McCartney, Paul
Entry updated 27 February 2025. Tagged: Music, People.
(1942- ) UK singer-songwriter who will forever be best known for being a member of the Beatles, although he has made innumerable recordings as a solo artist for over 50 years. He has displayed an occasional interest in sf in the course of his variegated career, mostly during the first decade.
One song on his album Red Rose Speedway (1973) is provocatively called "Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)" but has no lyrics to explain its title. "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five", on the 1973 album Band on the Run, has a line vaguely suggesting an apocalyptic future but is otherwise an enigmatic love song. Documents have surfaced showing that in 1974, Isaac Asimov was asked to flesh out McCartney's idea for an sf film featuring Aliens who pose as members of McCartney's band Wings; but McCartney disliked Asimov's approach and the film was never made. "Venus and Mars", the opening track of the 1975 album with that name, seems to reference astrology, but the reprise on the second side included the lyrics "Standing in the hall of the great cathedral / Waiting for the transport to come / Starship 21ZNA9". That album also included the song "Magneto and Titanium Man", paying tribute to two Supervillains from Marvel Comics.
The cover of Back to the Egg (1979) shows McCartney and his band in a Spaceship, looking down on Earth, but there is nothing science-fictional about any of its songs. A song on McCartney II (1980) called "Bogey Music" was inspired by Raymond Briggs's Graphic Novel Fungus the Bogeyman (graph 1977), which is arguably sf; an accompanying instrumental, "Bogey Wobble", was not released until 2011. His classical music album Standing Stone (1997) is based on a McCartney poem about an ancient man musing about the universe which is a marginal example of Prehistoric SF. Finally, McCartney's semi-autobiographical film Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) and some of his other songs do have elements of Fantasy, but not sf.
McCartney also wrote and performed the theme songs for two Technothrillers – the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) and the comedy Spies Like Us (1985) – and the Virtual Reality adventure Vanilla Sky (2001). He was knighted in 1997. [GW]
see also: Help!.
James Paul McCartney
born Liverpool, England: 18 June 1942
links
previous versions of this entry