Give My Regards to Broad Street, released on October 22, 1984, is still an album that represents the nadir not just of the decade but quite possibly of Paul McCartney’s career. (Yes, he re-recorded Beatles songs; no, that wasn’t a good idea.) As such, a flinty little number called “Not Such a Bad Boy” arrived like a bolt of cool-rocking lightning out of the boring-retread blue.
It wasn’t enough to save Give My Regards to Broad Street, an awful album that was paired with a worse movie. But “Not Such a Bad Boy” is certainly worth returning to.
Paul McCartney, at this point, had scarcely attempted a rock song since the punky final edition of Wings flew apart, and “Not Such a Bad Boy” shows just what an awful loss that had been — even as it points the way to next-decade successes like Run Devil Run.
Appearing here with Chris Spedding and Dave Edmunds on guitars, along with the ever-faithful Ringo Starr at the drums, Paul McCartney tears into a straight-forward little groover about a reformed rebel now reduced to kitchen-pass adventures — and he sounds like he’s having no small amount of fun doing it.
Sadly, even the pleasantly tough-minded “Not Such a Bad Boy” was swallowed whole Paul McCartney’s utterly wrongheaded Give My Regards to Broad Street, which featured a big single with David Gilmour in “No More Lonely Nights” but precious little else to recommend it to anyone other than the very, very patient diehard.
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A massive McCartney backlash has been building for some time. Lots of people during a recession who like him are unable to shell out for his reissued boxed sets while fatboy fanatics buy them nine times twice. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg and when Macca redeludes himself into the proverbial return to his folly, those that are attempting to rehabilitate splats of puke like ‘Not Such A Bad Boy’ will be rounded up and brought to the restored Eternity-length ‘Broad Street’ movie theater. You HAVE been warned.