In a development that has sent tremors through the geriatric rock establishment and confirmed every suspicion about the decline of Western civilisation, Sir Paul McCartney has admitted that actor Paul Mescal, the current darling of the weepy-youth set, knew a guitar part better than the man who wrote ‘Yesterday’. Yes, you read that correctly. The man who once held hands with the universe has been out-Beatled by a fellow who made his name moping around in a GAA jersey. The cultural triumph is, apparently, British. Though Mescal is Irish. But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good headline, eh?
According to reports that have the air of a fever dream, the two Pauls met at some sort of glittering showbiz jamboree, where the younger Paul picked up a guitar and played a McCartney composition with such breathtaking accuracy that the older Paul, visibly shaken, had to concede defeat. ‘He knew it better than me,’ McCartney is alleged to have whispered, before staggering off to find a gin and tonic and a quiet corner in which to contemplate his musical legacy crumbling to dust.
Now, let us pause to consider the sheer ontological horror of this moment. Here is Paul McCartney, a man whose bass lines have been the soundtrack to half a century of bohemian longing, and Paul Mescal, an actor who achieved fame by crying convincingly in a television drama about the Troubles. But apparently, that is enough. Enough to stand before a Beatle and play his own song back at him with more fidelity than he can muster. It is as if Shakespeare were told by a TikToker that he’d got the line ‘to be or not to be’ slightly wrong. Or Churchill corrected by a blogger on the finer points of blood, sweat and tears.
The British establishment has, predictably, seized upon this as a ‘cultural triumph’. Because nothing says ‘victory’ quite like a 30-something thespian knowing the chord progression to a song that has been recorded approximately four billion times. This is not triumph. This is the sound of a dying culture consoling itself with trivia. We are so starved of genuine artistic achievement that we now celebrate the ability to mimic it. ‘He played it better than McCartney!’ we shriek, as if that were the point of music. The point, surely, is to create something new, something that makes the angels weep or the devils laugh. Not to perform a cover version that would get you a pat on the head in a primary school assembly.
What next? Will we discover that a barista in Walthamstow can recite ‘Hey Jude’ with more emotional depth than the man who sang it to Julian Lennon? Will a child in a playsuit be declared more authentic in their rendition of ‘Let It Be’? The implications are terrifying. It suggests that the entire canon of popular music is reducible to a technical exercise, a set of notes that can be mastered by any diligent student. That genius is a myth. That the Beatles were simply lucky blokes who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and any plucky Irishman with a good ear could have done the same.
But of course, that is nonsense. The genius of McCartney was not in the perfection of his performance but in the excess of his soul. He wrote those songs in a state of inspired precarity, fuelled by cheap coffee and the ghostly hum of the Sixties. Mescal may know the notes, but he cannot know the fever. He cannot know the ache. He is a competent ghost, a memorised shadow. And yet, here we are, celebrating him as a conqueror. It is a sad, sad world, and my gin bottle is empty.
