It begins with a piano, playing the simplest idea in pop: two kinds of keys, black and white, sitting side by side, making harmony only when they are played together. Then two of the most famous voices in the world take it in turns to sing the obvious, as if it had never occurred to anyone before: ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard — oh Lord, why don’t we? When Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released “Ebony and Ivory” in the spring of 1982, it became one of the biggest hits either man ever had, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and staying at number one in America for seven weeks. It also became one of the most mocked songs either man ever made, voted the worst duet of all time, parodied on Saturday Night Live, and banned in apartheid South Africa. The story of “Ebony and Ivory” is the story of a song so simple that half the world sang along and the other half rolled its eyes — and of two musical giants who believed, completely, that simplicity was the point.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Paul McCartney stood in 1982. He was not a newcomer, and he was not a nostalgia act. He was, by any measure, the most successful songwriter alive — and he was at a crossroads. The Beatles were a dozen years behind him. Wings, the band he had built in the 1970s, had effectively run its course, with its final sessions taking place in 1980. John Lennon had been murdered in December 1980, an event that shook McCartney profoundly and left him, for a time, unsure about performing live at all. His next album, Tug of War, would be his first of the new decade, and it needed to prove something: that McCartney, approaching forty, was not a relic of the 1960s but a living, working artist with something still to say. He chose to open that album’s campaign with a duet — the first time he had ever released a duet with another top-league artist — and he chose, as his partner, the one singer whose voice could stand beside his own without either man having to defer: Stevie Wonder.
The song itself had begun, by McCartney’s own account, in the most ordinary way a great pop song can begin: with a row at home. He has said he wrote “Ebony and Ivory” after a little marital tiff with his wife Linda, thinking, in effect: why can’t we get it together? Our piano can. He demoed it in his small studio in Scotland in 1980, at a time when racial tension was, as he later put it, causing a lot of friction in Britain. The spark for the metaphor came, famously, from the comedian Spike Milligan, who had said, in McCartney’s retelling: “Black notes, white notes, and you need to play the two to make harmony, folks!” McCartney took that throwaway line and turned it into a thesis. On a piano, he later explained, you have black notes and you have white notes, and it is no good having only one kind: you need the two together, because then you get a harmony. Two together is perfect on a keyboard, and so the song asks, simply: why don’t we do it like that? It is, as a piece of writing, almost comically direct. That directness is exactly what its critics would attack, and exactly what its millions of listeners loved.
From the start, McCartney conceived the song as a duet, and he conceived it, specifically, as a duet across the colour line. He wanted, as he put it in the Wings fan-club magazine Club Sandwich, a black singer and himself as the white singer, because that was the way the song ought to be done. If he could have anyone, he said, it would be Stevie Wonder. He telephoned Wonder, explained the idea, and Wonder said yes. There is a lovely detail in the early history of the song: during the final Wings sessions at Finston Manor in October 1980, when the song was still being shaped, Wonder’s part was sung by Denny Laine, standing in for a partner who had not yet arrived. The song was waiting for its second voice. When Wonder finally joined the sessions, the wait was over — and the song, at last, had its argument in human form: two men, one black, one white, singing the same melody, in harmony, about harmony.
The recording took place at George Martin’s AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, in sessions running from 27 February to 2 March 1981, with further work at AIR in London later that year. Martin, the Beatles’ old producer, helmed the Tug of War sessions, and his presence matters: this was a reunion of the partnership that had made the most famous records in the world, now applied to a song about the simplest idea in the world. The two singers recorded together, in the same room, playing a host of instruments between them: McCartney on bass and guitar, Wonder on drums, and both of them on pianos, synthesizers and percussion. It was, by all accounts, a happy session. McCartney later recalled the Montserrat days fondly, telling one interviewer that they had a good time out there, all of them together. The track they made is sunny to the point of blinding: a mid-tempo pop-soul arrangement with a melody that seems to arrive fully formed, a chorus that a child could sing after one hearing, and a vocal blend — McCartney’s clear tenor, Wonder’s warmer, more soulful voice — that does, in sound, exactly what the lyric claims in words. Two voices, side by side, in perfect harmony.
There is a telling footnote to the billing. Although the record is, in every meaningful sense, a duet, Wonder’s record label would not permit him to take a lead billing, so he was credited instead with “additional vocals.” It is a small piece of music-business absurdity, and it sits oddly beside the song’s message: a record about equality, released under a credit that was not quite equal. The public, in any case, heard a duet. Radio played a duet. The charts rewarded a duet. And the two men, whatever the small print said, sang it as equals, trading lines and joining together on the chorus like two old friends who had finally found the song they were meant to sing together.
The single’s chart story was, by any measure, a triumph. Released on 29 March 1982 as the lead single from Tug of War, “Ebony and Ivory” topped the UK singles chart on 25 April 1982, and then crossed the Atlantic to do even better. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on 15 May 1982 and stayed there for seven consecutive weeks, through late June — the longest run at number one of McCartney’s post-Beatles career, and the longest of Wonder’s entire career. It was the fourth-biggest hit in America in 1982, and it topped the charts in a string of other countries, including Canada, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Spain. It also made chart history for Wonder: it made him the first solo artist to top the American chart in three consecutive decades, following his 1960s and 1970s number ones. The parent album, Tug of War, followed the single to number one, and it remains McCartney’s final chart-topping album in America. The B-side, “Rainclouds,” written by McCartney and Denny Laine, was a quieter affair, and nobody much remembers it — but then, nobody much remembers the B-side of a seven-week number one.
The video told a different story from the recording, and it is worth telling honestly, because it reveals something about how pop stardom actually worked. The two singers had recorded together in Montserrat, but they did not film together. The video, directed by Barry Myers at Elstree Studios in March 1982, was shot with the two men in separate locations — Wonder’s scenes were filmed in America — and edited together so that they appeared to be sitting side by side at the piano, singing under a window full of heavenly light, high-fiving and generally having a wonderful time. It had its world premiere on the BBC’s Top of the Pops on 8 April 1982, and in America it was first shown on Friday Night Videos on 23 April. A second video, for a solo version of the song later included on the 2007 reissue of Tug of War, featured McCartney alone, with additional scenes made to look like a prison, filmed at the Old Royal Mint in London. The main video’s trick — two men who never shared a frame, made to look like the closest of friends — became, in time, part of the song’s legend: a record about togetherness, sold with a video about togetherness, assembled from two separate rooms.
The song’s afterlife has been stranger than its chart run, and it runs in two opposite directions at once. On one side, it became a punchline. In 1983, Saturday Night Live aired a famous sketch in which Eddie Murphy, as Wonder, and Joe Piscopo, as Frank Sinatra, rewrote the song, with Sinatra complaining, in character, about the ebony-and-ivory metaphor itself. The sketch fixed the song in the culture as the very image of well-meaning, slightly embarrassing pop sincerity. It was parodied again in a commercial for the television show Psych, and in South Park’s “Black Puppy and White Puppy.” In a 2007 poll, BBC 6 Music listeners voted “Ebony and Ivory” the worst duet of all time. Critics, then and since, have called it simplistic, patronising, and naive — a song that reduced one of history’s deepest wounds to a piano lesson. McCartney himself, looking back, was disarmingly honest about it. When he wrote the song, he admitted, he thought: maybe we don’t need to keep talking about black and white. Maybe the problem is solved. It was not solved, and the song’s sunny confidence now reads, to many ears, as the sound of a man who did not yet know how unsolved it was.
On the other side, the song had teeth, in exactly the place where teeth mattered most. In 1984, Wonder won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” from the film The Woman in Red, and in his acceptance speech he dedicated the award to Nelson Mandela, then still imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid regime. The South African Broadcasting Corporation responded by banning “Ebony and Ivory” — the only song of McCartney’s solo career to be banned there — on the stated grounds of Wonder’s dedication. A song that critics called toothless had, in one country at least, proved too dangerous to play. The ban is a useful corrective to the easy mockery. Whatever the song’s flaws as poetry, its message — that black and white belong side by side — was, in apartheid South Africa, a message the state did not want its citizens to hear. A record about harmony, banned for the crime of harmony, is a record that meant something, somewhere, to someone with power enough to fear it.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the two men at the piano. McCartney and Wonder never made another record quite like “Ebony and Ivory,” and neither man needed to. McCartney went on to duet with Michael Jackson, to make film scores, to return to the stage, and to become, in time, the grand old man of popular music. Wonder went on making records of extraordinary depth, and his dedication to Mandela became one of the most famous moments in awards-show history. But for seven weeks in the summer of 1982, they were, together, the biggest thing in pop music, singing a song that a child could understand and a critic could despise, often in the same breath. Wonder later put the song’s appeal better than anyone: it did not demand that people reflect, he said, but it politely asked them to reflect upon life, using the terms of music — this melting pot of many different people. That is a generous description of a simple song, and it is probably the right one. “Ebony and Ivory” does not solve racism, and it never claimed, in its lyric, to do more than ask a question: why don’t we live together in perfect harmony, the way the keys do? The question is still unanswered. The song, for all its simplicity, still asks it.
That is why “Ebony and Ivory” still works, more than forty years later, for listeners who first heard it on the radio in 1982 and for listeners discovering it now, whether they love it or laugh at it. It is a song about the oldest hope in pop — that people who are different can make something beautiful together — sung by two men who proved, for three and a half minutes, that the hope was at least musically true. The charts gave it seven weeks at the top. The comedians gave it a second life as a joke. The censors in Pretoria gave it a third life as a threat. And somewhere between the joke and the threat, the song itself survives: two voices, black and white keys, side by side, asking, politely and stubbornly, why we cannot do it like that.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the two voices join together on the chorus. It is the sound of two legends, filmed in separate rooms and singing in the same key, asking the simplest question in pop — and, forty years on, still waiting for an answer.