G’night Dick

Miss Jane and Mikki who love you.

Mull of Kintyre

Mull is a very strange song to be a tremendously popular one. It isn’t a bit catchy, there is no “lick” or even any real “hook”. It’s one anyone can sing but it doesn’t flatter the singer’s voice. I suspect that an examination of the newspapers for a couple of months before it’s release (11/11/77*) might provide some clues as it seems to me it must be one of those songs that found it’s own perfect time and place. A perfect moment when it countered an insecurity felt by many or fulfilled a fairly specific need.

The song does invoke “indestructible Britain”; it says that some things don’t change or disappear as so much does in our times. It’s not that it invokes the past but that it places the security of a part of the past in the now.

I by no means intend to imply that Mull isn’t a good song. It simply doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of song that becomes a runaway best seller. The more usual mega-hit either is sprightly and catchy or has a hood that sinks deep into human experience/emotion, like Yesterday. Mull is practically a novelty song, particularly at a time when Folk was pretty much dead. It’s very simple, folky, in tune and lyric. The bagpipes contribute a strong pull on the sort of emotions that are very difficult to express in words and I’m sure they contributed despite the fact that you’d think they’d put the English portion off.

By the way, there may be a very simple explanation as to how Paul got the pipes in tune for recording this song: he tuned the guitars TO the pipes. Guitars are much easier to tune!

*It was the Queen’s jubilee year, she toured what was left of the Empire and then attended celebrations in various portions of Britain; EMI fired the Sex Pistols during the summer and firemen went on a national strike 3 days after the release – for what the info is worth.

An Explanatory Note

I don’t plan to break my word to have daily posts and I’m grateful to everyone who has stopped by this blog already. It has not been publicized yet — that’s the project for this coming week and I’ve spent the last couple days gathering details of websites that might carry a banner as well as doing some more Beatle writing. As soon as I get that process going, I will be slotting a post here on a more regular basis.