Interview for Calico Skies Radio

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This interview was conducted by Julio Eduardo Martínez, host of the Calico Skies Radio Puro McCartney podcast. Originally published in his 2021 book “McCartney – Surviving the Perfect Song“, it is reproduced below with his courtesy.

How did the possibility of creating The Fireman with Paul McCartney come about?

Martin Glover: It started with a call from Paul. My manager told me: Paul McCartney will call you in an hour so make sure you pick up the phone. So I said, OK. He invited me to remix three songs from his new album at the time, Off The Ground. I started and then suggested to him that instead of remixes, because he had pulled different sounds from different songs, a new piece could be done. He was surprised and asked me if anyone had done it before and I told him no. He loved it because The Beatles had a reputation for doing things that others hadn’t done before. So we did it. There were overdubs, he played double bass, sitar, but that first album of The Fireman was conceived under the remix idea. During the process we got six and ten different dub mixes of the same track, we thought it was better if they were together. So we did 10 or 12 mixes and Paul called me to say, “I love those mixes!”.  Then my manager called me and said, “Paul wants to put it out as an album, just as it is, as a band, with you.” And I couldn’t believe it. I told him that the normal thing was that I would take the best of those 12 mixes and put it on one mix. My manager insisted: “No, no, you don’t understand, he wants to put everything out as an album, as it is”. Of course that sounded great. Paul was with me in the studio during the mixing, we could stay until 4 or 5 in the morning. It was a magical time and the mixes captured that magic and that’s how that first Fireman album came out. I even remember the family loved it, they were dancing to the remixes. 

Did you have previous references to McCartney in his solo career as Wings?

Yes. Wings sounds better now than it did in the 1970s because it was so close to The Beatles and people said, “Oh, it’s not The Beatles!”. They were still successful. But now, over time, their songs sound different. Things like Maybe I’m Amazed, Band On The Run, Venus And Mars, which are classic records, absolutely. As well as his first album, McCartney, the one with the cherries. And the last one, McCartney III, is very good too. It has a mix with the first McCartney and some of The Fireman. I love his solo career. There’s always something with the eighties albums, but now that time has passed, they sound good too. When The Travelling Wilburys came out, I didn’t like them at all, but now I find their records fascinating. Sometimes, the perspective of time takes you to another side, with a different context. As it happened with David Bowie and his last album, Blackstar. I listened to it as soon as it came out, he was still alive, and I listened to it with two or three friends. We were always Bowie fans, we listened to it, and we thought it was good. Then he died, about a week later, and with those friends we decided to listen to it again, with Bowie dead, and we said it was a masterpiece. Music is very contextual. Context can also define an album. 

What do you think of McCartney II, an album associated with electronics?

It’s a very good record. It has things like Coming Up and Temporary Secretary which is like the first thing in the house genre. I remember the remixes that Freelancer Hellraiser did of it. The thing about McCartney is that he’s very prolific. He’s an incredible musician, one of the best melodic musicians on earth. When you take a look at his catalog, you can’t believe it, it’s incredible. 

Was McCartney an Avant Garde musician?

A lot of people credit John Lennon for being the Avant Garde beatle, but it was precisely Paul who really got into the Avant Garde techniques that we later used. He was the musician who did the loops on Tomorrow Never Knows and then thought of more variations on Sgt Pepper.

What was the process like working with Paul on The Fireman?

When we worked with Paul, we used to write, record and mix the song in eight hours. The great thing about that job, The Fireman, is that it wasn’t a Paul McCartney album, it was a Fireman album, so he could take that suit off and pretend to be somebody else, it was like an expression. And it was really fun for me because there was no pressure to put out a Paul McCartney record. And I was happy for him because he didn’t have that pressure to be Paul McCartney either. 

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