In the summer of 1980, Paul McCartney had the biggest song in America — twice over, in two different recordings, by what were effectively two different acts. The version he had made entirely by himself, singing through a sped-up tape machine in a Scottish farmhouse, conquered Britain. The version that conquered America was the same song played live by his band Wings in Glasgow, pressed onto the B-side of the single almost as an afterthought. “Coming Up” is the opening track of McCartney II and one of the strangest hits of McCartney’s career: a home-made experiment that radio stations on opposite sides of the Atlantic could not agree how to hear — and the song widely credited with nudging John Lennon out of retirement for one final, fateful burst of work.
A one-man band, ten years on
The song began, as McCartney told Rolling Stone in 1980, with no plan at all. Wings, the band he had led through the 1970s, had finished Back to the Egg in the spring of 1979 and were drifting; that July, McCartney retreated to his farm in Scotland and began recording alone, just to see what happened. “I originally cut it on my farm in Scotland,” he recalled. “I went into the studio each day and just started with a drum track. Then I built it up bit by bit without any idea of how the song was going to turn out. After laying down the drum track, I added guitars and bass, building up the backing track.”
The method was a deliberate echo of McCartney, the lo-fi solo debut he had made a decade earlier as the Beatles fell apart. Working between his home studio at Peasmarsh in Sussex and the Spirit of Ranachan studio in Campbeltown, Scotland, he plugged microphones directly into the back of a Studer 16-track tape machine, bypassing the mixing desk altogether. The first thing he cut was a piece called “Check My Machine” — literally a test of the equipment — and by the end of the summer sessions he had recorded more than twenty songs. At one stage the results were headed for a double album; pruned down to eleven tracks, they became McCartney II, released on 16 May 1980 as his first solo album since Wings had formed in 1971. It reached No. 1 in the UK and No. 3 on the Billboard 200, a commercial performance far sturdier than its eccentric contents might have promised.
The voice that wasn’t quite his
On “Coming Up,” the credits read like a joke about multitasking: according to the personnel listing compiled by McCartney scholar Luca Perasi, Paul sang lead and backing vocals and played synthesiser, electric guitar, bass, drums, handclaps and tambourine. Nobody else is required — although McCartney teased in a 1980 interview that Linda sang “a couple of things that were too high for me to sing, like the high voice on ‘Coming Up’,” a credit researchers still treat as uncertain, since the piping falsetto is largely a machine trick.
That trick was vari-speed. Recording his voice and then playing the tape back faster shifted the pitch upward and gave the record its defining feature: a bright, cartoonish, slightly unreal McCartney, chirping a lyric of dogged optimism — you want a love to last forever, you want a friend you can rely on, so stick around, because something good is “coming up, like a flower.” “I was working with a vari-speed machine with which you can speed up your voice, or take it down a little bit,” he explained. “That’s how the voice sound came about.” Set against choppy synthesisers and a relentless dance pulse, the result was McCartney’s take on new wave and synth-pop — a sound some critics of the day admired and others found baffling. Cash Box heard “an unusually produced but cute track”; Record World praised its “electronic keyboards, dance beat and Paul’s pop vocals.” The album version runs 3:49, trimmed from a longer take — a full-length version of more than five minutes later surfaced on the 2011 Archive Collection reissue of McCartney II.
Meanwhile, in Glasgow
Before the public heard any of this, Wings’ audiences heard the song first. For the band’s UK tour in November and December 1979 — their first British tour in four years, and, though nobody announced it, their last — McCartney slipped the unreleased “Coming Up” into the set as something new. At the Glasgow Apollo on 17 December 1979, one of the final concerts Wings ever played, the song was captured in a full-band arrangement that could hardly have been further from the farmhouse original: McCartney on bass and lead vocal, Linda on keyboards, Denny Laine and Laurence Juber on guitars, Steve Holley on drums, and a four-piece horn section — Tony Dorsey, Thaddeus Richard, Howie Casey and Steve Howard — punching behind them.
An edited take from that night became the B-side of the single, credited to Paul McCartney and Wings and coupled with “Lunch Box/Odd Sox,” a good-humoured Wings outtake dating back to the Venus and Mars sessions of 1975. Within weeks the band’s future collapsed anyway: Wings flew to Japan in January 1980, McCartney was arrested on arrival in Tokyo, the tour was cancelled, and the group never properly reconvened. The Glasgow recording was suddenly a souvenir of a band that had, to all intents and purposes, already ended.
America flips the record
The single came out on 11 April 1980, and at home the strange A-side did exactly what Parlophone hoped: on the Official Singles Chart it climbed 62, then 7, then No. 2, where it peaked — a major hit by any standard. America, however, preferred the flip. US radio programmers took to the warm, conventional, horn-driven live version, and Columbia Records — McCartney’s American label — switched its promotion to the B-side. McCartney himself was unaware of the move; he has said he would have pushed for the studio version, which he considered stronger. A Columbia executive explained the thinking with memorable bluntness: “Americans like the sound of Paul McCartney’s real voice.”
Columbia had even wanted the live version on McCartney II itself. McCartney refused — the album was to stay a pure solo record — and the compromise was a one-sided white-label 7-inch of the Wings performance tucked into North American copies of the LP. On 28 June 1980, “Coming Up” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, displacing Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” and stayed there for three weeks before Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” took over. It was certified gold by the RIAA for sales of over a million copies, and Billboard‘s bookkeeping tells the story of its split personality: the magazine listed the A-side for the single’s first twelve chart weeks, including the three at No. 1, before switching the listing to the Glasgow B-side for the remaining nine. By Stereogum‘s reckoning, it was only the third live recording ever to top the Hot 100, after Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips” and Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling” — and it was Wings’ sixth and final American No. 1, as well as the last single credited to Paul McCartney and Wings to make the chart at all.
The song that got John recording again
The most consequential listener, though, was in New York. John Lennon had withdrawn from recording in the mid-1970s to raise his son Sean, and by 1980 he had not released an album of new songs in six years. According to Fred Seaman, Lennon’s assistant in his final years, Lennon kept a wary ear on his old partner’s output and took real notice of “Coming Up”; Seaman recalled him complaining, only half joking, “It’s driving me crackers!” because he could not get the tune out of his head. Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack, drawing on Seaman’s account and his own research into Lennon’s final year, has argued that the song reignited Lennon’s competitive songwriting drive — the old reflex that a strong McCartney record demanded an answer.
McCartney himself tells the story with an “apparently” attached, and it is worth keeping it there: the claim rests on the testimony of people around Lennon rather than a Lennon announcement. “Apparently, it was the one song that got John recording again,” McCartney told Billboard in 2001. “I think John just thought, ‘Uh oh, I had better get working, too.'” What is beyond dispute is that Lennon admired the record and said so, on tape, in his final interviews. “I thought that ‘Coming Up’ was great,” he told Playboy‘s David Sheff, “and I like the freak version that he made in his barn better than that live Glasgow one. If I’d have been with him I would’ve said ‘that’s the one’ too.” In August 1980 Lennon entered New York’s Hit Factory to begin Double Fantasy, his comeback album. Four months later he was murdered. “Coming Up” — the playful, sped-up throwaway from a Scottish farm — stands as one of the last exchanges in the twenty-year musical conversation between the two men, and the rare case of McCartney, unknowingly, writing the prompt for Lennon’s final act.
Plastic Macs and a long afterlife
If the record had two versions, its video had eleven performers — all of them McCartneys, more or less. Directed by Keith McMillan, the “Coming Up” clip presents a fictional band, the Plastic Macs, in which Paul plays ten roles — himself, two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, a keyboard player and four saxophonists — while Linda plays both backing singers. In his later commentary McCartney identified some of the disguises: Hank Marvin of the Shadows on guitar, Sparks’ Ron Mael at the keyboards, a Beatlemania-era version of himself on bass, and a drummer loosely inspired by Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. The video premiered in Britain on The Kenny Everett Video Show on 14 April 1980 and in America on Saturday Night Live on 17 May.
Time has been kind to the song’s reputation. Where Stereogum‘s Number Ones column later shrugged at the “weird demo” quality of the studio take, The Guardian has ranked “Coming Up” among McCartney’s finest post-Beatles songs, and since he returned to live performing in 1989 it has been a near-constant in his setlists — usually, fittingly, in the full-band arrangement, the farmhouse experiment and the Glasgow souvenir finally reconciled on one stage. Few No. 1 singles carry so much history in their grooves: the end of Wings, the rebirth of McCartney the solo tinkerer, and the last spark of the Lennon–McCartney rivalry. Not bad for a song that started with a drum track and no idea how it was going to turn out.