THE FIREMAN
ELECTRO CLASH
PAUL MCCARTNEY GOES... DANCE? YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE IT. HAVING PROVED HIMSELF ADEPT AT TURNING HIS HAND TO MANY STYLES IN THE PAST, IT WAS WITH THE FIREMAN WHERE HE REALLY WENT FOR IT – EVEN IF HE DIDN’T ADMIT TO IT FOR A WHILE...
IAN WADE
© Getty Images
Paul’s 1993 LP Off The Ground was a live-band, one-take affair
©Getty Images
©2008 MPL Communications Ltd
In the early Nineties, Paul McCartney was putting the finishing touches to his latest solo work, Off The Ground, when he felt the need to get a fresh pair of ears in to help out with mixing. He was also curious about the then-emergent remix culture, and it was recommended that he contact Youth. After getting in touch, Paul invited Youth down to his Hog Hill studio to remix a couple of tracks, and the pair instantly hit it off. As the two worked on the album, they started to stockpile material between them.
Youth – real name Martin Glover – had previous form in showbusiness. He was a founding member of Killing Joke, initially leaving the band in 1982 before returning properly in 2008. He’d also formed Brilliant with future KLF-er Jimmy Cauty, a band that shone vaguely brightly in the mid-Eighties and had released the quite amazing Top 83 hit album Kiss The Lips Of Life. He’d had a hand in co-forming the WAU/Mr Modo record label with Alex Patterson, which released some of The Orb’s early work, as well as forming Blue Pearl, who had a Top Five hit in the summer of 1990 with Naked In The Rain. By the end of the Nineties Youth would have produced Crowded House’s Together Alone and The Verve’s multi-million selling Urban Hymns, as well as remixing U2, Edwyn Collins, Marilyn Manson and the Sugarcubes; since then he’s produced albums by Embrace, The Futureheads, Dido, Shack and The Charlatans, to name just a few.
“HE SAID, ‘DON’T BOTHER EDITING THEM, I LIKE THEM AS THEY ARE, I WANT TO PUT THEM OUT ANONYMOUSLY. WOULD YOU BE UP FOR IT?’”
In a recent interview with DJ Mag, Youth explained the initial meeting with McCartney. “So I went down there and he said, ‘Look, these are all the multi-tracks of the tapes from the album, pick a track and get going.’ I said, ‘Rather than do a new track, I’d prefer to just source different sounds from the tapes and start constructing a new track out of the sounds,’ and he said ‘Oh, that’s different, let’s do that.’ And then I said, ‘What would be good is once I’ve done that, if I get you to overdub bits and add things,’ and he was like ‘Oh, that’s interesting, okay.’”