(Credits: Far Out / Kurt Schollenberger / ETH Library)
Thu 15 January 2026 16:51, UK
There’s no sense in trying to compete with anything that Paul McCartney did when he was with The Beatles.
As much as people have tried to chase after the same kind of songs that the Fab Four made in their prime, the reason why they will never reach the same heights they did is that they are the blueprint for what all pop groups should be. There’s no way to rewrite that piece of musical history, but the times were definitely changing long before the band had officially broken up.
After all, the British invasion didn’t happen with only one band, and while The Beatles helped break down the doors for British rock acts, their competition did have more than a few tricks up their sleeve. The Rolling Stones had been showing the rest of the world the bluesy roots of rock and roll a lot better, and even though Ray Davies was a brilliant songwriter with The Kinks, he will forever be remembered for helping invent hard rock when ‘You Really Got Me’ first hit the airwaves.
But The Beatles always managed to stay one step ahead of everybody else. They had released Sgt Peppers right as the Summer of Love was beginning, and when they realised they had done all they could do together, they decided to leave a spotless track record with Abbey Road than trying to beat a dead horse for the rest of their lives. Everyone wanted to do their own thing, but whereas they broke up at the right time, Jimi Hendrix didn’t have nearly as much time to become a legend.
From the moment that he landed in England playing songs like ‘Hey Joe’ and ‘Purple Haze’, every guitar player on Earth knew they were out of a job, but Hendrix was about more than just guitar playing. He had become the epitome of what a guitar-toting frontman should be, and whether he was lighting his guitar on fire, playing behind his head, and playing his solos with his teeth, there was no one else on the planet that could touch him whenever he got onstage.
That is, if you were listening to rock and roll. The greats of the jazz world had already been interested in what Hendrix had been doing, but even if there was a rumour of Macca forming a small supergroup with the guitar legend, he felt that watching Fela Kuti took everything that Hendrix did and took it one step further.
It had been years since Hendrix shuffled off this mortal coil, but in the midst of making Band on the Run, McCartney knew he was looking at a once-in-a-generation talent when Kuti started playing live, saying, “I could do nothing but weep. It hit me so hard. It was like, boom, and I’ve never heard anything as good, ever, before or since. I mean, I’ve heard lots of fabulous music. I’ve heard Hendrix live and some great, great, stuff, but this was the killer. And, like I say, tears just pouring down my cheeks. It’s just so good.”
And you can hear that sense of jubilation find its way into the grooves on Band on the Run as well. We would have been in for a much different conversation had McCartney decided to just make a world music record by poaching the kind of music that Kuti was making, but when listening to the deeper cuts on the record like ‘Mamunia’, what he was doing harnessed the pure joy that he heard those musicians and learning to make his own version of that instead of being a culture vulture.
Because when you’ve heard something that popular, it’s impossible for it not to find its way into your psyche half the time. McCartney had a habit of listening to anything and everything he could get his hands on, but hearing something this heartfelt hit harder than any Little Richard scream or Chuck Berry lick ever could.
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