The one Britpop song Paul McCartney said was magical: “That needs to be said”

The one thing that every musician needs to do is keep listening. As much as people can easily turn their brain off the minute they get famous, it can become one of the biggest flaws in an artist when they refuse to expand beyond the same records they listened to when they were kids. And for someone as ingrained in pop culture as Paul McCartney is, he was always the last person who wanted to sit on their hands and listen to the Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly records he started with.

Ever since leaving The Beatles, Macca was as interested as anyone else to see what else was out there. He was already pulling from different influences when making Sgt Peppers after hearing Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, but across Wings’s discography, there are pieces of every genre that the 1970s had to offer. There was the homespun sound of RAM, but there was also punk on a track like ‘Spin It On’ and even flirtations with disco on ‘Goodnight Tonight’.

Once he reached the 1990s, though, McCartney got to the point where he started to become a bit more nostalgic for his older material. Right before he had begun The Beatles Anthology, Off the Ground had pieces of his old Beatles sound on tracks like the title track and ‘Looking for Changes’, but as the Fab Three reunited, they were already starting to come back into the public eye.

Because right after grunge came and went, it was suddenly becoming cool to look back on the heroes of the British invasion. The ‘Cool Britannia’ movement was officially in full swing, and while people like Phil Collins were lambasted for being terminally uncool, McCartney was among the first people to benefit from it when working on ‘Free as A Bird’ and later making Flaming Pie with Jeff Lynne.

And while he did think that bands like Oasis were derivative, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t find merit in bands like The Verve when talking about what makes a great song, saying, “There’s always a magic moment. [Like] in ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’. I remember hearing that record, the acoustic coming on, but when he hits that line, it’s like, ‘Fucking hell, that has to be said.’ It hadn’t been said before.”

While there is a little bit of irony in McCartney liking the one Britpop band that got into legal trouble with The Rolling Stones, that doesn’t mean that Richard Ashcroft didn’t sculpt a masterpiece here. There had been many ballads in the Britpop canon up until that point, but listening to those sweeping strings as the frontman sings about seeing his other half somewhere down the line is almost too human for some people to take.

And for rockstars themselves, it might hit especially too close to home. John Lennon may not have met his end to drugs or anything, but McCartney definitely remembers the days when Lennon was hooking himself on heroin and all of those precious hours lost thanks to him getting more and more doped up during the final years of The Beatles’ tenure.

But that’s the way that everyone needs to remember Lennon, either. As much as drugs may provide a temporary escape from everything, that high isn’t going to last nearly as long as the power of the music, and when McCartney looks back at his favourite songs, the good times are sure to outweigh the bad in every era.