Conventional wisdom has it that it was John Lennon who was The Beatles’ envelope-pushing innovator, but Mark Ronson has argued that this does Paul McCartney a disservice.
Speaking on Track Stars, the popular YouTube show that sees artists being played snippets of music through headphones on the streets of New York and being asked to identify them, Ronson was treated to a portion Temporary Secretary, a discombobulating slice of sequenced synth-pop from 1982’s McCartney II album.
Having correctly named the song, Ronson said of McCartney: “There's a tendency to misremember him as like ‘John Lennon was a rock ‘n’ roll badass and Paul was kind of like happy poppy guy,’ but Paul made the weirdest fucking music.”
To illustrate his point, Ronson recalled an incident that occurred when he was working with McCartney on his 2013 album, New.
“I went to his studio one time and I got there early,” he remembers. “He was literally like step sequencing a Moog keyboard to make the weirdest fucking sounds I've ever heard and was just like ‘Ooh, like a bit of that.’”
Warming to his theme, Ronson goes on to say: “He was the first person to use, like, Moogs on a recording with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. He was always pushing it forward.”
Which isn’t to say that John Lennon wasn’t a force for experimentation within the Beatles - the likes of Tomorrow Never Knows and Strawberry Fields Forever have been hugely influential on the development of electronic music, for example - but that his songwriting partner has always drawn from a wide sonic palette, too. “Paul McCartney is insane,” argues Ronson, in summary.
As an aside, Ronson also says that McCartney’s musical tastes are less predictable than you might think, and led him to wonder what kind of record he wanted them to make together.
“When I was in the studio with him and we were working, I was like, ‘What have you been listening to lately?’ And he played me Climax by Usher. And I remember being like, shook. I was like, ‘That's a fucking great record, [but] if he's expecting me to make Climax…’”
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