Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 16: Paul McCartney, Off The Ground (1993)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME! Also, some albums just REALLY suit the format, right

Remember when you’d buy a CD 💿

$35, certainly at least $20 — you’d get three songs in and you weren’t quite feeling it, and there was no way out but through — you pushed through, kept listening, found the magic, did ‘the work’.

Your favourite band, or a heritage/legacy artist would release an album — sometimes after a greatest hits, often a tour was coming and that would spark your interest, or also you were newly enthused about their work, say, and catching up and then, hey, new album!

It’s bits of all of that for me when (Sir) Paul McCartney of Beatle released his 9th solo album, his first of the 1990s, Off The Ground, at the very start of 1993. I knew his material already, of course. Grew up with it (didn’t everyone?). And he had been having something of a “comeback” in the late 80s like a lot of people from his era, they’d struggled through the 80s, looking (if not sounding) like Drunk Uncle at the nephew’s 21st. Down with the kids, yo. Cringe. But 1989’s Flowers In The Dirt was a banger.

Also Paul was touring New Zealand for the first time as a solo act. And my parents were taking me!

So Off The Ground was the album behind the tour — of course it was all about everything else, but the album was (I would say) correctly represented in the setlist:

And maybe that means it was just for the “piss-breaks”. But there’s always a dreaded “new song” (or two — in this case five!)

So my memories of this album are rightly connected with that magical night, when, as a teenager, I saw Paul McCartney, even shook his hand briefly as he flew over the crowd in a cherry-picker at the end of the night while the “nah-nah” endless chorus of Hey Jude rolled on and on.

But I’m also a stickler for the album everyone pans. It can’t always be all that bad (except for sometimes, when it is a shocker). Off The Ground isn’t the album that’s been slept on, it’s not suddenly going to win you over. But it is a set by one of the most gifted melodicists and multi-instrumentalists to work in pop music. He’s still in very fine voice and all-around form, and has great players with him. And can easily toss off a charmer like Peace In The Neighbourhood.

Or the chug-along opening title track, the very Wings-esque Golden Earth Girl, and speaking of Wings — I even love the prosaic clunker Biker Like An Icon, because it gives me the Helen Wheels vibes.

There are a small handful of gems on this album — it’s also better than you remember it, if you were one of those peeps that bought it because of the tour, or because you bought every album by every artist you loved back then, except you didn’t love this. I urge you to give it a whirl again, it’s one of the last reminders of the proper, pure Paul voice. It’s also the last original album of material he wrote and released with Linda fully by his side. And you can feel that. He was still calling her “Gertrude” from the stage, endearingly. And she was bopping away behind a prop-keyboard to the annoyance of too many Jean Jacket Journalists. The album that followed, Flaming Pie, is better. But Linda was sick when those songs were taking shape. And you can feel that heartbreak in those songs. It’s for the better of the songs. But that curtain would hang over the albums he made right up until 2007’s Memory Almost Full, which is both better than I remember it also, but still a bigger stinker than this.

If you came in on the wrong song, you’d absolutely write Off The Ground down as a failure. But it is an album of and for the CD age. It’s a little bit of a concentrated sprawl. By the time you get to closer, C’mon People it’s been a journey, and your rewarded with the sort of symphonic-tracing epic balladry that just makes you feel good that Macca has several of in his many garden sheds.

But first the silly-perfect mid-tempo mid-life-crisis rocker, Get Out Of My Way.

It’s not a great song, but it is a fun song — sad to hear those keyboard horns in the middle, but so cool to hear our boy just indulging his love of Carl Perkins (for the first time in a while). And sharing it widely.

I’m absolutely an apologist. And if you’ve read this far, you not only detect that, you’re also some sort of McCartney fan. So you deserve a pay-off. Here. Listen. Watch. Majestic!

Yes it’s hammy, and Macca always brings the cheese. But it’s also glorious don’t you think? Imagine just having that buried at the bottom of one of the albums a bunch of people that never listened all the way through decided had to be shit because they saw it was said so somewhere at some stage? But in true McCartney style, there’s something before the big finish. Winedark Sea, the album’s penultimate track might be even better.

Point is, he was on form here. And because it wasn’t his time, and he wasn’t the flavour, he was mocked as some middle-aged white-whiner. And that’s just incorrect. Other point is, I don’t want or need this album for my vinyl collection. I never really stream it and walk around with it in my ears. It is a CD. Because to me it was always a CD. And now it’s one I get to enjoy at least as much as I did 30 years ago when it was released. Maybe more.