Artist: The Fireman
Title: Rushes
Label: Hydra
Released: 1998
Track listing: Watercolour Guitars / Palo Verde / Auraveda / Fluid / Appletree Cinnabar Amber / Bison / 7am / Watercolour Rush

When it comes to Paul McCartney, music fans – especially those raised on the Beatles, or who grew up during his largely so-so phase in the 1980s – tend to fall into one of two camps. There are those who rush to criticise, blathering on about the late John Lennon and Macca’s occasional crimes against pop (the Frog chorus, Mull of Kintyre etc). Conversely, there are plenty who cite the breadth and depth of his work, his song-writing skills (all would agree – he is genuinely one of the best to have done it), and his passion for taking risks and experimenting.

Without wanting to sound like a Beatles bore – mainly because I’m not, though I have read a few books and watched a number of documentaries – it is now fairly well known that McCartney, then without kids and frequently with more time on his hands than his bandmates, was the first to investigate Music Concrete (a major influence on both 1966’s much-cited ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and Lennon’s later ‘Revolution No. 9’), and the first to throw himself into London’s psychedelic freak-out scene.

McCartney has spent decades battling with the estates of his deceased bandmembers over his desire to release ‘Carnival of Light’, an infamous 14-minute 1967 recording (created for a specific event at the Roundhouse) which is dark, twisted, weird and extremely experimental. Curiously, this bit of extreme experimentation was recorded in the same session as the band laid down the psychedelic pop nostalgia of ‘Penny Lane’. You can listen to the full psychedelic freak-out on YouTube; suffice to say it sounds a bit like post-rock fused with experimental ambience. One bit is even like the Beastie Boys if you pitched them down to a smack-addled tempo.

His post-Beatles catalogue is also full of oddities and interesting experiments; the kazoo-sporting disco-pop of ‘Coming Up’, the frazzled techno-pop insanity of ‘Temporary Secretary’ (later re-edited for 21^st century dancefloors by Matt Edwards AKA Radio Slave), the dub-flecked end-of-night disco brilliance of Wings number ‘Goodnight Tonight’, the gritty P-funk-inspired grunt of ‘What’s That You’re Doing’ (from 1982’s Tug of War), and the pleasingly pompous, prog rock era orchestral rock album he recorded and released as Thrillington (1977). Yes, he did record a terrible and creepy duet with Michael Jackson, but even a musical genius is allowed a few missteps over a career that has lasted for well over 60 years.

Even so, by the 1990s Macca was a little lost musically. While he’d taken a gamble via the modern classical Liverpool Ontario project, written and created with Carl Davis, 1992’s Off The Ground album, recorded live in the studio in a sort of recall to the 1968 Get Back sessions, was Americana-tinged classic rock by the numbers. That set, though, did connect him with former Killing Joke man Youth, who was then spending much of his time exploring ambient, techno and decidedly psychedelic electronic pastures – sometimes alongside Alex Patterson with The Orb, but more frequently as a remixer.

On the suggestion of one of his friends, McCartney invited Youth to his private studio and asked for his help mixing one of the album tracks. The session went swimmingly, so McCartney asked Youth to do a more experimental, ambient and dancefloor-focused treatment of the album. Looking back, it’s an interesting and very McCartney-like idea: take bits from album cuts and whatever else you fancy from the multi-track tapes, then see what you come up with. McCartney became more involved as the sessions progressed, adding new sounds and textures to the hallucinatory, ambient techno-adjacent soundscapes Youth had created.

The result was Strawberry Oceans Ships Forest, its stream-of-consciousness title echoing the spontaneity of the sessions and the decidedly contemporary electronica feel of the resultant recordings. Something of a time capsule, it boasts nods to the pitched-down grooves and psychedelic overtones of the Orb’s WAU! Mr Modo label, the sample-rich ambient house headiness of the Orb themselves, the chugging spirituality of early Goa trance, dub delays aplenty and lots of trippy effects. There are clear flashes of McCartney – snippets of vocalisations, dub-influenced bass, crunchy guitar licks and so on – but its relationship to its source material was largely loose.

This was a contemporary sound collage connected to the alternative pulse of dance music culture’s more interesting and druggy fringes. As a result, the pair’s trippy soundscapes were frequently underpinned by rhythms you could dance to – or wearily shuffle around to in a daze. It’s like McCartney on MDMA – and in my book that’s a good thing. The album’s final cut, ‘Sunrise Mix’, is a properly rushing, low-tempo dancefloor workout of the kind that would be celebrated as an ambient house classic had it been made by some cool Italians (or Alex Patterson for that matter).

McCartney loved it and was much inspired, as he told Rolling Stone in 2009: “I used to joke with Youth in the studio, where we’d be putting together these midnight-dancey, ambient records, saying to him, ‘this is like everything they won’t allow me to do in the studio. This isn’t like working, it’s like goofing around’. And Youth would pull the best bits out, get rid of the indulgent bits – and that’s the good thing about him, he’s like a DJ/producer, and I trust him, even if sometimes begrudgingly, to be my editor.”

Thus, The Fireman was born. Initially released in 1993 in a plain, matter-or-fact red sleeve devoid of writing and production credits, McCartney’s PR people made sure journalists knew he was involved – even if he and Youth didn’t speak about it publicly until the late 2000s. It was hardly a secret, but then their target audience was not crusty middle-aged Macca fans and Beatles bores, but people who took drugs, stayed out all weekend and bought Orb records to soothe battered comedown minds – the kind of listeners who would generally balk at the idea of McCartney making an ambient record.

My introduction to the Fireman came via a review in a music magazine – I can’t remember which – of second album Rushes (1998). My interest was piqued by the idea of McCartney making ambient music with Youth, a producer whose work I knew well (the benefits of spending much of my teens being obsessed by ambient, strange techno and IDM). Thus, I bought a copy of the album on vinyl from my local branch of Virgin Megastore. It has sat in the collection ever since, occasionally being dug out on Sunday nights or the wee small hours following a suitably heavy night.

Returning to it 27 years on, Rushes still stands up to scrutiny. It is a slightly different beast to Strawberry Oceans Ships Forest, feeling a touch more musically developed and a little less rooted in the sound collage-meets-slow tempo dance music feel of the earlier ambient house/chill out room movement (one which Youth had played a starring role through his friendship with former roadie turned DJ/producer Alex Paterson – for more on this, see the long read I did chronicling the story of the early 90s chill-out movement).

That’s not to say that it was a radical revolution; unlike their later third and thus far final album, the more psychedelic and guitar-laden 2008 set Electric Arguments, it still seemed to come from a similar headspace, musically and sonically speaking. Their working methods were similar, too, albeit with more active involvement from McCartney throughout. The former Beatle discussed it, and how it varied from working with both John Lennon and producer Nigel Godrich (best known for his work with Radiohead, but also the man at the mixing desk for some Macca solo material), during the 2009 Rolling Stone interview mentioned above.

“The process of making music with Youth is different from the way I collaborated with Nigel or John,” McCartney said. “With Nigel, I brought finished songs to him and we worked on them. He’d say what he did and didn’t like, and we did the editing process that way too. But the Youth process is instantaneous and one of spilling out ideas and then mixing them. Or he’ll say, ‘give me a couple of minutes and I will do an arrangement’. It’s not just thinking about things and carefully going about it. I always do a bit of goofing around in the studio [with Youth], but with Nigel it would be a bit more considered.”

The fluidity of this process – create things on the fly, layer them up and mix them while in the flow – is hinted at in the title, Rushes, a reference (I have always assumed) to the initial, pre-editing takes on scenes in TV shows and films. Traditionally, rushes are basically what has been captured on the day without the tidying up of post-production, the narrative shaping of editing, and the addition of music and foley effects.

The music on Rushes is undeniably vivid by design, as with almost all ambient music: these are soundscapes to conure mental images and put you in a specific inner space and mood. The difference is that while actual rushes, in a film context, are by their very nature rough around the edges, The Fireman album is sonically detailed, impeccably produced, and far more ‘polished’ – even if it was done at the time, in the moment – than either Youth or McCartney would probably admit.

It’s those details that leap out, particularly if you listen on headphones. There are plenty of nods to the immersive ambient sound worlds created by Youth and Paterson (sometimes alongside Jimmy Cauty) in the VIP Room at Heaven – AKA the first chill out room, and the inspiration for the earliest Orb productions. Those sessions frequently saw them mixing multiple sound sources, bringing samples into the mix (via a sampler dragged down to the club) while looping up bits of records, and combining beat-free music with rhythms from completely different records.

The idea was immersive musical sound collage, and that’s what Rushes provides in spades (as does the Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld Album and the now deleted Live 93 compilation) – it’s just that most of the samples used are not odds and ends found on strange spoken word records or BBC sound effects LPs, but rather Macca playing the piano or guitar, singing random things, turning his hand to other instruments and so on. Some of these elements are buried in the mix, like echoes of the past, but others are more noticeable.

This is particularly evident on the album’s opening two track-suite, where the simple and uncluttered ‘Watercolour Guitars’ – a kind of acoustic guitar-driven McCartney/Youth nod to the Steve Reich/Pat Metheny classic ‘Electric Counterpoint’ – slowly morphs into 12-minute epic ‘Pal Verde’, its blissful, undulating guitar motifs ebbing in and out of the mix alongside fluid bass guitar, rising and falling electronics, atmospheric field recordings, snatches of McCartney vocals, squally trumpets, hip-hop tempo drum machine beats and swirling ambient textures (the latter frequently spun backwards and forwards across the stereo field for added impact). It sounds a bit like an Orb record, especially when a dubby bassline drops midway through, but you’d expect that with Youth’s Patterson connections.

‘Aureveda’, which stretches out across side B of record two, sees the duo explore their love of Indian musical culture, with droning synths, sitar and Tabla taking centre stage in a grandiose and at times deeply psychedelic soundscape full of found sounds, ethereal pads and snippets of spoken word samples and McCartney vocalisations – the latter frequently run through all manner of effects units. A reference from the time (or at least the 90s) would be Material’s similarly inclined ‘Mantra’, which Alex Paterson remixed (alongside Kris Weston) in 1993.

The album’s second disc opens with ‘Fluid’, a pertinently titled affair where a delay-smothered piano motif – as beautiful and poignant as anything laid down years later by Nils Frahm – and lapping waves set the tone for what follows. Shards of spacey synth and jazzy, relaxed guitar melodies appear, then suspenseful cymbals. But that, aside from occasional spoken word snippets and curious samples, is it. It’s effortlessly beautiful – the kind of trippy but blissful ambient soundscape more often heard in recent years from Melody is Truth founder Jonny Nash.

As the album progresses, we get occasional curveballs. ‘Appletree Cinnabar Amber’ is such an outing –all bluesy guitars, low slung dub-adjacent bass, languid trip-hop beats and, crucially, snatches of the guitar and piano melodies introduced in ‘Fluid’; it’s like a second pass on the same track with added psychedelic visions and a touch of grunt. It works wonderfully, of course, and deftly showcases both artists’ ability to riff on a simple musical theme.

The slow-motion swing and stoned sonics underpinning ‘Appletree Cinnabar Amber’ are explored further on the more suspenseful and head-mangling ‘Bison’, with crustier and more lo-fi guitars and live-sounding hip-hop breaks (likely played by McCartney, given his love of jumping onto a drum kit at every opportunity), before intergalactic electronics and mournful, elegiac strings take over as it slickly mutates into the bittersweet ambient brilliance of ‘7am’. Listen hard enough, and you will hear the same effects-laden and mutilated Macca vocal samples introduced early in the album.

This sense of coming full circle is emphasised by short closing cut ‘Watercolour Rush’, where the gorgeous, sun-splashed guitar motifs of opener ‘Watercolour Guitars’ return to bookend the album. Played in the mix backwards, then forwards, then sped-up, before slowly fading out, it offers a logical conclusion to a circular ambient journey that stands up to any of its contemporaneous rivals. As a complete piece of work, Rushes is undoubtedly the musical highpoint of the Fireman project – even if it does lack the frazzled, ‘sprawled on a beanbag in the chill out room while the groove continues’ feel of Strawberry Oceans Ships Forest.