CLUB SANDWICH 58

UNPLUGGED

Paul talks exclusively to Club Sandwich about how he felt the evening of 25 January, performing an entirely acoustic set for the first time in his career, and he runs through the 17 tracks on the new limited-edition album, Unplugged: The Official Bootleg.

            "I like any excuse to loosen up, and one of the attractions of Unplugged was that it was so loose. A lot of people liked the very informal, intimate atmosphere. I did - in fact, I was a bit surprised at how intimate and how informal it was. It was fairly nerve-wracking, though, not plugging into amps after all those years, using mikes for the guitars. It's a completely different discipline - if you turn around to look at the drummer, the guitar sound goes.
            "We may well put some acoustic stuff into the next tour. A lot of people said that their favourite bit of the 1976 Wings tour was when we all sat down for the acoustic set. For Unplugged we stood up, because we had sat down in 1976. Next time, we'll be hovering above the audience.
            "To me, the Unplugged set was the nearest thing I've done to a pub gig for a long time. And in my particular case, as I'm not a black blues singer from the '50s, my stuff tends to have more humour when it gets like that. But I feel more comfortable not being serious. The breakdown at the front of 'We Can Work It Out' was hilarious. It's like something from a blooper tape. The album has that element to it, and I'm really glad we did it."

            Be-Bop-A-Lula
            "I had a friend at the Liverpool Institute called Cass, and he was in a group called Cass and the Cassanovas. He was one of the first guys I knew who got into it semi-professionally. The rest of us played around in our houses, and learnt songs, but he was on a Jim Dale Skiffle Contest at the Liverpool Empire, and me and some other guys from the school went to support him. They came second or third. He was the first rock idol to come from our midst! And at school one day he said, 'There's this great record by Gene Vincent, called "Be-Bop-A-Lula"', so I wrote it down and went to Currys record shop after school and ordered it. That record is purple in my mind, the whole song is purple, because of the purple Capitol label. It was a 78. We threw that into Unplugged at the last minute: I started doing it at rehearsals and Wix really liked the idea."

            I Lost My Little Girl
            "Anything that I had written on an acoustic was considered. Like 'Mother Nature's Son', which we also thought about for Unplugged but just didn't fancy in the end. And 'I Lost My Little Girl', the first song I ever wrote, at 14, was written on the guitar. After that I wrote 'When I'm Sixty-Four', but that was on piano. 'I Lost My Little Girl' is a very innocent little song - G, G7, C - but quite interesting because the chords go down as the melody goes up; it's a clear musical trick, but it's also interesting to see such ideas around in my first song." Did you sit down with a pen and paper and try to think of all the songs you associated with acoustic?
            "Yes, with the band. I mentioned 'San Francisco Bay Blues', for example, and Robbie liked that one, so that was in. And, as I say, we also tried 'Mother Nature's Son' [in rehearsal] but I just didn't enjoy myself, so we grabbed something else instead. We wanted to enjoy ourselves. 'Junk', for example, came out of the blue, no particular reason. We tried a lot and the ones that felt better went onto the final list."

            Here, There And Everywhere
            "John and I were particular fans of songs with little Cole Porter-era preambles, and we put them into a few of our own. 'Girl Of My Dreams', one of John's favourite songs from early on, had a long preamble before it got into the song. So 'Here, There And Everywhere' was going to have a preamble; in fact, it's only a short one ['to lead a better life...'], but it's nice to have those little bits that don't happen anywhere else in the song.
            "When people have asked what my favourite song is I've often listed 'Here, There And Everywhere'. There are some nice chord changes and clever little ideas. It ends on a major chord that you don't expect, and there's a real nice key change that George Martin suggested in the middle, to go into the solo. I think that's why jazz people picked up on it. I like the words, too."
            Were you aware, with Unplugged, that it was another one of those songs that you hadn't performed live before?
            "My career's funny. I don't keep track. I don't know how many songs I've written, for instance, though obviously it changes each year. So, in the same way, I'm pretty vague as to whether I've done a song live before."

            Blue Moon Of Kentucky
            "I originally heard the Elvis version, uptempo and echoey, then later I heard the Bill Monroe original, a slower waltz version, and loved his nasal delivery. I also saw him doing it on telly, in America, a couple of times. So I thought, for Unplugged, that it would be nice to do his version first and then go into the uptempo Elvis one.
            "It's a song from way back that I had confidence in singing, and that's often enough to choose it for an act. It's funny - I never meant to record it, but I did it on the early Wings tours, which we recorded, and now this, which we've released, and it's become a bit more important than I intended it, really. But that's OK."

            We Can Work It Out
            "When I think acoustic, as I did for Unplugged, I tap into a whole other pool of numbers that I wouldn't think of on electric. I actually wrote 'We Can Work It Out' on an acoustic, at twice the speed, like a country and western song. It was nice for Unplugged because Wix could play the harmonium lines on his accordion. And I hadn't done it for a while - 1965 -and that's a while, in anyone's language."