The Paul McCartney album his label didn’t want to release: “I was almost insulted”
The number one rule about pop music is usually not to question Paul McCartney. Throughout his time with The Beatles and his solo career, McCartney usually knew what made people want to dance and feel good about themselves, so there was no real reason to believe that he was going to make something terrible whenever he went into the studio. He did have his fair share of off moments, but when he staged one of his comebacks in the 1990s, his label outright refused to release Flaming Pie at first.
When you think about it, the idea of limiting McCartney’s content in the late 1990s makes zero sense. The world had just gotten a taste of Fab again with the release of The Beatles Anthology, and since the rest of the Britpop world was paying tribute to The Beatles everywhere they could, it wasn’t exactly hard for someone to get on board with an album by one of them.
If anything, McCartney even leaned into Fab sensibilities on many of the songs. A track like ‘The World Tonight’ may qualify for being toothless dad rock for some people, but there were also amazing pieces of McCartney magic spread throughout the album, including the song ‘Beautiful Night’, which featured Ringo Starr on drums and one of the final performances between him and his wife Linda before her tragic death.
As McCartney presented it to his label, he was met with pushback he hadn’t gotten before, telling Billboard, “One of the bigwigs at the record company said, ‘We don’t want a [solo] record from you for the next two years. I was almost insulted at first. But I thought, ‘Well, yeah, it would be silly to go out against yourself in the form of The Beatles’. So I fell in with the idea and thought, ‘Great, I don’t even have to think about an album.’”
Then again, taking that break from working on the record managed to give McCartney a greater focus on what he was working on. The Beatles Anthology served as a way of refreshing his memory of what made him so endearing to the rest of the world for the past few years, and that kind of Fab magic gave McCartney a renewed spirit on this record.
The tides were already turning towards McCartney’s classic sound on Off the Ground, but Flaming Pie was some of his sturdiest songs in years. Most of McCartney’s later 1980s work tended to fall a bit too close to dad rock, and while there is still some to be found here, tracks like ‘Calico Skies’ are so good that they could have been released during The Beatles’ prime, almost fitting nicely on The White Album.
Even the leftovers from the album ended up going over fairly well. Despite being written during the album sessions, the song ‘When Winter Comes’ had to wait nearly 30 years before it was ready for primetime, eventually getting a release at the end of McCartney’s third namesake album, McCartney III.
Although McCartney could have been justifiably miffed that his label didn’t want an album, Flaming Pie was well worth the wait. There were still some new ideas to be found, but there were also more than a few glimpses back to the ‘Cute Beatle’ that the world never lost its fondness for.