However, James Paul McCartney is the author behind the worst of the Beatles’ canon: the insufferable Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, the truly execrable Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and that one man ego trip that was Let It Be…Naked. The Love album aside (which I think is a remarkable, beautiful achievement) I don’t think you should mess with a body of work; once a recording is out there it no longer belongs to the artist, it belongs to the paying audience. Let It Be…Naked was wrong in exactly the same way that the 40th anniversary Doors remasters were wrong. We all know Jim was censured, that his words were adulterated, but we’ve lived with the ‘official’ version of Break On Through for 45 years now – why change it? Let It Be…Naked may have unearthed a new version of Don’t Let Me Down, but it should never have existed.
Anyway, no matter how bad the worst of McCartney’s Beatles compositions were, they are nothing compared to the worst excesses of his solo and Wings years. You could easily fill a double CD with some of the bollocks he’s produced since the greatest band that ever walked the planet split. The world can get by quite happily without one version of Oobu Joobu: it certainly does not need six! And as for certified turds like Morse Moose and the Grey Goose, Wonderful Christmastime, Bip Bop, Spies Like Us, the stupid The Other Me (with its ridiculous opening couplet ‘I know I was a crazy fool for treating you like I did, but something got a hold of me and I acted like a dustbin lid’), Move Over Busker, that awful bloody Frog Chorus garbage and almost all of his moronic vanity projects, such as the Thrillington album (instrumental versions of the hugely underrated Ram), the Country Hams, Rockestra and so on, the world would be a better place without them.
He’s been producing garbage for more than 40 years, but nothing quite as awful as this. Today, ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment the World’s Worst Records presents Paul McCartney dragging down the career of another one-time great with the nadir of his solo work, Ebony and Ivory.
Everything about this half-assed project is wrong, from the fact that the two of them didn't even record their parts at the same time or in the same studio to the wretched cover (above) with a whimsical Paul leaning against an oversized keyboard and a crappy photo of Stevie tacked on as a last-minute sop to the co-creator of this pap. It's horrible, horrible, horrible. Lord knows how it managed to get to number one in the UK, US, Canada, Japan, Norway and Germany. Still, not everyone was fooled: the song was named as the tenth worst song of all time by Blender magazine and was cited as the worst duet in history by listeners of BBC 6 Music.
I love the Beatles...but I hate this.
