“You don’t get the joke”: What did Paul McCartney consider to be too British?

Paul McCartney has always lived to make people happy with his music. As much as there may have been some hard times between him and his bandmates back in the day, everything built to that moment when he could have a record in the charts or playing a show with everyone partaking in a sing-along of ‘Hey Jude’. That usually meant keeping things incredibly simple so that people from all walks of life could understand him, but there were always a handful of classics that could go over their heads.

Outside of being one of the greatest melodists of his time, though, Macca has also written a few songs that fans may consider annoying. ‘Temporary Secretary’ might not fit everyone’s definition of what a hit song should sound like and despite being one of the biggest of his entire solo career, there’s a good chance that most would want to take a hammer to their more delicate areas than have to withstand one more runthrough of ‘Ebony and Ivory’ with Stevie Wonder.

But when McCartney started his solo career with Wings, he was already in for an uphill battle. Despite releasing one of his finest albums with RAM, there were a lot more people who simply didn’t get what he was going for, so when he relaunched with a band on Wild Life, fans started to either turn off or move on to whatever his other ex-bandmates were doing. Then again, no one would have expected him to have Band on the Run up his sleeve.

From start to finish, Wings’ third outing was the moment McCartney fully arrived with songs that harkened back to his Beatle days, and when looking at Venus and Mars, it was like he was doubling down on the kind of musical earworms that he had loved. Framed as a journey through the stars, the track was the archetype for Macca’s arena rock period, complete with rockers like ‘Medicine Jar’, showtunes like ‘You Gave Me the Answer’, and pop delights like ‘Listen to What the Man Said’.

Right as the album is closing up shop, ‘Treat Her Gently’ felt like the perfect way to cap off a banger record. Considering this would be right before the band made Wings Over America, this was the perfect song to hold lighters up to as the act reached the end of the night. So why the hell did he end up including the theme from Crossroads at the end of the album to break up the flow?

Even McCartney admitted that ending it with the cheap musical fanfare may have been too British for people to take in, saying, “It is a bit of a British joke that I thought might be too much of a British joke, but I’d still like to put it out. If you don’t get the joke on it, it sounds like a closing theme.” And yet, that wouldn’t be the first time the man kneecapped himself at the end of one of his projects.

Despite having a great reflective look at his past and present on Memory Almost Full, McCartney’s decision to put the mindless rocker ‘Nod Your Head’ at the album’s end only made people scratch their heads. Thematically, the whole thing closed off with the penultimate track, ‘The End of the End’, talking about his death. However, whether it was poor sequencing or him not wanting to leave everyone on a downer note, making a cut that’s nothing but a cheap Little Richard pastiche does lessen its impact as the final song.

Even if the ending does come off as a bit of a joke, that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from counting Venus and Mars among McCartney’s finest works as a solo artist. He had spent all that time building the momentum from his last album, and after being treated like a punchline by critics, this is where he finally found the kind of music that could translate to stadiums of people.