During his downtime, when not touring or creating his high-flying albums, McCartney enjoyed picking up his brushes and let his imagination run wild or as he himself would put it, “just to let the paint lead the way.” (far out)
Roughly speaking that means Macca would begin painting, likely as a relaxation technique, without an idea of what would happen next. It means that often his work, though expressive, is without serious direction and therefore often sees famous faces pop up in his work. Not only is there room for his former wife Linda in his repertoire but also images of Andy Warhol and of course, Bowie. The paintings were exhibited in Siegen, Germany in 1990.
These paintings are not created with a physical subject but plucked from Macca’s mind’s eye. As such, ‘Bowie Spewing’ sees the image of Ziggy Stardust, (perhaps in relation to Linda McCartney’s Polaroid of Bowie) vomiting across the canvas.
Both songs were recorded during the sessions for Egypt Station, McCartney’s chart-topping album released in 2018. The LP, produced by Greg Kurstin, was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, becoming the first release of McCartney’s solo career to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
Describing the outtakes as a “treasure trove” in an interview on his website, the 77-year-old said the material comes from various ab-libbed sound checks and rehearsals.
On being asked if he still improvises at soundchecks, McCartney said: “Yeah, we do!” and added: “We’ve got millions of them! And fortunately, there’s a guy in our team called Jamie, who logs them. And he tells me we’ve actually got thousands. Some of them are really good and occasionally I’ll pick one out and work on it.
“For ‘Egypt Station’, I picked one out, though we didn’t finish it. I picked one out and we’re kind of making a track around this riff from the soundcheck jam. ‘Cause it was like, ‘That was a good little riff!’ But because they’re improvised they’re instant and then they’re gone.
He added: “Thankfully our stuff is captured because these days you can record just about anything that moves! It’s a little treasure trove…And one day we will have to put together an album, or something, with a selection of these songs that we’ve gathered. Because they are from all around the world!”
The limited edition vinyl picture disc will feature new and exclusively created artwork based upon the parlour game exquisite corpse along with a lyric insert.
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