Not Wings, Not His Solo Career: Paul McCartney's Forgotten Musical Project

Paul McCartney will always be best known for the Beatles, but he also went on to form the immensely popular '70s band Wings and maintain an acclaimed, successful solo career. He's put out so much music that the occasional endeavor gets overlooked and memory-holed, one of which was his occasional electronic-heavy project, the Fireman. One of McCartney's many former bandmates is a musical artist who calls himself Youth (real name: Martin Glover), a member of the dark '80s synth rock band Killing Joke. And in the early 1990s, together they formed the Fireman, a studio-based band.

Electronic music isn't necessarily dance music, but it is experimental and futuristic, and McCartney was always an innovator in that realm. Such efforts date back to when he constructed tape loops for the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and released the robotic 1980 synth pop single "Temporary Secretary," a nearly perfect Paul McCartney song that should be required listening for younger generations. He applied that interest to his collaboration with Youth, who made house music that was hard to dance to, as well as ambient music and soundscapes. Here's the history of Paul McCartney's least-known band (if one can even call it that), the Fireman.

In 1993, Paul McCartney reached out to producer and Killing Joke member Youth to rework tracks from his just-released LP "Off the Ground." Youth had other plans. "I thought we should deconstruct the album into samples and then construct a new mix from those. And Paul liked the idea," Youth said (via McCartney's website). McCartney eagerly helped out. "It was great fun, because normally these are the bits that producers try to get me to shut up about — they usually say 'Stop messing around, Paul,”" he said.

Their mutual work, "Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest," hit stores in 1993 without any musicians credited. Speculation abounded that the Fireman was connected to the former Beatle, who was no stranger to rumors, such as the bizarre fan theory claiming that McCartney died in the late 1960s. The album, on which McCartney played banjo, flute, and double bass, Youth played bass, and both musicians produced, wasn't widely marketed, but it did spawn the ambitious single "Transpiritual Stomp." The LPs "Rushes" and "Electric Arguments" followed in 1998 and 2008, respectively, by which point McCartney and Youth had identified themselves.

That third album was the result of self-challenging musical exercises — the tracks on "Electric Arguments" were each composed and recorded in one day, and performed by the musicians as characters they created. It's the last Fireman release to date, and also the most visibly successful, spending a week on the U.K. album chart at No. 79.