Talk More Talk

‘Talk More Talk’ is the third track on Paul McCartney’s sixth solo album Press To Play.

The basic track was done in a day. Lyrically it was picking out quotes that I liked from, I think, a Tom Waits interview. ‘I don’t actually like sitting down music’, great things like that, random cut-outs. ‘A master can highlight the phrases his words to digress’. I liked the surrealism of that line. I like ‘art’ films, Buñuel, Bergman, The Seventh Seal. I could never make out what the hell they were about, but there was something attractive about the abstractness of them. So I’ve gone that way on ‘Talk More Talk’ and ‘However Absurd’, which are the two main surrealist lyrics.

A remix of ‘Talk More Talk’ by McCartney and Jon Jacobs appeared on the ‘Only Love Remains’ 12″ single.

‘Talk More Talk’ is a strange track for me, really, because normally I will write a song and finish it, and then go and record it. But occasionally you get a feeling that you just don’t want to do it the same way all of the time, so you occasionally look around for alternative methods . And when we were working on stuff like Sgt Pepper, which I mention because it was kind of pretty experimental, the same thing would occur. You’d just think, well, let’s not make the same track again, let’s not have the same attitude to this next track. Let’s completely look at it a different way. So on ‘Talk More Talk’ I just came in the studio that morning and just started saying, OK, let’s not work on one of the other tracks, let’s not do one of the tracks we’ve written, let me try and make something up.

So I just started from scratch, and just went till the end of the session and just made this whole track up. And that was just the feeling of that day, you know? It basically is about people nattering on. So I got into what for me are kind of a little bit surreal, a little bit abstract lyrics, which was good fun for me because normally you try and make your lyrics mean something, just so that the people listening out there can kind of grab hold of it and identify with what you’re saying. Sometimes you get a little bit fed up with making so much sense all the time.