Paul McCartney is certainly on the top 5 of the most important songwriters of all time and music today would have been quite different without him, not only on his work in The Beatles but also in Wings and as a solo artist. After the end of the Fab Four he released until 2026, 27 albums and although musicians usually like most of what they wrote and released, there is one song in particular that McCartney believes is terrible.
The song Paul McCartney wrote but thinks is terrible
When asked if he looks back on his career and thinks there are songs that aren’t good, he said: “Yeah, you get some songs you think didn’t really work or didn’t achieve what you wanted to achieve. But you can’t win them all, you know. I have a song called ‘Bib Bop’ and it’s just very (sings) ‘Bip bop, bip bop bop, Bip bop, bip bop bam’. I was looking back on that and thinking ‘Gosh, how can I get away with that?'”
“But I was with Trevor Horn, the producer and Trevor said: ‘That’s one of my favorites of yours’. So seeing from his perspective I thought ‘You know what? He’s no slouch, maybe it’s ok’. But yeah, that one I think wasn’t that great,” Paul told The Rest is Entertainment in 2026 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Paul has consistently mentioned this track, at least since the 1980s, as the one he dislikes the most. He feels that tracks like this one were released unfinished.
He said:
“You can’t get it right all the time. If there’s been a fault with my stuff, I think some of it was unfinished. Looking back on some of it now, I think, ‘You didn’t finish the bloody thing.” So . . . yeah, I might have been a bit soft, and some of it might have been a bit unfinished.”
“And sometimes a critic will say, ‘That’s really lousy”. I’ll tend to agree with him: ‘He’s right, it’s not very good, that one.’ I know there are quite a few tracks on my albums that I just don’t like now. Like ‘Bip Bop,’ off Wild Life. Oh, God, I can’t listen to it; it just goes nowhere. But occasionally a good one comes along, and occasionally there’s a little wave on the little millpond. That makes it all worthwhile,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1986. More recently he described the song as “a terrible little thing on ‘Wild Life’ called ‘Bip Bop'”.
He said Wings didn’t get good reviews at first because people expected them to be a continuation of The Beatles’ sound
In the book “Conversations with McCartney“, he told Paul Noyer that he was a bit more harsh about that song. Paul said it was a song he had always hated. “That’s my theory, that in years to come, people may actually look at all my work rather than the context of it following the Beatles. That’s the danger, as it came from ‘Here There and Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Fool on the Hill’, to ‘Bip Bop’, which is such an inconsequential little song. I must say, I’ve always hated that song.”
The song was featured on Wings debut album “Wild Life” (1971). According to Paul, Wings didn’t get good reviews for that album because people were expecting something that would sound like a continuation of The Beatles’ sound. “We didn’t get good reviews for this because I think people were expecting something more sort of Beatle-like. I was purposefully digging my heels in saying, ‘We’re not gonna do that’. Just like an imitation of The Beatles. I didn’t feel like that was a good way to go,” he said on his website in 2022.
The Beatle said that his idea for Wild Life was to make the record quickly to give it a sense of freshness. “Well, I wanted to make an album just like that! (Clicks his fingers.) And Bob Dylan had just done an album in a few days, kind of thing. So I thought, ‘Yeah,’ you know. ‘That’d be good.”
He continued:
“Give it a freshness.’ That was the approach for putting ‘Wild Life’ together.” A Bluegrass version of “Bip Bop” was recorded by Paul and his wife and then bandmate Linda in the garden of their Scotland home in 1971. In the recording that was released in the 2001 compilation “Wingspan: Hits and History”, their daughter Mary can be heard in the background.
That song was played live for the first time at the Portland Building in Nottingham, England, in 1972. It was part of Wings’ setlist only that year during their European tour. THe track was performed 36 times, with the final performance taking place at Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, Germany. As expected, McCartney never performed it at his solo shows.
The album did well at the time, peaking at number 11 on the UK Albums Chart. In the USA it peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. It was later certified gold by the RIAA in the USA, with more than 500.000 copies sold. It was recorded with Paul (Vocals and electric guitar), Linda McCartney (Tambourine and harmony vocals), Denny Laine (Bass) and Denny Seiwell (Drums).