Paul McCartney: Back in the US

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * )

This is the album you'd probably never have heard of if Macca hadn't engendered some controversy — and therefore attention — by reversing the famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting attribution on the Beatles' songs he covers. To be fair, his choices are those he had the greater, if not exclusive, hand in writing: Hello Goodbye, Getting Better, Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, and so on.

For a man who turned 60 last year he's still in (mostly) fine voice on these live recordings, which fill a double disc with Beatles, Wings and solo hits. But there are also those unexceptional recent songs he includes — the workman-like Lonely Road and Driving Rain, and his recent theme to Vanilla Sky — which knobble the middle of the first disc. He pays a nice tribute to George Harrison on Something with ukulele, Harrison's favourite instrument in later life.

The second disc, where he pulls out Band on the Run, Back in the USSR, Maybe I'm Amazed and the quirky B-side C Moon, is better and after the simplistic polemic Freedom, written immediately after September 11, it's a fairly standard race to the tape with Let It Be, Hey Jude, Long and Winding Road, Lady Madonna, and so on to The End. It hardly adds to the sum of human knowledge — or even Macca's cachet — but as a souvenir for American audiences it's pretty sound.

Label: Capitol