‘Press’: the Paul McCartney song that couldn’t survive the 1980s….See More

There comes a point in every artist’s life where they find themselves out of step with the times. As much as some people like to claim that their favourite acts can do no wrong, there isn’t a soul on this Earth who can claim that every single project that they’ve ever worked on is faultless.

Although Paul McCartney has an insanely great track record and not too many albums that people have to complain about, there are a few rough patches that happen once he reached the end of the 1970s.

Granted, some people were already upset that Macca wasn’t the kind of person he was in his Beatles days when Wings started. He could still knock out a hook, but since he had to share the wealth with Denny Laine and Linda McCartney, it was easier for some fans to feel cheated that three other very important people weren’t standing onstage next to him on principle.

By the time Wings broke up, though, he was a brand-new pop star altogether. McCartney II got him working with new experimental music again, and by the time that Tug of War started, he had the kind of hits that he hadn’t seen since the beginning of Band on the Run. Not everyone was going to be a fan of stuff like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, but it got him back to sounding current without sounding forced.

Things did get a little bit shaky by the time that Pipes of Peace started, but Press to Play was the moment where everything went off the rails. It was clear that he wanted to move in a different direction, but the only problem was that he had no idea what that direction was, which made the whole thing a bit of a mess to sit through.

Despite the retro-looking cover, a lot of the album is coated with strange detours, whether that’s jamming along to dad rock on ‘Stranglehold’, going back to Beatles whimsy on ‘However Absurd’, or making the closest thing to an aggressive track he ever made on ‘Angry’.

Of all the tunes that came out of his 1980s run, ‘Press’ is the one that is the most questionable. It’s still Paul McCartney, and by definition, that means that the tune is catchy, but the subject matter and the sound of it aren’t nearly as timeless. The squelchy keyboards throughout the tune at least let everyone know what tone he was going for, but for a song that’s about marital sex, it feels odd hearing it played like any random pop tune.

And for the first time in McCartney’s career, this was a sign that he needed to switch things up. There was never a point where he was in a bad spot career-wise, but looking at the way that he worked through later projects like Flowers in the Dirt and Off the Ground, he seemed to be trapped in a little bit of a funk before The Beatles Anthology completely shifted what he was trying to do.

But out of all of Macca’s mid-period singles, ‘Press’ is one of the few that is the least salvageable. Hell, the song ‘Pretty Little Head’ is actually far better in many regards, but the public never catered to that one, to the point where it became the first-ever McCartney song that completely failed to chart.

Even though the song is timestamped in the 1980s and never really found its way out, that’s no reason to discount the record on principle. McCartney always compared his music to the way that most people look at artists, where some of the bad bits have to be recognised so that it makes up the full picture. So, really, we may have to thank songs like this so that we can appreciate ‘Jet’ and ‘Listen To What the Man Said’ a little more.