To Broad Street

Rewatching Give My Regards To Broad Street the other day was something of a bizarre experience. When I'd first seen the movie in the 1980s, it was a terrible disappointment:

• a huge MTV music video with virtually no plot
• a why-are-they-here? selection of Beatle songs re-recorded by McCartney
• a mostly-silent Ringo floating around
• ditto for the debonair George Martin & 
• ditto for other members of Wings, including wife Linda

Now I see it a little differently...and I mean...a little. It's still terribly indulgent...but now seeing the way McCartney's career has diversified:

• Trance music
• Classical music
• Short films
• painting
• authoring a children's book

...Give My Regards To Broadstreet now appears to be one of McCartney's very diverse projects...and good luck to him. Busted for drugs during an aborted Wings Japanese tour, McCartney wrote the story, 24 hours in the life of a band whose master tapes for their new album go missing. That concept then holds together several scenes:

• a nightmare
• shooting a couple of music videos
• the band rehearsing

...and the pay-off is that Beatle McCartney performs:

• Yesterday/Here, There & Everywhere
• Eleanor Rigby &
• Good Day Sunshine

...which, before Paul's recent concert DVDs...was a pretty rare Paul/Beatle thing. Macca also performs some of his then-newer SOLO songs, including No More Lonely Nights, and...actually, the music's pretty good...but that plot (making Help's look like Art) is seriously lame!

However, if you're a Beatle fan and want a memory of what two of the boys looked like twenty years later, this is for you.

Critics: It's History, loosen up!

My guess is that Lennon's death triggered a massive trauma for McCartney. Lennon is referred to several times during Tug Of War...and given that this was McCartney's next project, I feel that he grabbed at the nearest Beatle-like project he could find (with Ringo & George Martin)...and created a Help-like silly film. The really funny Beatle-irony is that the missing George Harrison was then regarded as a hughly successful film producer.  

Paul McCartney Interview about

Broadstreet & John Lennon

When looked at in that light, Give My Regards To Broadstreet is not half bad, an indulgent rainy Sunday afternoon movie, created by a great musician going through a dreadful crisis...and the theme song, though ostensibly written for Paul's wife, Linda, may (also) have been written for Johnny Moondog:

"...No more lonely nights...

...You're my guiding light

Day or night

I'm always there..."

       No More Lonely Nights

Give My Regards To Broadstreet DVD

Give My Regards To Broadstreet soundtrack 

For more info, see:

• wikipedia Give My Regards To Broadstreet
• Extensive Playboy interview with Paul & Linda McCartney. Lots about Lennon, The Beatles, Lennon's death, Yoko, Give My Regards To Broad Street, Peter Brown's Book The Love You Make (see Beatle Books) etc.