“This song was written a year or so after the Beatles break-up. At the time, John was firing missiles at me with his songs, and one or two of them were quite cruel.
I don't know what he hoped to gain, other than punching me in the face, the whole thing really annoyed me. I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I'm not really that kind of writer, so it was quite veiled. It was the 1970s equivalent of what might today be called a diss track.”
"The idea of too many people preaching practices, it was definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do," McCartney admitted. "I just got fed up being told what to do, so I wrote this song… The first verse and the chorus have pretty much all the anger I could muster, and when I did the vocal on the second line, 'Too many reaching for a piece of cake,' I remember singing it as 'piss off cake,' which you can hear if you really listen to it.”
McCartney also skewered Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, on the track. The lyric “You took your lucky break and broke it in two” reportedly started life as "Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two" before being changed. Again, it was the couple’s perceived preachiness that irked McCartney.
The LP ” Ram” on May 17, 1971. It was the second studio album by Paul McCartney, made in collaboration with his wife Linda McCartney.
The album was recorded amid McCartney’s legal action in the United Kingdom’s High Court to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership, following the band’s break-up the year before. It is the only album credited to the couple.
RAM”s 50th anniversary will be celebrated in May with a special reissue of the album, which will be released on May 14 as a limited edition, half-speed mastered vinyl pressing
It was recorded in New York with guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken, and future Wings drummer Denny Seiwell. Its release coincided with a period of bitter acrimony between McCartney and his former bandmate John Lennon, who perceived verbal slights in the lyrics to songs such as “Too Many People”.
“I did feel he [John] was preaching a little bit about what everyone should do, how they should live their lives,” Paul explains on the ‘Ramming’ video segment. “I felt some of it was a bit hypocritical.”
I was in the middle of this horrendous Beatles break-up. It was like being in quicksand.
He added: “The lightbulb went off one day and we realised that we could run off and go to Scotland where we loved. Just to keep myself amused, I’d just make up stuff on the guitar. Instead of thinking “After The Beatles this has got to be important”, I thought ‘Maybe this is the way to go, just have fun with it’.”
" At the beginning of the album, when I was writing it, I spent a lot of time in Scotland, and the average day there would be: get up, have breakfast with the family, then maybe go into my little studio. I always had a little four track studio, which is what The Beatles always used to record on. That’s a real discipline recording on a four track, you’ve either gotta know exactly what you’re doing or you have got to start bouncing tracks. You can imagine, when you get into that, it’s addictive.
On a average day, I could have done that. I could have gone for a horse ride, as Linda was a big horse rider. At some point in the day we would have gone for a horse ride. I might have played with the kids, and they liked to go on horse rides too. Then in the evening, I’d drink whisky, of which there was a large supply in Scotland."
Not many know that Macca had made a secret version of all-instrumental RAM: The Story of Percy Thrills Thrillington and his album.
Thrillington was recorded that same year but was released under the pseudonym Percy 'Thrills' Thrillington in 1977. Sources - Turkey Daily News - Amazon _ PaulMcCartney.com - YouTube -Dangerousminds.net
The songs were re-recorded over three days at EMI Studios in Abbey Road, London, from 15-17 June 1971, and was mixed on the 18th. Paul McCartney was the producer.
It is one of most notable works of Paul McCartney's solo career, finally reprinted on vinyl. Flash of autonomous art, despite being born as instrumental version of anor of his works, Ram (1971), and Phantom album during more than two decades that McCartney took to recognize his signature.
Such Thrillington never existed. Let's back up to 1971 the full instrumental cover album McCartney released in 1977 under the name Thrillington, the one that was a track-by-track cover of his 1971 album Ram. It wasn’t until 1989 that he admitted in public that he was responsible for the Thrillington album.
Listen to the full version of Thrillington HERE
