Oh sweet merciful Jesus, your ears may be about to be violated: Paul McCartney is writing the music for a ballet:

"I'm interested in doing things I haven't done before," he said.

How about you shut the fuck up and duck out of the limelight forever, Paul? After all, you've never done that before...

Saving The World, Paul McCartney Style

Paul McCartney has some sage words to help us with the problem of climate change:

Sir Paul told the Independent: "Many of us feel helpless in the face of environmental challenges, and it can be hard to know how to sort through the advice about what we can do to make a meaningful contribution to a cleaner, more sustainable, healthier world.

"Having one designated meat-free day a week is a meaningful change that everyone can make, that goes to the heart of several important political, environmental and ethical issues all at once."

Not sure what this goes to show, other than Sir Paul and I have very different definitions of the word "meaningful". 

However, for me, this doesn't get to the heart of the problem with climate change and "environmental challenges". The problem isn't the changes we are seeing within our world. The problem is people - in particular rock stars who left anything even approaching every day reality decades ago - giving me spurious advice on how to live my life based on bugger all evidence. That really does my head in. This idea that because someone is famous they suddenly become incredibly knowledgeable on anything they care to dabble in is simultaneously idiotic and dangerous. After all, if Sir Paul - or Bono, or Thom Yorke, or that dweeb from Coldplay - wandered into the operating theatre with some advice for the surgeon just before they start operating on your brain, you'd tell them to fuck right off. And this flows across all the different parts of life. I'd probably take advice from the person who wrote "Live and Let Die" on songwriting; for just about anything else I don't really need the glib pronouncements of the man who wrote "The Frog Chorus."

So, in order to deal with my "environmental challenges", I've decided to never again listen to anything Paul McCartney has to fucking say. That goes to the heart of several important political, environmental and ethical issues for me all at once...

Paul McCartney

There’s something about Paul McCartney that winds me up. It isn’t his songs. Yes, he wrote The Frog Chorus. But great musicians are allowed some lapses in taste and judgement. And having written songs like Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, The Long and Winding Road and Maybe I’m Amazed more than makes up for a dodgy moment in the 1980’s – which, less face it, is when most artists chose to leave taste to one side. Paul McCartney is a great song writer – you won’t find me arguing that.

What does bother me slightly is the way he constantly tries to make himself into a more revolutionary figure than he actually is. This article is a great example of this tendency. Paul McCartney – the author of Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna and Yesterday, is claiming that he was the one who made the Beatles political. This may be true – it would certainly be difficult to disprove. But everyone knows that, regardless of who made the Beatles political, it was John Lennon who was the true counter-culture icon in the Beatles.

And it doesn’t stop there. I read an article recently in The Guardian’s Guide that was basically about how avant-garde Sir Paul is. Except, the article showed Paul McCartney was not avant-garde, but was close to those who are. Like John Lennon. And the DJ who turned one of tracks into a dance anthem. And his wife when she was taking random photos. Paul McCartney comes across as someone who is desperate to be cool, and in doing so just shows how desperate he is to be seen in the same light as John Lennon.

Ultimately, Paul should let his back catalogue shut up and do the talking. He is a great song writer – better, I’d argue, than Lennon. But his puerile attempts to position himself as some sort of avant-garde icon and political revolutionary is just not going to work.