Paul McCartney - McCartney II

The Man Who Had Everything and Chose the Bathroom

In 1979, McCartney had extraordinary recording spaces at hand: High Park Farm on the Mull of Kintyre — a converted barn housing the Spirit of Ranachan Studio, a 24-track facility where two years earlier he’d recorded “Mull of Kintyre” with the Campbeltown Pipe Band (nine weeks at UK #1, over two million copies sold, the first single in UK history to hit that number, still #4 on the all-time UK chart). He also had his Peasmarsh farm in East Sussex, where he’d later build a studio inside Hogg Hill Mill — a working windmill built in 1781.

And for McCartney II, he dragged his drum kit into the kitchen.

Wings Had Just Collapsed

Wings imploded when McCartney was arrested at a Japanese airport in January 1980 — cannabis in his luggage, ten days in jail, tour cancelled, band finished. Instead of a polished comeback, he retreated to his homes in East Sussex and Scotland, hired a 16-track Studer and a couple of microphones (plugged directly into the machine, no mixing desk), and started experimenting alone with an ARP synthesizer. Originally a double album of 20 songs, eventually trimmed to 11. Released May 1980 to baffled, negative reviews.

The critics had no idea what they were hearing.

One Man in a Room, Reinventing Himself

What strikes me about McCartney II is how deliberately primitive it is — not accidentally, but as a formal choice. This is a man who played on some of the most meticulously crafted studio recordings in history, who worked with George Martin at Abbey Road, who understood the mechanics of professional production as well as anyone alive.

And for this record, he pulled the drums into the kitchen or bathroom depending on what room-echo he wanted on a given track.

That’s not naivety. That’s a very specific decision about what kind of record to make.

It mirrors exactly what he did for the original McCartney album in 1970 — another period of sudden isolation (the Beatles had just collapsed), same stripped-down solo approach, same direct-to-tape method. McCartney II is its spiritual sequel, a decade later, triggered by another implosion.

What changed was the synthesizer. The ARP 1601 sequencer shows up throughout the record, running mechanical arpeggios and rhythmic patterns that have almost nothing to do with pop music at the time. This was 1979 — the same year Unknown Pleasures came out. McCartney wasn’t consciously following post-punk, but he arrived at a similar place: rhythm as atmosphere, texture as emotion, repetition as hypnosis.

Four Songs That Keep Me Coming Back

”Frozen Jap” — The Accidental Orientalism

This one has a complicated history with its title. McCartney was experimenting with the ARP and stumbled onto a melody he described as “Oriental”-sounding. He needed to name it quickly and reached for a placeholder. Earlier working titles were apparently considered — and one of them was “Crystalline Icicles Overhang the Little Cabin By the Ice-Capped Mount Fuji.” He actually considered that title. I love him for this.

“Frozen Jap” stuck, despite being a slur he genuinely hadn’t registered as offensive. Japanese pressings were retitled “Frozen Japanese.” The song itself is gorgeous — a slow, drifting synthesizer piece that feels more like Ryuichi Sakamoto than Paul McCartney. It doesn’t resolve. It just… exists in its icy atmosphere and ends. No verse, no chorus, no hook. Just texture.

It’s the album track I find myself returning to most quietly.

”Darkroom” — The Seduction of Double Meanings

McCartney said “Darkroom” wasn’t about Linda’s photographic darkroom — though she was, of course, an accomplished photographer, and they had a literal darkroom at the farm. He was drawn to the word’s layered meanings: a dark room, a photographic space, an invitation. He framed it as a kind of seductive line: “Come, let me take you to the Casbah.”

The original version of “Darkroom” was apparently much longer and wilder — “very long with crazy noises,” as he put it — and he almost cut it entirely when trimming the double album down. He edited it because he liked it too much to lose. What survived is a looping, slightly sinister groove with his vocal floating over it like he’s not quite sure what he’s saying, which is probably the point.

It should be weirder than it is. Instead it’s hypnotic, almost danceable in the strangest way.

”Check My Machine” — Testing Equipment with Tweety Bird

This was literally the first song Paul recorded in these sessions. The title tells you exactly what it was: a test. He had new equipment and needed to check if it worked. The song samples dialogue from a 1957 Merrie Melodies cartoon — Tweety and Sylvester in Tweet Zoo — which McCartney simply had on tape and dropped in because it sounded good. The result is a dub-inflected groove with his vocal looping repetitively over a bass line thick enough to climb.

It never made the original album — it became the B-side to “Waterfalls,” which tells you everything about how the record label approached this material. The B-side. But when you hear it in context of the full sessions, it feels like the room warming up, McCartney loosening something in himself, discovering what the equipment can do before he starts making “proper” songs.

It sounds like what it is: pure creative play. And play, on tape, has its own kind of energy.

”Secret Friend” — Ten and a Half Minutes of McCartney Alone

The longest song Paul McCartney has ever officially released. Ten minutes and thirty-one seconds. He described playing cow-bell and maracas in real time for the full duration — physically performing for over ten minutes straight, alone in a room.

What I find fascinating is the commitment that implies. This isn’t sequenced or programmed — he’s actually standing there shaking maracas for ten minutes because the song required it. The rhythm and groove it builds is genuinely trance-inducing, flittering synths moving over a locked-in pattern that doesn’t really go anywhere because it doesn’t need to. It’s a motorik cousin, a long meditation on staying in the pocket.

The B-side to “Temporary Secretary.” McCartney, releasing a ten-minute experimental groove as a B-side in 1980.

The Rest of the Album Deserves a Footnote Too

The four tracks above are where I live on this record, but the rest of the album has stories worth knowing.

“Temporary Secretary” is the one that cracked open the cult reputation. McCartney hired an ARP 1601 sequencer specifically for these sessions, and the frantic mechanical arpeggios it produces on this track sound less like 1980 pop and more like early Detroit techno — rhythmic, relentless, slightly deranged. The concept amused him: needing a secretary, but only briefly. That’s the whole joke. And the ARP sequencer was meant to sound like a typing machine, which it absolutely does. NME at the time called it “wonky electropop that didn’t sound so much ahead of its time as out of it altogether.” Decades later it turned up regularly in electronic DJ sets alongside early Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, and nobody batted an eye. The critics were simply wrong about which timeline this song belonged to.

“Bogey Music” was directly inspired by Fungus the Bogeyman, Raymond Briggs’s children’s picture book about a green underground-dwelling monster. This is the same Raymond Briggs who wrote The Snowman. McCartney — the man who wrote “Yesterday” — made a song about Fungus the Bogeyman. The range is genuinely staggering.

“Coming Up” is the commercial centrepiece, his voice sped up and run through echo processing into a mutant funk groove that became his biggest US hit since the Beatles. But its real significance is what happened when John Lennon heard it on the radio in New York. According to the story, Lennon was so galvanised — so struck by the fact that McCartney had made something this alive and strange — that he went back into the studio himself. That session became Double Fantasy. Lennon was killed before it could become anything more. “Coming Up” is, by that accounting, one of the last dominos in a devastating chain. One of music history’s great butterfly effects, playing out from a sped-up vocal recorded alone in a farmhouse in Sussex.

Why This Still Matters

McCartney II was critically demolished when it came out. Critics heard a man who’d lost the plot. What they were actually hearing — though nobody had the language for it yet — was bedroom pop before the term existed, proto-techno before Detroit had named it, lo-fi electronic experimentation conducted by someone who had no aesthetic reason to go lo-fi except that he wanted to.

Pitchfork later noted it was remarkably prescient of the lo-fi and bedroom recording movements. The NME retrospective called it an album that “foretold the sound of 1980s pop.” “Temporary Secretary” now turns up in electronic DJ sets, contextualised alongside early Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, and it doesn’t feel out of place.

Think about what the formal choices actually mean:

One person playing everything — now the default mode of independent music production
Drums recorded in domestic rooms for natural reverb — what bedroom producers do instinctively
Synthesizer as primary instrument — not texture, but the whole skeleton
No mixing desk, straight to tape — removing a layer of mediation between impulse and recording
Releasing 10-minute experimental pieces as B-sides — treating the weird stuff as just as valid as the commercial stuff

He was doing all of this in 1979. Alone. Between Scotland and East Sussex. Without a band or a label telling him what he was making.

The most powerful thing about McCartney II isn’t any individual song — it’s the total lack of self-consciousness. McCartney had nothing to prove by being weird. He was Paul McCartney. He could have made anything. He made this instead, shaking maracas for ten minutes in a farmhouse, and that choice, that specific abdication of expectation, is what makes the album feel alive decades later.

The Locations as Character

The Spirit of Ranachan Studio in that Scottish barn. The Peasmarsh farmhouse. The windmill at Hogg Hill Mill (used again for McCartney III during the pandemic). None of these are glamorous rock spaces — they’re domestic, rural, private. Extraordinary rooms made ordinary by the fact that he just lives there.

That barn is the one I keep thinking about. The same room where he brought the Campbeltown Pipe Band for the UK’s best-selling single — and where he sat alone with a synthesizer to make “Frozen Jap.” Same room. Same person. Two completely different ideas about what music should be.

McCartney II is what happened when he trusted the weirder one. I’m glad he did.

Written February 2026

“Got a place we could go / Come on, let yourself go”

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