s awards include BRIT Awards, Grammy Awards, American Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards, Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards, Classical Brit Awards and the UK’s Q Awards. As a member of The Beatles, his songwriting partnership with John Lennon produced "some of the most popular music in rock and roll history". In the United Kingdom, McCartney has been knighted and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). In 2017, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) for services to music. In the United

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States, McCartney received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. (Wikipedia, 2021)

He also has ‘honorary doctorates of music from Yale and Sussex universities…a street and a rose named after him [and] a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame’ (Norman, 2016, p 804). His song ‘Yesterday’ has ‘long since displaced Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as the most-covered song in history with around 2000 alternative versions and more coming out all the time’ (ibid, p. 678). The 1979 edition of the Guinness Book of Records listed Paul McCartney as “the most successful composer of all time”, for having written or cowritten 43 songs that sold a million records or more, and accounted for 100 million sales in singles and the same number of albums. (Norman, 2016, p. 542)

Inside the field of popular music, his position has been assured for some time. The Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin reminisced about an event that took place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 1999 when Paul was inducted into, what is now, illustrious company. Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin and Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records, Neil Young, Bono from U2, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Robbie Robertson from The Band and a veritable who’s who of various musicians, producers and celebrities were all assembled backstage in the green room. In an aside to his companion, George Martin quietly confided ‘just wait to see how this lot react the minute Paul arrives’ (quoted in Barrow & Dextor, 2004, p. 15). As Paul McCartney made his way into the room: The entire collection of noble rock stars just froze. The silence was palpable…It was uncanny how the whole room was there to pay deference to this man, just as the awaiting media were. The musicians in the room, big stars, genuinely famous across the planet and rightly full of their own achievement, seemed to unite in recognising that here was the head boy, the role model that defined pop star, that personified creativity, songwriting and fame (Barrow & Bextor, 2004, pp. 15–16).

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Conclusion In concluding, we draw on the work of Richard Peterson and his ‘production of culture’ approach (1982, 1985, 1997). Peterson showed that ‘the nature and content of symbolic products are shaped by the social, legal and economic milieu in which they are created, edited, manufactured, marketed, purchased and evaluated’ (1985, p. 46). The space and time in which works are created also have an effect on creative action (ibid, 45). These structures give positive reinforcement to those fortunate enough, like McCartney, to acquire a way into the various spheres of cultural production that make practice possible. As Brian Arthur states, ‘these positive feedbacks in fact are very much a defining property of complex systems’ (Arthur, 2015, p. 17). The systems-based approach we have taken in this book, what we call the creative system in action, is in many ways a synthesis of the sociological (Bourdieu, 1977, 1993, 1996) with the psychological (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1997, 2014) and has been taken up by us here to give a comprehensive account of Paul McCartney’s own creative practice. We’ve shown that for McCartney there has been a significant interplay between himself and what Bourdieu has called the space of works, that is, the accumulated heritage of songwriting, musical performance and record production. An immersion in this space of works, similar in effect to an immersion into the domain of knowledge that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had identified in his systems model of creativity (), has presented possibilities of action to Paul McCartney as he built and came to possess the necessary habitus to act. This habitus has been described as: a ‘feel for the game’, a ‘practical sense’ (sens pratique) that inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to rules. Rather it is a set of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions. The habitus is the result of a long process of inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes a ‘second sense’ or a second nature. (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993, p. 5)

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This habitus, this acquired feel for how things work, is what allows creative agents like Paul McCartney to act and react within the particular structured and dynamic spaces known, in this case, as the field of popular music. Bourdieu notes that fields like these are social arenas where the production and circulation of goods, ideas and knowledges are populated by other creative agents who compete and, we also add, cooperate, using various levels of the forms of capital pertinent to popular music. Similarly for Csikszentmihalyi, a field is a structured social organisation that understands and can act upon the domain knowledge that each creative agent, in our case Paul McCartney, uses to maintain their own position. The domain creative agents are immersed in is a structure of knowledge manifest in a particular symbol system, in this case, popular music. McCartney himself is one of the individual agents who makes changes to the stored information that pre-exists them. In this case, we can say that McCartney is necessary, a field is necessary and a domain of knowledge is necessary in order for creativity to emerge. Each of these factors is all necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves. That is, a domain, a field and a person, all operate within a non-linear system which they themselves all constitute and act within. It is the interplay between all of them that makes creative action possible. This multifactorial and dynamic system that Paul McCartney is a noteworthy active creative agent within is characterised not only by complexity but also by emergence, interdependence, network effects, non-linearity, complementarity and complexity. The musical ecosystem Paul McCartney continues to be part of is a complex one that is characterised by multiple components that interact in densely interrelated networks. This ecosystem, like all other systems, is ‘chaotic, highly nonlinear and essentially impossible to explain and predict from mechanisms and laws’ (Sawyer, 2010, p. 368). In other words, we cannot understand McCartney’s creative practice by taking a simplistic and reductionist approach. Like their biological cousins, ‘social systems are complex systems that share many systemic properties with other complex systems, including the human mind’ (Sawyer, 2010, p. 368). It would be pointless to conduct a neuroscientific study of Paul McCartney’s brain or a cognitive appraisal of his talent or personality and hope to gain a complete understanding. Similarly, if we only

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took a sociological view, the picture of his creative practice would also be incomplete. It is in understanding and accepting the holistic complexity of this multifactorial, non-linear system that we can then hope to gain knowledge of it. Within this creative system, we also need to consider the notion of complementarity. As set out above, complementarity is a state of reciprocity between what are often seen to be two oppositional frames (Kelso and Engstrom, 2008). Each frame, taken to be diametrically opposed, only tells half the story. For example, the idea favoured by those with a Romantic leaning is that art and commerce act in opposition to each other. We can see immediately above, however, that Paul McCartney’s creative practice has been facilitated by access to money, as was John Lennon’s, and just about every other creative practitioner who has been commercially successful within the music industries. We could even go one step further and say that for McCartney, each side of this complementary pair brings the other into being. The money begets the art which begets the money which begets the art and so on. In addition to complementarity, the system presents constraints, which each creative agent must work within. What is important to note here is that constraints can be seen, at one and the same time, as enablers producing what Harry Criticos (2019) calls a ‘constrabling’ effect. For example, immersing oneself inside a tradition of popular music doesn’t prevent one from being innovative; in fact, it also enables it. Without growing up with his father as his guide into the tradition of popular music, Paul McCartney would have produced very different work to the work we have come to know. That immersion has enabled him to grapple with the wide variety of innovative actions he has taken across his lifetime. In bringing these ideas together, that is the complementary pair of tradition and innovation, Negus and Pickering maintain that ‘an avantgarde or radical aversion to tradition as a dead weight to be thrown off, and a conservative reverence for tradition as fixed and sacrosanct, are equally misleading’ (2004, p. 114). It would be very hard to argue that Paul McCartney has not been both influential and innovative while at the same time maintaining a deep link to traditional forms and ways of doing things as he has creatively extended them and at times rendered them

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obsolete. The breaking down of the traditional idea that rock performers needed to write their own songs comes out of his and John Lennon’s collaborative and competitive practice—another complementary pair. McCartney’s whole creative practice has been characterised by a deep entwining of complementary pairs. This also applies to another set of complementary pairs, that of agency and structure. Agency is the ability to take action or make choices, which McCartney certainly has, but these choices are always taken within, and facilitated by, structural limits. Janet Wolff used these ideas to argue that all, not just some, creative activity takes place inside a compendium of pre-existing conditions (1981, p. 9). She argued that: Everything we do is located in, and therefore affected by, social structures. It does not follow from this that in order to be free agents we somehow have to liberate ourselves from social structures and act outside them. On the contrary, the existence of these structures and institutions enables any activity on our part, and this applies equally to acts of conformity and acts of rebellion …All action, including creative and innovative action, arises in the complex conjunction of numerous structural determinants and conditions. Any concept of “creativity” which denies this is metaphysical and cannot be sustained. (Wolff, 1993, p. 9)

As Waldrop points out, ‘there’s no division between doers and done-to because we are all part of this interlocking network’ (1992, p. 323). This network of creative activity that characterises McCartney’s creative practice is also partially centred on the non-linearity of cause and effect. In other words, one cannot make a conclusive straight-line causative relationship between one action and another. Did Henry McCullouch’s decision to quit Wings at the time he did cause the Band on the Run album to be a creative success? It might, but it’s more likely that it was one of innumerable factors that helped that work to emerge in the way that it did. As Capra and Luisi indicate, inside systems ‘small changes may have dramatic effects because they may be amplified repeatedly by self-reinforcing feedback’ (2014, p. 106). This feedback may become iterative and provide, in some cases, a cumulative effect in a process of increasing returns for McCartney, as Brian Arthur suggested. In any case, it is exceedingly difficult to delineate or predict where and when the

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change in the system may occur and which precise factor is the actual trigger for creative change in that system. These changes could ‘be initiated everywhere in an event cycle and after a certain time be read off as either cause or effect elsewhere in a system’ (Skyttner, 2006, p. 34). Non-linearity is a fact of systems, as is dynamism. They are in a state of perpetual change. Nothing within these systems holds steady for too long. McCartney’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed in a state of what we could call dynamic equilibrium, an active and fluid state which is always in flux. Creative agents, like McCartney, have survived inside this dynamic system of popular music over a long period of time since, by necessity, they have had to adapt to these ever-changing musical environments by ‘constantly revising and rearranging their building blocks as they gain experience’ (Waldrop, 1992, p. 146). These dynamic systems are not only composed of multiple factors or ‘interacting components that stay together, as a set, over time’ (HomerDixon, 2006, p. 22) but they are deeply networked and interconnected with each other. They are not only networked across multiple factors within the system, across fields and domains, but are also interconnected with other related systems that are proximate to them. As we saw with the case of ‘Paperback Writer’ and how it emerged in its recorded form, creative systems never exist in isolation from other systems. In short, all systems are scalable, existing as systems within systems within systems (Thompson, 2019, pp. 45–46). None of the component parts of this holarchy, the hierarchy of nested systems that extends horizontally and vertically, ‘can be regarded as more primary than the other’ (Skyttner, 2006, p. 34). The dynamic interactions of these systems produce what is called emergent phenomena. Emergence, the process of a novel thing coming into being which cannot be reduced to its constituent parts, is synergistic. We saw this in the case of ‘Yesterday’, the emergent and novel object that has turned out over the long term to be more than the sum of its parts. As Montuori has argued, ‘emergence and self-organisation are characteristics of open systems that are adapting to their environment in new ways’ (2011, p. 418). This leads us to a brief consideration of power within that world. Fields, as stated prior, are spaces of coopetition, that is, the complementary aspects of both competition and cooperation. Struggles over

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positions taken in this field are centred on economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital. As one accumulates more and more of these forms of capital, the more power one has to effect decisions and take creative action. But this power is dependent on the structures, principally the domain and field, that creative agents wrap themselves within. In this case, we argue here that the freedom of someone like Paul McCartney to act is always contingent on the structures of the domain and field he is immersed in. It is not the case, as Romanticism would have it, that there are no impediments to his actions or that ‘all choices are themselves forced outside circumstances’ (Teichmann & Evans, 1991, p. 45). We must not forget, in emphasising structural factors and their effects, that ‘self and culture are mutually constituting entities’ (Gl˘aveanu, 2014, p. 9). In this case, active choice-making agents are still a necessary component of the creative system. As Vlad Gl˘aveanu suggests we cannot do ‘away with the individual or downplays his/her role in creative production’ (2014, p. 9). In this regard, Bourdieu suggests ‘those who think in simple alternatives need to be reminded that in these matters absolute freedom, exalted by the defenders of creative spontaneity, belongs only to the naïve and the ignorant’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 235). To reiterate, the interplay between agency and structure, their complementarity, makes practice possible. For Schirato and Yell ‘practice is always informed by a sense of agency (the ability to understand and control our own actions), but…the possibilities of agency must be understood in terms of cultural trajectories, literacies and dispositions’ (1996, p. 148). This begs the question, as it most certainly did for Bourdieu, of how behaviour can ‘be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’ (quoted in Swartz, 1997, p. 95). This was the same question that struck Anthony Giddens in his book Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (1979) as he also tried to ‘resolve the dispute between determinists, who believe that human behaviour is entirely determined by outside forces, and voluntarists, who believe that humans possess free will, and can act as they wish’ (Haralambos & Holbern, 1995, p. 906). In doing so he saw that there was an intimate and interdependent relationship between agency and structure

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and associated this complementarity with how power works, particularly inside institutions. We could take EMI or any other record company or publishing house or even MPL Communication itself as examples. For Giddens, power, and how it operates, was associated with two things. These are the rules and resources one abides by and has access to. For him, rules are not codified or written down but are alive in the way people behave and the conventions they adhere to. Resources also come in two forms. The first of these are allocative resources, that is, the access one has to the physical things that have been transformed by human action. These are, as one example, things like the recording studio tools and technologies one can use to get things done. Access to these allocative resources, as seen at McCartney’s own Hog Hill Mill studio, gives one a sense of being able to control creative action. On the other hand, authoritative resources are non-material. They result from the action of one individual on another and ‘involve the ability to get others to carry out a person’s wishes, and in this way humans become a resource that other individuals may be able to use’ (Haralambos & Holbern, 1995, p. 906). As McCartney’s accumulation of the various forms of capital grew over his lifetime, the more of these resources he had at his disposal. As a result, there was more he could get done. The story about the producer-engineer for Press To Pay, Hugh Padgham and McCartney’s reaction to him is instructive. From all of this, we can say that not all individuals within the creative system are equivalent, either in institutions or in the broader field itself. Despite creative activity being distributed across the system, some individuals like McCartney wield more influence and decision-making power than others. But this also means that power does not emanate solely from individuals. In a similar way to Bourdieu, Michel Foucault (1980) argued that power is dependent on the constitution of fields of knowledge and vice versa. For him, it is the result of a productive network, which permeates sociocultural systems including, for our purposes, the system of creativity. Power in this sense is diffuse and non-linear since its operation is not simply ‘top down’. It certainly has a ‘transformative capacity’, as Giddens has suggested, and can be used by agents to enact change in the things they produce or the actions of other people. In this way, those who have

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it can ‘exercise power over other people, and so constrain people and reduce their freedom. At the same time though, power also increases the freedom of action of the agents who possess it. What restricts one person, enables another to do more’ (Haralambos & Holbern, 1995, p.906). However, rather than seeing the operation of power, of the type McCartney possesses, as primarily negative, Foucault insisted that: if power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault quoted in Jordan & Weedon, 1995, p. 479)

The action of power in this diffuse manner accounts for the way purposeful human action, of the type McCartney, has engaged in across his life’s work, can help reproduce and transform structures and those same dynamic structures can both constrain and enable that creative action. Waldrop sums up this complexity of systems by asserting that ‘as we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world’ (1992, p. 333). With these ideas in hand, we can say, ‘in the end’, that Paul McCartney was deeply engaged with this world as a choice-making agent. The music he made, like all creative activity, emerged out of the antecedent conditions he encountered and the resultant novel variations, the innovations that have become part of his story, are certainly valued in the field: the social setting of which he is part. His corpus of work has become a deeply valued addition to the store of knowledge, the domain, the space of works, the accumulated heritage of music making we have also inherited from him. It is this creative system in action that explains his creative practice.

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Index

A

AABA 100, 164, 165 Abbey Road 68, 112, 117, 127–129, 133, 139, 179, 180, 198, 205–208, 210, 214, 224, 255, 262, 263 AC30 61 Academy of St Martin in the Fields 263 ‘Across the Universe’ 178 Adams, Ryan 229 adaptability 15 ‘A Day in the Life’ 174, 200 Adele 230 Adgrove Ltd 263 Adorno, Theodor 23, 192 aeolian cadence 156 Aerosmith 194 agency 11, 73, 74, 101, 113, 151, 193, 194, 274, 276

agency and structure 11, 16, 19, 98, 111, 170, 274, 276 ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ 85, 133, 156, 165, 171 ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ 154 AIR Studio 215, 224 Albert Hall 252 Albert, Robert 5, 75 Albufeira 93 Alexander, Arthur 79, 152, 163 Alexander, Victoria 6, 7 ‘All My Loving’ 85 Alomar, Carlos 217, 218 Amabile, Teresa 7, 8, 13, 107, 148, 149 American Music Awards 269 A Million Volt Sound and Light Rave 249 Amsterdam 154 Anaheim 267

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. McIntyre and P. Thompson, Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1

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284

Index

Anderson, Ray 249 Anderson, Rusty 69, 226, 260 ‘Anger’ 218 Anthology 223–225, 250 Apollo C. Vermouth 202, 247, 251 Apple Corp 178, 264 Apple podcasts 265 Ardmore & Beechwood 265 Arnett, Will 265 arrangement 27, 79, 94–99, 119, 121–123, 139, 150, 160, 173, 180, 182, 196, 199, 207, 211, 221, 222, 229, 232, 268 arranger 190, 196, 203, 210, 240 art 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 46, 61, 67, 133, 134, 138, 172–175, 192, 193, 201, 233, 250, 256, 268, 273 Arthur, W. Brian 269, 271, 274 Artist and Repertoire (A&R) 190, 194–196, 240, 248 artistic 7, 12, 89, 130, 216, 257 artistic creativity 10, 28 Art of Noise 253 art world 11, 89 Art Worlds 124 Asher, Jane 93, 133, 137, 172, 173, 248 Asher, Peter 248 Askland, Hedda 6 Aspinall, Neil 31, 51, 125, 158 Associated Television (ATV) 152, 264 ‘A Taste of Honey’ 86, 156 Atlantic Records 270 Aunt Mimi 147, 153 autodidacts 169, 170 Automatic Transient Overload control 128 Average White Band 221

B

Bach 96, 172 Bacharach, Burt 163, 165 ‘Back in the USSR’ 52, 80 The Back in the World Tour 64 ‘Back Seat of My Car’ 206 Back to the Egg 64, 203, 213 Bacon, Tony 47–49, 57, 58, 70 Badfinger 189, 205, 207 Badman, Keith 31 Bailin, Sharon 6, 157 Baker, Arthur 253 ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ 52, 180 ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’ 251, 253 ‘Ballroom Dancing’ 52 the band 27, 49–52, 55, 56, 58–68, 86, 115, 119, 133, 139, 160, 176, 178, 179, 201–203, 209, 212, 218, 245–247, 270, 274 ‘Band on the Run’ 52, 189, 207, 209–212 Barber, Adrian 58 Barber, Simon 163, 265 Barcelona 250 Barrow, Tony 31, 70, 200–202, 270 Bartley, Don 226, 227 Bart, Lionel 91 Bastick, Tony 87, 150 Bateman, Jason 265 Baur, Steven 29 BBC 115, 138, 139, 147, 148, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 174, 181, 258 BBC Radiophonics Workshop 174, 249 Beach Boys, The 120, 132, 133, 174 Beatles, The 1, 27–31, 49–52, 55–57, 59–61, 63, 66–68,

Index

74, 85, 86, 93–99, 111, 112, 115, 118–122, 124–128, 130–135, 137, 139, 140, 151, 156, 159–161, 163–165, 167, 171, 172, 175–178, 180–182, 195, 199–205, 209, 213, 218, 223–226, 229, 230, 236, 246, 247, 249–251, 254, 255, 257, 258, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270 The Beatles Bible 225, 250 Beat poets, the 251, 252 ‘Beautiful Boy’ 247 ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ 49 ‘Because’ 75, 179 Becker, Howard 7, 11, 12, 89, 124, 129 Beethoven 179 ‘Begin the Beguine’ 79, 152 Bekhtereva, Natalia 8 Benitez, Vincent 31 Bennett, Joe 25 Bennett, Tony 197 Bergquist, Carlisle 7 Berlin, Irving 79, 152, 163, 270 Berns, Burt 163 Berry, Chuck 121, 158, 179, 180 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 15 Bestall, Alfred 257, 258 Bextor, Robin 31, 70, 200–202, 270 The Big Three 58 Bill Black 235 Bill Black’s Kay upright bass 235 Billboard 253 Billboard Hot 100 253 ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ 254 ‘Blackbird’ 63, 253 Black Dyke Mills Band, the 189, 202, 203 Blackwell, Otis 163

285

Blake, Mark 31 Blake, Peter 250 ‘Bluebird’ 211 blues 46, 48, 79, 82, 96, 119, 121, 152, 158, 161, 199 Boden, Margaret 3, 11, 75, 76, 96, 117 Bolan, Marc 207 Bond St 201 Bonner, Michael 31, 86 Bono 270 Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the 189, 201, 251, 257 Borroughs, William 251 Boulton Brothers, the 172 Bourdieu, Pierre cultural capital 87, 115, 124, 211, 263 cultural production 11, 12, 18, 29, 107, 108, 114 economic capital 11, 17, 108, 160, 236, 248, 268, 269 field 11, 12, 17, 18, 24, 25, 29, 50, 89, 108, 114, 170, 193, 272, 277 field of works 24, 53, 108, 190, 193, 239 habitus 11, 17, 24, 54, 55, 88, 150, 157, 170, 193 social capital 113 space of works 11, 24, 80, 157, 159, 169, 182, 193, 204, 221, 271, 278 symbolic capital 50, 68, 124, 197, 228, 236, 248, 268, 269, 276 Bowie, David 53, 207 Boyd, Patti 133 ‘Boys’ 85 Bradford 202

286

Index

Braheny, John 164, 165 Brazil 64 Brennan, Matt 224 Brill Building 163, 164 Brit Awards 254, 269 Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 269 Broadway 78, 115, 138, 163, 245 Brocken, Michael 1 Brolly, Brian 211 Brothers in Rhythm 253 Brown, Peter 31, 158 Bruford, Bill 26 Bunny, Jah 221 Burgess, Richard 197 Burnard, Pam 24, 25 ‘Bye Bye Love’ 47

C

Campbeltown Pipe Band 213, 214 ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ 166 Candlestick Park 66, 171 Capitol Records 211, 267, 268 Capra, Fritjof 16, 107, 274 Carlin, Peter 31 Carmichael, Hoagy 79, 80, 152 ‘Carnival of Light’ 173, 249 Carpool Karaoke 265 Carroll, Lewis 153, 257 The Cars 222 Casbah, the 50 Casey, Howie 56, 63, 210 Cash, Johnny 212 Cattini, Clem 207 Cavanagh, David 31 Cavendish Avenue 163 Cavern, The 205 Chalk Farm 249

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard 52, 226 Chappell Studio 201 Charles, Ray 79, 95, 152, 197 The Chemical Brothers 253 Cherokee Studios 215 ‘Chicago’ 46, 77, 83 Choi, Jimmy 25 Choir of King’s College, Cambridge 263 ‘The Christmas Song’ 264 Clapton, Eric 179, 229, 270 Clarke, Stanley 215 Clark, Tony 112, 128, 206, 207 Classical Brit Awards 269 Claxton, Guy 6 Cleveland 270 Clott, Johnnie 53 Cloud Nine 224 Clover 220 Clydesdale, Greg 27, 29, 151, 182 ‘C Moon’ 208 Cochran, Eddie 48, 49, 163, 222 The Coffin 58 Cogan, Alma 91 Cogan, Fay 92 Colbert, Stephen 82, 83 Coleman, Ray 31, 74, 77, 79, 81, 85, 91–93, 95–100, 115, 152 collaborative creativity 150, 169 Collins, Marcus 149 Collins, Phil 218 Columbia Records 267 ‘Come and Get It’ 205, 206 ‘Come Together’ 179, 180 competition 8, 21, 27, 50, 110, 117, 275 complementarity 15–17, 19, 27, 272, 273, 276, 277

Index

complexity 15, 17, 109, 176, 181, 183, 219, 272, 273, 278 complex systems 15, 17, 140, 219, 271, 272, 278 Connolly, Ray 31, 153, 154 constrabling 15, 111, 273 constrabling factors 192 convergent thinking 7 cooperation 12, 21, 27, 50, 89, 110, 275 Corden, James 265 Costello, Elvis 220, 221, 225 The Country Hams 212 Coury, Al 211 Coward, Noel 79 Craft, Anna 6 creative person 1, 8, 9, 13, 80, 134, 196, 245 personality traits 8, 12 place 1, 3, 17, 21, 75, 182 process 4, 8, 13, 14, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 73, 80, 112, 129, 150, 157, 158, 226, 233, 237 product 8, 25, 65, 73, 74, 90, 102, 151 creative collective 23, 123, 125, 127, 132, 139, 192 creative output 27, 30, 124, 160, 169 creative system 15, 17, 20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 74, 77, 92, 107, 111, 116, 119, 122, 140, 147, 161, 162, 170, 181–183, 189, 194, 233, 271, 273, 275–278 creative system in action domain 1, 19, 20, 101, 114, 132, 134, 170 field 1, 19, 101

287

individual agent 12, 19, 23, 28, 74, 108, 161, 272 creative thinking 7, 76 creativity and time 271 big C and little c 6, 7 definitions 5, 7, 13, 101 European conceptions 2 Indian conceptions 3 myths 2, 9, 24, 83, 101 Western vs Eastern conceptions 2 Criticos, Harry 15, 111, 192, 273 Cropley, David 6 Crosby, Bing 158 Crosby, Stills 229 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 7, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 75, 76, 80, 89, 90, 94, 108, 118, 134, 148, 150, 151, 176, 183, 194, 201, 204, 219, 220, 237, 238, 240, 268, 271, 272 Culan, Roger 207 Cullum, Ross 222 cultural approach 9 cultural intermediaries 29, 223, 246, 265 cumulative advantage 269 Cunningham, Blair 223

D

Daily Express 257, 259 ‘Dance Tonight’ 226 Dark Side of the Moon 211 David, Hal 163, 165 Davies, Hunter 31 Davies, Rosamund 4, 5 Davis, Carl 261, 262 Davis, Todd 29

288

Index

Day of the Dead 252 ‘Day Tripper’ 166 Death from Above 230 DeCurtis, Anthony 220 ‘Deep Deep Feeling’ 237 Dekker, Thomas 179 Denmark St. 264 Derbyshire, Delia 249 Derry and the Seniors 56, 211 DeZutter, Stacy 13, 14, 151, 182 Diamond, Neil 197 Dido 254 Diperna, Alan 31 The Diplomats 59 Dire Straits 223 distributed creativity 13, 14, 19, 151, 182 divergent thinking 7 ‘Doctor Who Theme’ 249 Doggett, Peter 31 Dolmetsch family, the 207 domain 19–23, 25, 26, 29, 59, 74, 76, 77, 80, 83, 87–90, 95, 96, 98, 101, 111, 113, 114, 116, 122, 128, 150, 151, 157, 159, 162, 173, 182, 183, 190, 191, 194, 206, 220, 239, 248, 271, 272, 276, 278 domain acquisition 54, 80, 149, 151–153, 155–157, 200 domain immersion 80 ‘Don’t Blame Me’ 154 Donnegan, Lonnie 48, 49 Donovan 204 Dorfsman, Neil 221, 236 Dowd, Tom 198 Doyle, Tom 31, 62, 63, 212 The Drifters 80 ‘Drive’ 222

Driving Rain 226 The Driving World Tour 64 Duke String Quartet 99 Du Noyer, Paul 31, 61, 63, 135, 137, 138, 202, 223, 250, 253, 256, 257, 259–261 Durband, Dusty 92 dyad 112, 117, 120, 139, 150, 155, 162, 169 Dylan, Bob 81, 197 dynamic equilibrium 16, 17, 275 dynamism 15–17, 275

E

The Eagles 229 Eastern mysticism 178, 251 Eastman, John 225, 264 Eastman, Linda 174 Ecce Cor Meum 207, 253, 262 Eccleston, David 31 EDM 250 Ed Sullivan Show 97, 204 Ed Sullivan Theatre 82 Eerola, Tuomas 29, 77, 94 Egan, Sean 31 Egypt Station 52, 230, 231 Eisenberger, Robert 8, 117 ‘Eleanor Rigby’ 82, 166, 168, 169, 251 Electric Arguments 52 Electronic Sounds 173 Elliott, Anthony 29 Ellis, Royston 117 Elson, Howard 31, 74, 93, 206, 212, 258, 259 emergence 15, 17, 24, 27, 73, 74, 76, 89, 92, 109, 112, 138,

Index

139, 149, 158, 159, 173, 272, 275 Emerick, Geoff 31, 58, 112, 124– 126, 129, 130, 132, 139, 140, 159, 173, 178, 209–211, 214, 224, 236, 255 EMI/Parlophone 117, 120, 128– 132, 138, 139, 159, 160, 178, 199, 203, 209, 210, 214, 226, 249, 262, 265, 267, 277 EMI records 27, 112, 128, 160, 180 EMI’s Abbey Road 98, 112, 130, 172, 173, 214, 217 EMI’s Studio Two 214 engineer 58, 65, 76, 111, 124–127, 129, 130, 158, 171, 173, 174, 177, 182, 189, 191, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 206, 208–210, 216, 217, 222, 224, 226, 229, 232–236, 239, 240, 255, 277 English, Joe 135, 212 ‘English Tea’ 267 Engstrom, David 15, 273 Enlightenment 6 Entwhistle, John 122 Epstein, Brian 31, 159, 178, 213 Epworth, Paul 230 Ertegun, Ahmet 198, 270 Esher 177 Esher Demos 177 Essex, Kenneth 98 Essex Music 203 Estádio do Maracanã 64 Estefan, Gloria 197 Evans, Mal 47, 51, 125, 158, 205, 276 Everett, Walter 29, 31, 46, 47, 55, 111, 117, 121, 122, 125 Everly, Don 163

289

Everly, Phil 163 Everlys, The 158, 163

F

The Faces 100, 229 Fairlight 222 Faithfull, Marianne 251 ‘Falling in Love Again’ 79, 152 The Family Way 172, 199, 207 Fender Telecaster 235 field 1, 17, 19–21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 51, 53, 59, 74, 76, 77, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98, 101, 108, 111, 113, 116–118, 122, 128, 132–134, 138–140, 149, 151, 157–160, 162, 170, 179–183, 190, 194, 196, 204, 206, 208, 211, 223, 225, 228, 233, 234, 239, 240, 248, 254, 255, 265, 269, 270, 272, 275–278 Fillmore West 249 The Fireman 52, 247, 253–255 Fitzgerald, Jon 94, 95, 100, 164–166 ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’ 47 Flaming Pie 52, 224–226, 266 Flick, Vic 207 flow 112, 237, 238 Flowers, Herbie 207 Flowers in the Dirt 220, 223, 236, 255 The Foo Fighters 52 Forbes magazine 268 Foucault, Michel 277, 278 ‘FourFiveSeconds’ 253 The ‘04 Summer Tour 64 Franklin, Aretha 197 ‘Free as A Bird’ 224 ‘Freedom’ 226, 259

290

Index

‘Frere Jacque’ 121 Freud, Sigmund 7, 83, 84 Frith, Simon 22, 56, 157, 191 Frog Chorus 258 ‘From Me To You’ 85 Froom, Mitchell 221 Frost, David 204 Fuller, Louise 99 Fulpen, Har 31, 97 Fulton, Janet 6, 17, 109, 240

G

Gabarro, Francisco 98 Gabriel, Peter 216 Gadd, Steve 215 Galton, Sir Francis 6 Gambaccini, Paul 31, 49, 92, 211, 212 Gambier Terrace 117 Garbarini, Vince 31, 52 genius 5–7, 11, 20, 23, 74, 83, 85, 151, 175, 176, 182, 189, 191, 247 Gentle, Johnny 51 ‘Georgia on My Mind’ 79, 80 Gershwin, George 152 Gershwin, Ira 79, 152, 163 ‘Get Back’ 60, 166, 178 ‘Get on the Right Thing’ 208 Gibson ES-5 235 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop 235 Giddens, Anthony 11, 75, 111, 130, 276, 277 Gilbert, Paul 31, 78, 229 Gilbert, Tony 98, 99 Giles, David 29, 177 ‘Gimme Some Truth’ 178 Ginsberg, Allan 251, 252

‘Girl Of My Dreams’ 155 Giuliano, Geoffrey 31, 201, 212, 213 Give my Regards to Broad Street 258 Gl˘aveanu, Vlad 7, 9, 13, 14, 19, 135, 149, 182, 233, 234, 276 Glover, Martin 254, 256 ‘Go Now’ 213 ‘God Only Knows’ 132 Godrich, Nigel 226 Goffin, Gerry 163, 165 ‘Golden Slumbers’ 179 Golding, Craig 190, 195–197, 203, 209, 239 Good Day Sunshine 267 The Good Evening Europe Tour 64 ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ 156 The Goons 153, 174 Gorilla 201 ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ 229 Gracen, Jorie 31 Grade, Sir (now Baron) Lew 264 Graham, Bill 249 Grammy Awards 197, 253, 258, 269 The Grateful Dead Photo Film 250 Greenaway, Gavin 263 Greenfield, Howard 163 Greenfield, Susan 8 ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ 212 Green, Lucy 53, 54 Griffiths, Brian 56 Grillo, Oscar 258 Grimshaw, Caroline 31, 65, 68–70 Grohl, Dave 253 group creativity 149, 150, 183 Guilford, J.P. 7 Guinness Book of Records 270

Index

H

Haefeli, Mark 32 haiku 252 Hamburg 55–57, 63, 67, 86, 156 Hammel, John 65, 68 Hammond, Ian 29, 79, 80, 97 Hammond, John 198 harmony 57, 59, 99, 160, 167, 179, 196, 229, 230, 232, 238 Harries, Dave 198, 199, 206, 212, 218 Harris, Anne 6 Harris, Emmylou 229 Harrison, Charles 95 Harrison, Clive 26 Harrison, George 52, 86, 95, 125, 133, 155, 156, 160, 173, 175, 177–179, 200, 224, 250 Hass, Richard 25 Hawkes, Greg 222 Hayes, Sean 265 Hear Music 228, 268 Heartbreak Hotel 154 Heaven Club 254 Heilbronner, Oded 29 Heinonen, Yrjö 28, 29, 77, 80, 94 ‘Help’ 92–94, 98, 166, 199 ‘Helter Skelter’ 253 Hemphill Brothers Coach Company 66 Hendrix, Jimi 204 Hennessey, Beth 10, 13, 107, 148, 149 Hennion, Antoine 23, 65, 95, 123, 124, 192, 193 Hepworth, David 31, 45 Hepworth-Sawyer, Russ 190, 195–197, 203, 209, 239 ‘Here Comes the Sun’ 179

291

Hertsgaard, Mark 29 Hesmondhalgh, David 22, 191 Heuger, Markus 29, 80, 93 Hewson, Richard 207 Hey Grandude 257 ‘Hey Jude’ 69, 79, 166, 201, 204 ‘Hi Hi Hi’ 257 High Art 137 High Gate farm 214 Hill, MIchael 154 historiometric approach 9 Hodgson, Brian 249 Hofner 58, 236 Hofner 5001 235 Hofner 5001 bass 236 Hog Hill Mill 215–217, 232, 234, 277 ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’ 132 Holland-Dozier-Holland 163 Holly, Buddy 152, 158, 264 Hollywood Walk of Fame 270 Holmes á Court, Robert 264 Homer-Dixon, Thomas 16, 275 Hopkin, Mary 189, 203, 204, 207 Horn, Trevor 221 Hotel George V 95 Howe, Michael 5, 6, 75, 175, 176 How I Won the War 171 ‘How Many People’ 221 ‘Howl’ 251 Hughes, Chris 222 Human League 216 Hutcheon, David 31, 57, 215, 256

I

Iachimoe, Ian 248 ‘I Am the Walrus’ 174 ‘I Can Bet’ 229

292

Index

‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’ 86 ‘I Feel Fine’ 122, 166 ‘I Got You, I Feel Good’ 132 ‘I Hear A Symphony’ 132 illumination 150 ‘I’m Not in Love’ 216 ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ 201 Imagine 178 ‘I Me Mine’ 178 immersed/immersion 22, 25, 47, 53, 54, 74, 76–78, 80, 83, 86–89, 98, 101, 115, 149, 151, 152, 157, 169, 173, 182, 189–191, 197, 200, 220, 237, 239, 271–273, 276 ‘In My Life’ 167–169 increasing returns 269, 274 incubation 150 Indian philosophies 173 Individualism 3–5, 7–12, 14, 17–19, 21–26, 28, 30, 56, 74–76, 79, 80, 88, 89, 101, 108, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 124, 130, 134, 140, 148–151, 157–159, 162, 163, 167, 169, 176, 177, 182, 183, 189, 191–193, 217, 219, 238, 255, 276, 277 individualist perspective 15 Indra nightclub, the 55 Inglis, Ian 29, 77, 81, 100, 111, 164 Innes, Neil 201, 202 innovation 5, 15, 89, 97, 114, 125, 192, 273, 278 inspirationist view 233 instrumentation 62, 120, 222, 232 interconnectedness 15–17, 29, 109 International Space Station crew 267 International Times 173, 249

intuition 87, 150 INXS 254 ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ 85, 161 Isle of Man 257 The Isley Brothers 79, 152 ‘It’s Not Too Bad’ 172 It’s 2 Easy 132 iTunes Festival 267 The Iveys 205 ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ 165

J

Jacaranda Club, the 52 Jackson, Michael 215, 264 Jagger, Mick 251, 260 Jamaican 30, 221 James, Dick 133, 159, 264 ‘Jet’ 212 Joel, Billy 197, 270 John, Ethan 229 John Foster & Sons Ltd Black Dyke Mills Band 202 Johns, Glyn 179, 229 Jones, Quincy 197 ‘Junior’s Farm’ 212 ‘Just Fun’ 161

K

Kabaka, Remi 211 Kahne, David 226 Kaiserkeller Club, the 56 Kant, Immanuel 4 Karkhurin, Anotoly 7 Katz, Bob 227 Kaye, Lenny 253 Kehew, Brian 31, 126, 127, 129, 130

Index

Kennedy Center Honors 270 Kenyan safari 172 Kern, Jerome 79, 152 Kerouac, Jack 251 Kerr, DJ Roy 250 Kerrigan, Susan 6, 109, 151 Killing Joke 254 King, Carole 163, 165 King Cole, Nat 79, 152 King Lear 174 King, Martin 29 King’s Singers, the 258 Kinnock, Neil 263 Kintyre 59 Kirschmeider, Bruno 55 Kisses on the Bottom 253 Klein, Alan 180, 181, 226, 264 Koestler, Arthur 16, 109, 110 holarchy 16, 27, 109, 110, 112, 122, 139, 140, 275 holon 16, 26, 109, 110, 112, 117, 119, 122, 123, 131, 138–140 Kreisler, Fritz 58 Kruse, Robert 29 Kurstin, Greg 230, 231

L

Laboriel, Abe 69, 226, 260 Labour Party 263 ‘Lady Madonna’ 166 Lagos 52, 190, 209–211 Laine, Denny 52, 59, 209, 210, 213, 215, 216, 225 Laine, Frankie 79, 152 Laszlo, Ervin 15, 109, 110 The Late Late Show with James Corden 265 Latour, Bruno 233

293

Lear, Edward 118, 153 Lebuda, Izabela 7, 9 Ledbetter, Huddie 48 Led Zeppelin 62, 229, 270 Leiber, Jerry 163, 171 Lennon, Alfred “Freddie” 153 Lennon, John 28, 48, 49, 74, 85, 86, 91, 94–96, 100, 112, 116, 117, 119–121, 124, 125, 133, 139, 140, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157–159, 161–170, 174, 178–183, 199, 200, 220, 246, 257, 264, 269, 273, 274 Lennon, Julia 153 Lennon, Sean 147 Lester, Dick 92 ‘Let it Be’ 60, 166, 178, 179, 181, 229, 258, 259 Lewis, Jerry Lee 152 Lewisohn, Mark 31, 48, 49, 59–62, 64, 74, 79, 85, 96, 98–100, 115, 121, 124, 125, 128, 129, 152–155, 179, 199, 205, 215, 250 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song 270 LIFE magazine 247 Lilliestam, Lars 54 Lipson, Steve 221 ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ 258 ‘Little White Lies’ 154 ‘Live and Let Die’ 62, 69 ‘Live At The ICA Festival’ 267 live performance 1, 59, 122, 171 Liverpool 1, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 58, 63, 78, 115, 117, 147, 153, 155, 161, 172, 205, 226, 250, 255, 259, 261, 265, 266 Liverpool Anglican Cathedral 261

294

Index

Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) 263 ‘Liverpool Lou’ 212 Liverpool Oratorio 207, 222, 263 ‘Liverpool Sound Collage’ 250 Livy, Ken 129 Lombroso, Cesare 6 London 45, 59, 61, 62, 77, 117, 133, 135, 137, 138, 172–174, 190, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 215, 222, 224, 228, 235, 249, 252, 254, 262, 263, 267 London Evening Standard 172, 207 London Voices 263 ‘The Long and Winding Road’ 166 ‘Long Haired Lady’ 206 ‘Long Tall Sally’ 47, 154 Los Angeles 212, 215, 228, 253 The Los Angeles Times 252 ‘Love Me Do’ 161, 265 Lubart, Todd 7 Lucas, Bill 6 Ludwig, Bob 226, 228 Luisi, Pier 16, 107, 274 ‘Lullaby of the Leaves’ 77 Lush, Richard 112, 124, 199, 208 Lynne, Jeff 224 Lynn, Vera 79, 152

M

MacDonald, Ian 30, 74, 136, 168 MacDonald, Phil 112, 126 Madison Square Garden 63, 259, 260 Magdalen College 262 Magdalen College Choir from Oxford 263

‘Magical Mystery Tour’ 172, 178, 201, 258 ‘Magneto and Titanium Man’ 251 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 177 Mahler 156 Manhattan 163 Mann, Barry 163 Mann, William 156 Mansfield, David 252 Mantovani 96, 99 Marotta, Jerry 217, 219 Mars, Bruno 229 Marsden, Gerry 266 Martin D28 235 Martindale, Colin 29 Martin, George 27, 31, 70, 95, 96, 98–100, 112, 115, 119, 122, 124, 128, 130, 131, 133, 139, 152, 159, 160, 165, 166, 172–175, 177, 179, 195, 198–201, 203, 204, 207–209, 214–216, 224, 228, 255, 261, 262, 270 Martin, Giles 228 Martins, Peter 263 Marvin, Hank 54 Marx, Karl 10 ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ 257 Mashego, Teresa-Anne 7 mastering 128, 226, 227 Mattacks, Dave 215 The ‘Matthew Effect’ 269 ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ 52, 189, 225 McCartney I 206, 225, 232 McCartney II 215, 229, 232, 234 McCartney III 231, 232, 234–237 McCartney, Jim 46, 47 McCartney, Linda 206, 209, 210, 215, 221, 225

Index

McCartney, Mike 47, 212 McCartney, Paul 1, 2, 28–32, 45–55, 57–70, 73–83, 85, 86, 88–102, 112–122, 124, 125, 128, 133, 137, 139–141, 147, 150–153, 155–170, 172–183, 189–191, 197–222, 224–234, 236–240, 245–278 McCartney Productions Limited (MPL) 61, 64–67, 224, 228, 232, 263–265, 269, 277 McCracken, Hugh 59, 206 McCullough, Henry 52, 208, 209 McDonald, Phil 125, 205 McGear 212 McGee, Garry 31 McGrath, James 29, 30 McIntosh, Robbie 221 McIntyre, Phillip 6, 11, 15, 17–19, 22, 28–30, 95, 108, 109, 111, 130, 150, 151, 159, 167, 190, 192–194, 196, 199, 239, 240, 254, 255, 268 McRobbie, Angela 6 Meany, Michael 6 Mellers, Wilfrid 31, 100 Mellotron 168, 173, 255 melody 56, 73, 77, 79, 81–85, 88, 90–93, 95, 97, 101, 119, 122, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 176, 178–180, 183, 232, 257 Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) 269 Memory Almost Full 226–228 Mendes, Chico 221 Menlove Avenue 153, 168 mentor/mentoring 174, 197–199, 203, 215, 216, 224, 239

295

Mercury Records 252 Merriam, Alan 55 Merseyside 45, 263 Merton, R.K. 269 metanarrative 1 Michael, George 197 ‘Michelle’ 57 micro-system of record production 217 Middle-eight 92, 165 Mike Sammes Singers 207 Miles, Barry 31, 81, 83, 84, 90, 92–96, 113, 118–120, 156, 165, 166, 168, 173, 199, 203, 204, 248, 249, 251 MIller, Steve 225, 266 Minelli, Liza 197 Misra, Girishwar 3 Mitchell, Paul 31, 222 ‘Money’ 211 ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ 85 Montuori, Alfonso 7, 9, 13, 17, 19, 148, 275 The Moody Blues 59, 213 Moog 173, 230, 235 ‘Moonglow’ 86, 156 Moon, Keith 257 ‘Moonlight Sonata’ 179 Moore, Allan 29, 111 Moore, Tommy 51 Morey, Justin 25, 254, 255 Morgan, Gareth 47–49, 57, 58, 70 Most, Mickie 124 Motalleebi, Shirin 7 motivation extrinsic 8, 117, 149, 174 intrinsic 8, 117, 149, 167 ‘Motor of Love’ 221, 222 Motown 122, 163

296

Index

Mouth Almighty 252, 253 ‘Move It’ 54 MPL Communication 263 MPL Publishing 264 Mpofu, Elias 7 MTV 216–219, 253 MTV Europe Music Awards 269 MTV Video Music Awards 269 ‘Mull of Kintyre’ 213 Murphy, Jeff 227 muse, the 3, 5, 22, 74, 82, 85, 86, 191, 225 musical creativity 23–26 musical ecosystem 272 musician/musicians 1, 24, 32, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53–63, 67–69, 73, 77, 78, 85, 92, 97–99, 111, 115, 122, 132, 133, 139, 148, 155, 157, 165, 182, 189–193, 195–197, 206, 209–212, 215, 217–219, 221, 224–226, 230, 233, 239, 240, 252–254, 266, 268, 270 musician-producer 190, 239 music industry 24, 28, 89, 90, 95, 120, 192, 224, 234, 264, 267 music producers 25, 193 My Aim Is True 220 ‘My Love’ 208 Myambo, Kathleen 7

Negus, Keith 6, 15, 21–23, 74, 75, 77, 157, 191, 223, 246, 273 NEMS 213 network 10, 15, 16, 29, 109–111, 113, 124, 157, 192, 204, 272, 274, 277, 278 networks of collaboration 14 neuropsychology 8 New 228–230 New Orleans 190, 212 The New World Tour 64 New York 59, 63, 163, 175, 190, 206, 226, 228, 252, 259, 260 New York City Ballet 263 New York Philharmonic Orchestra 206 Nigeria 52, 209, 211 Nijstad, Bernard 149, 150 Nilsson, Harry 204 Niu, Wehai 2 NME 246 Nobile, Drew 29 non-linearity 15–17, 19, 108, 272, 274, 275 Norman, Philip 31, 56, 57, 132, 133, 135, 136, 216, 217, 219, 220, 225, 257, 270 Northern Songs 133, 159, 178, 264 ‘Not A Second Time’ 156

O N

NASA Astronaut Bill McArthur 267 Nash 229 Nashville 62, 190, 201, 212 National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences 197

Ocean’s Kingdom 263 O’Connor, Brian 265 O’Connor, Sinead 197 ‘Octopus’s Garden’ 179 Off the Ground 223, 254, 255 Okun, Milt 198 ‘One After 909’ 161

Index

The One on One Tour 64 Ono, Yoko 175, 264 The On the Run Tour 64 Oobu Joobu 257 The Orb 254 Orbison, Roy 163 Orchard, Steve 232, 234, 236–239 Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) 269 organized complexity 15 Ostwald, Michael 6 The Out There Tour 64 Owen, Alun 85 Owens, Buck 78, 152

P

Padgham, Hugh 216, 217, 220, 277 ‘Paperback Writer’ 102, 107, 111–113, 115, 119, 121–123, 125, 126, 128, 132, 135, 136, 138–140, 148, 162, 176, 248, 275 Paris 49, 95, 248 Parker, Bobby 79 Parnes, Larry 51, 56 Parsons, Alan 207 Pascall, Jeremy 31 Paton, Elizabeth 5, 6, 17, 109, 240 Paul and the Finchley Frogettes 258 Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio 261 paulmccartney.com 265–267 Paulus, Paul 149, 150 Pedler, Dominic 31, 79, 86, 115, 119, 121, 152, 156, 163, 165, 166 Peel, Ian 31, 133, 160, 173, 206, 207, 252–256

297

Pennebaker, James 29 ‘Penny Lane’ 168, 229, 249 Perasi, Luca 31, 220–222, 227, 228, 236 performing musician 32, 45–47, 50, 55, 57, 63 Pestalozzi Children’s Choir 215 Peter and Gordon 248 Peterson, Oscar 197 Peterson, Richard 7, 10, 192, 271 Petrie, Duncan 6, 7, 74 Petrie, Keith 29 Pet Sounds 120, 133, 174 Pickering, Michael 6, 16, 21, 74, 75, 77, 157, 191, 273 Pieper, Jorg 32 Pink Floyd 211, 249 Pipes of Peace 215, 219 Plant, Robert 62 Plato 3–5 Playboy Magazine 166, 167 The Police 216 Pomus, Doc 163 Pope, Robert 6 popular music 1, 21, 22, 24, 27–30, 57, 75, 76, 80, 89, 90, 96, 101, 132, 138, 147, 148, 151–153, 157, 159, 164, 170, 182, 190, 194, 204, 223, 227, 228, 234, 239, 246, 248, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275 Portillo, Michael 263 Portugal 93 Postcard 204 Powell, Aubrey 32, 84 preparation 150, 248, 249 Presley, Elvis 152, 235 Press to Play 215, 216, 219, 220 The Pretenders 221

298

Index

Pritzker, Steven 7 producer 11, 27, 70, 87, 95, 119, 124, 131, 175, 179, 190, 194–198, 200–204, 206–209, 214–218, 221, 222, 226, 228–231, 239, 240, 250, 254, 265, 270, 277 production of culture approach 10 ‘P.S. I Love You’ 265 psychological reductionism 12 psychology 8, 9, 12, 29, 84 Purser, Ronald 9 Putnam, Bill 198 Putnam, Junior 212

Q

Q Awards 269 Quarry Bank 154 Quarrymen, the 48–50, 148 ‘Queenie Eye’ 230

R

Radio Luxembourg 115, 154 Ram 59, 197, 206, 207, 225, 251 ‘Ram On’ 251 ‘Ramona’ 155 Ramone, Phil 197, 198, 206, 251 Ramon, Paul 247, 251 Ransome-Kuti, Fela 211 Ray, Brian 69, 260 Rayner, Eddie 217 ‘Real Love’ 224 Reck, David 29 recording engineer 190, 196, 240 record producer 32, 76, 111, 159, 182, 183, 189–191, 193–198,

200, 216, 224, 232, 233, 240, 261 record production 1, 110, 111, 128, 140, 189, 190, 194–196, 201, 203, 207, 220, 233, 240, 271 REDD Desk 126 Red Rose Speedway 208, 229, 258 Reed, Jerry 62 Reed, Lou 207 Reising, Russell 29 Return of the Forgotten poetry festival 252 ‘Revolution 9’ 174, 175, 250 ‘Revolution’ 125 Revolver 119, 122, 124, 125, 133, 167, 171, 174, 209, 245 rhythm 48, 93, 121, 128, 200, 201, 211, 218, 222, 229, 232 Richard, Cliff 54 Richard, Little 47, 67, 152, 154 Rickenbacker 58, 122, 236 Rihanna 253 Rio 64 Robbins, Joel 21 Robertson, Robbie 270 Robinson, Smokey 163, 165 rock and roll 46, 78, 133, 152, 204, 226, 269 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 270 ‘Rock Around the Clock’ 154 ‘Rock Island Line’ 48 Rogers, Nile 266 ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ 85 Rolling Stone 180, 220, 246, 259 The Rolling Stones 229 Romantic 4, 6–8, 11, 23, 30, 73, 74, 76, 83, 101, 117, 148, 175, 176, 191, 192, 233, 273 Romantic agony 148

Index

Romanticism 3, 4, 6, 28, 190, 192, 276 Ronson, Mark 229 Ronstadt, Linda 229 Rothenberg, Albert 4 Roundhouse 174, 249 Rouse, Allan 31, 214 Royal, Kate 263 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra 261 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir 262 Rubber Soul 167, 245 Rubin, Rick 194 Rude Studios 213 Runco, Mark 5, 7, 8 Run Devil Run 226 Run-DMC 194 Rupert the Bear 257 Russian Cosmonaut Valery Tokarev 267 Ryan, Kevin 31, 126, 127, 129, 130

S

Sahwney, Nitin 253 Salewicz, Chris 31, 61, 76, 81, 92, 156, 204, 248 ‘Sally G’ 212 Saltaire 202 Sandford, Christopher 31 ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ 80 Saville Row 264 Sawyer, Keith 2, 4, 6–9, 14, 15, 17, 21, 109, 148–151, 157, 169, 176, 182, 183, 272 Sax, Sidney 98 scalability 15, 17, 23, 26, 29, 111

299

Schaffner, Nicholas 31, 134, 171, 172 Scheurer, Timothy 164, 165 Schön, Donald 87 Schultheiss, Tom 31, 85, 133 Schwartau, Bill 198 science 6, 7, 60, 75, 268 scientific creativity 10 Scotch and Coke 135, 213 Scotland 51, 59, 213, 221, 247, 257 Scott, Ken 159, 174, 177, 204 ‘Sea Melody’ 258 Seattle Kingdome 64 The Second Album 132 Second World War 77, 259 The Secret Tour 64 Sedaka, Neil 163 Seiwell, Denny 52, 59, 206, 209 selection 20, 59, 67, 89, 111, 116, 181, 183, 194, 196 self-organisation 15, 17, 109, 275 ‘September in the Rain’ 79, 152 Setzer, Brian 197 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 172, 174, 177, 200, 209 The Shadows 93 Shaw, Greg 163 ‘She Loves You’ 85 Sheldonian Theatre 262 ‘She Said, She Said’ 174 ‘She’s Leaving Home’ 199 Sheridan, Tony 56 Shuker, Roy 22, 23, 157, 164, 191, 193, 223, 224 Shuman, Mort 163 Sigthorsson, Gauti 4, 5 ‘Silly Love Songs’ 57 Simon, Paul 197

300

Index

Simonton, Dean Keith 3, 7, 9, 10, 12 Sinatra, Frank 154, 158, 197 singalongs 46, 78, 152 Siouxsie and the Banshees 254 Skelton, Zach 230 skiffle 48, 49, 156, 158 Skyttner, Lars 16, 109, 275 Smartless 265 Smith, John 175 Smith, Keith 232, 234–236, 238 Smith, Larry 201 Smith, Norman 124, 159, 200 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles 168 social and cultural structures 19 social conditions 18 social creativity research 9 social distribution 14 social-personality approach 8 sociocultural approach 9 sociology 9, 10, 29 Sodajerker on Songwriting 265 Soft Machine 249 Soho Square 235, 263 ‘Somedays’ 225 ‘Something’ 179 ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ 79, 152 ‘Song of the Earth’ 156 song structure 54, 59, 113, 164, 232 songwriting 1, 25, 26, 28, 48, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 84, 86, 88, 90, 93–95, 112–114, 117, 119, 120, 124, 128, 138–140, 147, 148, 151–153, 155–159, 161–165, 167, 169, 170, 174, 175, 180, 182, 189, 191, 196, 199, 216, 217, 220, 221,

228, 239, 248, 253, 264–266, 269–271 Sony/ATV Publishing 264 Sony Publishing 264 The Soul Album 132 The Sound of Silence 132 Sounes, Howard 59, 137, 201, 211, 221, 261–264 Southall, Brian 31, 124, 131, 214 Spain 171, 172 Spector, Phil 179 Spence, Helen 31 Spencer, Ellen 6 Spinozza, Dave 206 Split Enz 217 Spotify 265 Springsteen, Bruce 270 Srivastava, Ashok 3 ‘Stairway to Paradise’ 77 Standing Stone 207, 258, 262 Stanshall, Vivian 201, 257 Starbucks 267, 268 Star Club 57 Starr, Ringo 52, 125, 133, 159, 179, 215, 225, 234 Stax Records 163 Stein, Morris 7, 90 Steinway Baby Grand 234 Sternberg, Robert 2, 5, 7, 75, 85 Stern, Howard 265 Stewart, Eric 215–220 Stewart, Rod 197 Stiff Records 220 Sting 70, 254 St John’s Wood 117, 133, 173, 205 Stockhausen 133, 172 Stokes, Geoffrey 31 Stoller, Mike 163, 171 St Paul’s Choir 258

Index

Stratton, Jon 30, 223 Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest 255 Strawberry Fields 168 ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ 27, 172, 199 Streisand, Barbra 197 Strepsil 68 structural factors 28, 183, 193, 276 structures 4, 10–12, 17, 19, 20, 23–25, 75, 88, 89, 108, 109, 111–115, 130, 134, 139, 140, 152, 156, 159, 164, 166, 168–170, 172, 182, 183, 191, 192, 194, 222, 255, 262, 271, 272, 274, 276, 278 Stuart, Hamish 221 Studer multitrack 206 Suczek, Barbara 29 The Sugarcubes 254 ‘Summer in the City’ 132 The Summer Live ‘09 tour 64 Sundance Film Festival 253 ‘Sunday Rain’ 52 ‘Sunny Afternoon’ 132 Sun Valley Studio 224 Super Furry Animals 253 Surrey 177 Sutcliffe, Stuart 57 Swansea 205 ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ 79, 152 symbolic goods 18 systems model of creativity 14, 15, 22, 73, 75, 76, 116, 120, 123, 127, 131, 134–136, 271

T

‘Take it Away’ 52 Taylor, Derek 158

301

Taylor, Robert 227 Tears for Fears 222 ‘Tears of a Clown’ 168 Ted Brown Music Co 95 Tedder, Ryan 230 Te Kanawa, Dame Kiri 262 10cc 215, 216 ‘That Was Me’ 226 ‘That’ll Be the Day’ 154 ‘The Things We Do For Love’ 216 Thomas, Chris 174, 175 Thomas, Dylan 257 Thompson, Paul 16, 26, 27, 108, 111, 153, 155, 158, 164, 171, 173, 194, 196, 199, 217, 233, 275 ‘Those Were The Days’ 203 Thrillington 207, 251 Thrillington, Percy ‘Thrills’ 207, 247, 251 Tibetan philosophies 173 ‘Ticket to Ride’ 122, 124, 166 Tighe, Elizabeth 8 ‘Till There Was You’ 85 time 16, 20, 21, 28, 32, 50–52, 56, 61, 69, 77, 84, 86, 88–91, 93, 96, 97, 100, 113, 115, 118, 119, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131–134, 137, 138, 140, 149, 153, 159, 160, 163, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174, 177–181, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 205, 209, 212, 221–225, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 238, 239, 245, 246, 248, 252, 261, 263, 265, 267–270, 273–275, 278 The Times 156 Tin Pan Alley 79, 163, 165, 245

302

Index

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ 119, 125, 255 Toussant, Allain 212 Townsend, Ken 112, 125, 126, 129, 139 Townshend, Pete 260 Toxteth 153 Toynbee, Jason 21, 23, 24, 98, 170, 192, 193, 195, 239 tradition 3, 10–12, 15, 25, 46, 47, 54, 77, 79, 80, 117, 129, 153, 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 182, 190, 203, 239, 273 Tram Sheds 168 transmission 20 Travelling Wilburys 224 Tschmuck, Peter 24 Tug of War 52, 215, 216, 219 ‘Turn Turn Turn’ 204 Turner, Joe 79 Turner, Steve 31, 73, 115, 117, 118, 249, 250 ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ 48 Twiggy 203 ‘Twin Freaks’ 250 Twin Towers 259 ‘Twist and Shout’ 85, 86

U

U2 254, 270 ‘The Ugly Duckling’ 264 UK BAFTA (British Academy Award) 258 ‘Unchained Melody’ 264 Unit Delta Plus 249 Universal International 228 Universal Music 266 Universal Music Enterprises 268

Unplugged Tour 64 The Up and Coming Tour 64 ‘Uptown Funk’ 229 The ‘US’ Tour 64

V

van Sant, Gus 253 variation 20, 25, 73, 76, 80, 90, 101, 121, 164, 169, 191, 205, 240, 278 Vaughan, Ivan 257 vegetable percussion 174 Velikovsky, Joe 17, 109, 110 ‘Venus and Mars’ 61, 212, 217 verification 90, 101, 150 The Verve 254 Vincent, Gene 49 Vince, Peter 31, 214 Virgin Islands 190 Visconti, Tony 204, 207, 208, 211 Vox AC-30 235 Vygotsky, Lev 6

W

Wagner, Naphtali 29 Wal 5-string bass 236 Waldrop, Mitchell 16, 17, 274, 275, 278 ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ 207 ‘Walk This Way’ 194 Walker Art Gallery 256 ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’ 212 Wallas, Graham 94, 150 Waller, Fats 78, 152 Waller, Gordon 248 Wally Heider Studio 212

Index

Washington, Dinah 79, 152 The Washington Post 259 Watson, Peter 4, 6, 28 Watts, Ernie 215 ‘We All Stand Together’ 258 ‘We Can Work It Out’ 166, 167 ‘We Gotta Get Outta this Place’ 132 Webb, Bernard 247, 248 Weber, Erin 30, 31, 246 Weil, Cynthia 163 Weisberg, Robert 2, 5, 7, 13, 25, 75, 80, 86, 88, 89, 157, 175, 176 Weiten, Will 75, 84 Welsh, Bruce 93, 94, 203 Wenner, Jann 175 West, Alan 29 West, Kanye 253 Wexler, Jerry 198 Weybridge 117, 118, 139, 168 ‘What’s That You’re Doing?’ 265 Whissell, Cynthia 29 The White Album 52, 174, 175, 177, 250, 267 ‘White Christmas’ 270 White Elephant 126 White, Monte 95 Whitman, Slim 48, 78, 152 The Who 122, 229, 257 ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ 154 ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ 253 Wickens, Paul ‘Wix’ 69, 221, 225, 260 Wicke, Peter 23, 175, 191, 192 Wild Life 213 Williams, Allan 31, 51, 52, 55, 158 Williams, Anthony 6 Williams, Hank 78, 152, 158 Wilson, Tony 213

303

Wimpole Street 77, 92 Winehouse, Amy 229 Wings 32, 49, 59–63, 66, 203, 208–210, 212, 213, 225, 235, 255, 258, 266, 274 Wings Over America 56 With the Beatles 86 Witten, Chris 221, 223 Wittkower, Rudolf 5 Woffinden, Bob 31 Wolff, Janet 7, 10, 23, 159, 192, 274 Wolf, Richard 58 Womack, Kenneth 29, 31 ‘Woman’ 248 The Wonderstuff 254 Wood, Len 132 Woolton 49, 147, 148, 153 ‘The Word’ 229 Word magazine 250 Working Classical 262 World Cup, The 135 ‘World Without Love’ 248 WWII 45, 138, 260, 261

Y

‘Yellow Submarine’ 166, 202, 257 ‘Yesterday’ 30, 70, 73–77, 79, 81– 83, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97–102, 107, 126, 148, 167, 176, 180, 199, 270, 275 ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ 180 ‘You Gave Me The Answer’ 266 ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’ 180 ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ 85 ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’ 168

304

Index

Young, Neil 270 ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ 57 Youth 136, 154, 253–256 Youtube 54, 121, 122, 265, 266

Z

Zak, Albin 195 Zinovieff, Peter 249 Zolberg, Vera 7, 10