It's a shame the most interesting Beatles at the time of their 1970 break-up - Lennon and Harrison - are no longer with us, because the post-Beatles legacy is carried into the second decade of the 21st century by these two albums. Not that many care, few today will be listening. If they did, these would confirm McCartney and Starr's irrelevance, the McCartney album especially. But his excuse is it's deliberate.
Kisses on the Bottom - the title from a line in a 1930s' Fats Waller song Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter which he covers here - is McCartney going back to the music of his parents' generation, in some instances songs he heard as a kid round the family piano at Christmas.
But - immaculately produced by Tommy LiPuma (Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole), partially recorded in the famous Capitol Studios in Los Angeles where Sinatra and others worked, with Diana Krall and her group, guest Eric Clapton, and the London Symphony orchestrated and arranged by expat Kiwi Alan Broadbent and Johnny Mandel - this is far from a boozy knees-up around the ol' joanna in Liverpool.
Even the two Waller songs (the other the cheery My Very Good Friend the Milkman) are given poised readings, which is the tone here. The quiet ballads therefore - often soaked in romance and nostalgia - come out best: Home, More I Cannot Wish You (written by Frank Loesser whose publishing Macca owns) and Irving Berlin's Always are shamelessly wistful, late-night reveries, and McCartney's original My Valentine - written for his new wife - fits in seamlessly as a newly minted classic jazz ballad.
McCartney also includes the often forgotten intros these old songs had: Bye Bye Blackbird doesn't start with "Pack up all my care and woe".
