The Boys of Dungeon Lane suggests Paul McCartney's memory might be full

His newest memory work, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, promises listeners “the story before the story”, but ends up excavating old tricks and administering pop palliatives.

“All my life’s an open book”, McCartney sings on “Come Inside”, which his fans know isn’t really true. His stories have been honed over decades of interviews, and the ones that crop up again here – a formative hitchhiking trip with George Harrison, or writing songs with John Lennon at Forthlin Road – feel papery now. There are scattered lyrical references to Liverpool buses, larders, his father’s big band jazz (unusually, if jarringly, sampled on “Salesman Saint”). But there is little that wasn’t already accomplished, with more restraint and suggestion, on “Penny Lane” and “Honey Pie”.

The album’s strongest moment is its opening thirty seconds – McCartney’s spoken introduction, against sparse, angular guitar chords, is surprisingly fresh. It’s tempting to imagine this is what his mid-60s, avant-garde experiments with tape loops and cut-ups might have sounded like, had they ever seen the light of day.

In its weakest moments, it sounds like algorithmically-optimised McCartney – generic love songs, mid-tempo rockers, and just enough Beatles references to soundtrack his fanbase’s Facebook Reels and TikToks. It will keep the Beatles marketing machine well-oiled as it starts up again over the coming years, with a London museum and four-part “cinematic event” in the works.

Musically, The Boys of Dungeon Lane sounds like 2020’s excellent McCartney III with the edges knocked off. Andrew Watt’s production adds little to the mix – as McCartney himself tells it, most of the tracks were started at his home studio in Sussex and then shipped off to Watt’s Los Angeles studio to “pop it up”. Watt’s influence is heard most clearly on “Ripples in a Pond” and “Never Know”, which call to mind the 80s pop excess of Pipes of Peace. Watt’s overproduction, and McCartney’s endless marketability, masks the fact that he is as capable as ever of coaxing a song out of an acoustic guitar. He is still finding chords that sit you up straight. Indeed, the last decade has seen a renaissance of intricate, unembellished acoustic guitar parts that compare to those he wrote in Rishikesh in 1968 or on his Scottish farm in the 1970s. There are hints of this homespun, stripped back McCartney on “We Two” and “Momma Gets By”, and “Down South” and “The Days We Left Behind” continue his recent interest in blues and americana, with its echoes of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. For the most part, however, his lyrics feel half- finished, and resolve too easily into philosophical platitudes: “we knew that we would be alright”, he sings on “Down South”; “I know my little world / is still alright”, he similarly concludes in “First Star of the Night”.

For a life as storied as McCartney’s, making an album about “the past” was always going to be an unwieldy subject. It might be, after all, his instrumental works – what he cannot, or chooses not to, say in words – that are most hauntingly evocative of his past: the classical work Liverpool Oratorio, the soundscape Liverpool Sound Collage, or the apocryphal, unreleased experimental album, Unforgettable. Sadly, this one is anything but.