Most artists can’t get away with saying that they paved the way for the future. Even if someone goes into the studio trying to make something no one else has done, there’s a fine line between genuine experimentation and doing something so forward-thinking that they end up crawling their way up their own ass. While Paul McCartney could easily build an entire condominium inside his colon if he wanted to, he wasn’t afraid to say that he was a little bit ahead of the curve on this track.
Looking at Macca’s track record, I can say that he never claimed to be a forward-thinking genius by any stretch. He certainly had his perfectionist tendencies behind the scenes, but he was far more interested in playing what caught his ear, even if it meant dipping his toes into the same old granny music schlock that everyone made fun of him for.
Although Wings had their fair share of futuristic and cringy moments, McCartney was already looking to move forward by the time he finished up Back to the Egg. As much as people may have liked that record, how much further into rock territory could one go after making something like ‘Rockestra Theme’?
So that meant the next album would have to scale things back, but McCartney turning into a synthesised cyborg was the last thing most people expected. After spending years playing around with synths, McCartney II felt like the art-rock record that could have been made by someone half McCartney’s age, especially when he tried working on different instrumentals like ‘Front Parlour’.
Out of all the experimental moments, though, ‘Check My Machine’ was a major departure. Outside the fact that the version on the B-side was nearly nine minutes long, the hypnotic groove of the song is something that feels far more indebted to the dancefloors of nightclubs than the stadiums that the former Beatle was used to filling up with Wings.
Even though he was still one of the biggest pop stars in the world, McCartney thought that he was joining the new school of new wave artists warping standard rock and roll, saying, “‘Check My Machine’ is just me – the drumming is real, and the singing is real. Old school? Ha! Well, there was no other school at the time. I suppose we were inventing the new school.”
Granted, McCartney wouldn’t suddenly reimagine himself as a new wave star overnight. Only one album later, he was making the kind of pop music that everyone loved and the occasional song that made blood want to pour out of someone’s ears like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, but McCartney II still remains a fun experiment that he pulled off when he was still known as a major pop star.
McCartney never lost that edge, either, eventually turning that kind of music into a full-time side project when working with Youth and putting together The Fireman. Although it’s hard to say that anything McCartney touches could be considered an underground classic by any stretch, a song like ‘Check My Machine’ may have had a lot more influence on the modern indie scene than most people realise.
