In a development that has sent tremors through the geriatric wing of the music industry, Sir Paul McCartney has publicly confessed that Paul Mescal, the Irish actor with a penchant for sad-boy guitaring, is actually better at playing the instrument than he is. Yes, you read that correctly. The man who wrote ‘Yesterday’ – a song so ubiquitously boring it makes elevator muzak sound like avant-garde jazz – has admitted defeat to a man whose primary qualification is looking tragic in a pair of shorts.
Let us sit with this absurdity for a moment. McCartney, a knight of the realm, a man who has earned more in royalties than most small nations, is allegedly quaking in his Cuban heels because some lad from Kildare can strum a few chords without hitting a bum note. This is the same McCartney who, let’s not forget, once insisted that ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was a profound meditation on the human condition. Now he’s throwing in the towel because Mescal’s barre chords are cleaner than his? The sheer indignity of it.
One can only imagine the scene at McCartney’s country estate. A bottle of fine claret is being aggressively uncorked. The heating is on full blast despite the soaring energy bills. Sir Paul, draped in a cashmere cardigan, stares at his own calloused fingers with the haunted look of a man who has just realised his legacy is being outshone by a chap from the telly. “He played ‘Blackbird’,” McCartney is reported to have mumbled into his lentil soup. “It was... better.” Let that sink in. The man who wrote ‘Let It Be’ is now the supporting act for an actor who once cried on screen for three hours straight. This is the cultural landscape we inhabit.
And yet, is this not the perfect metaphor for modern Britain? A country that once gave the world the Industrial Revolution, Shakespeare, and the Spice Girls now reduces its luminaries to whimpering apologies in the face of some fresh-faced Celt who can play guitar. We have crossed the Rubicon of cultural self-flagellation. Next, we’ll have Stephen Fry apologising to a TikToker for having a vocabulary. The end is nigh.
But let’s not absolve McCartney entirely. This latest surrender is part of a worrying pattern. First, he tours with a band that includes a man who once played bass for a Dire Straits tribute act. Then, he releases an album of duets with Kanye West’s autotune. And now this: grovelling at the feet of Paul Mescal. The man is clearly suffering from some form of martyrdom complex. Perhaps it’s the gin. I imagine he’s been overindulging in the extra-dry stuff, the kind that makes you think your own failures are actually deeply endearing.
As for Mescal, I hope he’s enjoying his fifteen minutes of fingerpicking fame. No doubt he’ll be offered a lucrative deal to front a brand of overpriced acoustic guitars, or maybe he’ll star in a biopic about a struggling folk singer who dies tragically in a canal boat accident. Either way, he shall become yet another symbol of our desperate need to canonise anyone who can play a D chord without wincing.
So raise your glasses, dear readers. A toast to Paul McCartney, the man who once said “it’s getting better all the time” and now knows it isn’t. And a toast to Paul Mescal, the man who has proven that acting sad will always trump actual musical genius. This is the state of Britain in 2025. We have officially become the supporting act for our own cultural history. And I, for one, am off to the pub to drink until I forget which Paul this article was about.
