Flaming Pie, Paul McCartney’s 10th solo album, arrived at the tail end of the Beatles’ mid-’90s renaissance. The remaining Fab Four members instigated this revival with the release of their long-gestating documentary The Long And Winding Road, which was given the generic title Anthology by the time it ballooned into a multi-media retrospective in 1995. Due to a stroke of luck, the release of the documentary and its accompanying rarities compilations coincided with the rise of Britpop. The time was ripe for McCartney to deliver an album steeped in Beatles lore, and that’s exactly what he claimed Flaming Pie was.
Upon its release in May 1997, McCartney maintained that his immersion in the Beatles’ past inspired him to up his game, to make an album in the vein of his old band. Even its title was a nod to an arcane bit of Fab Four lore, derived from Lennon’s claim that he had a vision of a man on a flaming pie declaring that his band would henceforth be known as ”Beatles with an ’a’.” It was a canny marketing method, a tacit acknowledgment that perhaps his recent albums weren’t quite up to snuff while also snagging listeners whose interest in the Beatles may have been rejuvenated thanks to Anthology and the new breed of Britpoppers. It also was a bit deceptive. Flaming Pie sounds as similar to the Beatles as Oasis, which is to say not much at all; it’s recognizably in the same melodic vein, but all the production frills don’t recall Sgt. Pepper’s and the tone of the album is decidedly reflective, suiting a man taking stock of his life upon the cusp of his 55th birthday.
Back in 1997, this wistful undercurrent was criticized as solipsistic—in the original review for Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis dismissed the album opener “The Song We Were Singing” as a self-congratulatory “boomer reminiscence”—but a dive into the rarities-laden Archive Edition of Flaming Pie reveals that the album represented the end of an era as well as a creative rebirth. According to McCartney, he was told he could not release his solo album while the Anthology rollout was underway, so he kept tinkering with the songs that would comprise Flaming Pie while working on other projects—Standing Stone, his second long-form classical piece, for example, and a fairly tedious 1996 single called “The Ballad of the Skeletons” in which he jammed with avant-garde icons Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, and Marc Ribot.
Elsewhere, he sat for the interviews that formed the heart of Barry Miles’ authorized 1997 biography Many Years From Now and spent a chunk of 1995 living out his DJ fantasies via the Westwood One radio show Oobu Joobu, whose 15 episodes were condensed and edited into six B-sides for various Flaming Pie singles. He tagged along with his wife Linda whenever she promoted her line of vegetarian meals and cookbooks, sometimes stealing away to write a new song.
All of this activity fed into Flaming Pie, whose origins are more piecemeal than the finished project suggests. Trawling through his back pages led to pulling two songs from his archives: the melodramatic pomp of “Beautiful Night,” which he attempted with Billy Joel’s band in 1986, and "Great Day," which dated all the way back to the early ’70s, sharing a partial melody with “Big Barn Bed” from Red Rose Speedway. A couple of loose blues rockers cut with his old friend Steve Miller back in 1995 (“If You Wanna,” “Used To Be Bad”) were short-listed along with a pair of unreleased George Martin-produced outtakes from 1992 (“Calico Skies,” “Great Day”) and then he enlisted the services of Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra leader who shepherded the two “Threetles” Beatles reunion tracks for Anthology.
After the first solo session with Lynne, the McCartneys received bad news: Linda had breast cancer. Paul decided to carry on and complete the album because “the thing about those moments in life is, there’s no option but to get on with it, ‘cause the other option would be to just lie down and go to sleep, which isn’t an option. So you’ve just got to get on with it, you’ve got to do things, you’ve got to go to the doctors, keep the thing going, keep running the shop. You get on with it, and this is me getting on with it.” He wound up writing two songs after Linda’s diagnosis, neither of which are heavy with grief. “Really Love You” grew out of a funky jam with Ringo Starr, and “Heaven on a Sunday,” a lazy slice of jazzy yacht-rock, only hints at his love for Linda through its refrain “If I only had one love, yours would be the one I choose.” Comparatively, the delicate finger-picked “Calico Skies” and “Little Willow” are infused with a sense of loss and mourning, floating along upon a bittersweet breeze that neatly complements the sepia-toned reflections of “The Song We Were Singing” and “Somedays.”
These sweetly sad songs are the ones that linger, and they’re served well by their earliest incarnations as home recordings and demos that serve as bonus tracks on both the double-disc reissue and companion 5-CD/2-DVD edition. As nice as it is to hear these hushed, unadorned rough versions, McCartney feels most comfortable when he’s crafting an entertainment, which Flaming Pie certainly is. Maybe they don’t sound like the Beatles, but with their stainless steel gleam, "The World Tonight” and “Young Boy” were ornate singles designed to grab attention whether heard on VH1, adult contemporary radio, or the soundtrack to the forgettable Robin Williams & Billy Crystal comedy Fathers’ Day. The casual but tangible chemistry between McCartney and Miller may be in service of featherweight compositions, but they made the final cut instead of the more interesting throwaways “Broomstick” and “Looking For You”—B-sides both, presented and accounted for on the reissue—because the easy-rolling guitar duels offer some welcome air among the album’s heavier numbers. Individually, they feel thin, but they help make an album that captures multiple sides of McCartney’s personality, a record where his craft, silliness, sentiment, and charm are in balance.
Maybe McCartney achieved that delicate equilibrium on Flaming Pie because he was indeed "getting on with it," coming to terms with his wife’s illness by making an album that celebrated those he held dearest. He’d continue to play with Ringo for many, many more years, and he’d work with longtime engineer Geoff Emerick a while longer, but Flaming Pie would be the last time Linda sang on one of his records, the last time George Martin wrote him an orchestration. It was also the first time he found space for his son James on a record, giving him the guitar solo on “Heaven on a Sunday,” a gesture that gained poignancy over the years. Most importantly, Flaming Pie gave McCartney his first US Top 10 album in 15 years, giving him the confidence to try newer and weirder things as he headed into the new century. Some of these albums were good, some were bad, but none of them had the same heart as Flaming Pie. It may have its flaws, but it’s one of the rare McCartney albums where he grapples with emotions too big to neatly fit inside the confines of a pop record.
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