Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney has written over a thousand songs in the course of his career, building one of the most important catalogues in the history of pop music. Yet even one of the greatest songwriters of all time has never hidden the fact that he made a few mistakes. In fact, there's one song he considers, without hesitation, the worst he ever wrote.
It's “Bip Bop”, the second track on “Wild Life”, the debut album by Wings, released in 1971. It was also the first song recorded for the album, on July 24, 1971, and one of the last to be mixed, on October 17 of the same year. Curiously, it was recorded in mono. Besides the full band version, the album also features a brief instrumental, acoustic reprise titled “Bip Bop Link”, placed near the end of the record.

After the Beatles broke up, McCartney could have coasted on the repertoire he'd already built. Instead, he chose to start over from scratch with Wings, experimenting with new ideas and new musical languages. It was precisely in that transitional phase that “Bip Bop” was born, a bare-bones track built on a minimal groove and a deliberately childish lyric.
Speaking about its genesis, McCartney explained: “I was just playing the guitar and the bass string, tapping away on it, a very simple thing, almost a basic blues. We were very interested in playing robust music, music that didn't necessarily have to mean anything. We were never too serious: we just liked to have a bit of fun.”
On another occasion he added: “'Bip Bop' is just a song I wrote. It's the one our little girl likes. She knows it and it's easy to sing. It could have been called 'Flip Flop', you know? It could have been anything, and instead it became 'Bip Bop'."

Despite its curious origins, the song never became a cult favorite even among McCartney's fans, and over the years its author has come to openly disown it. Interviewed by Q Magazine in 2015 and asked to name the worst song of his career, he answered without hesitation: “Bip Bop”. He then added: “The lyrics are fucking horrible.” After quoting some of the song's most embarrassing lines, McCartney explained that he had never been able to stand the words, not even at the moment he wrote them. He recounted, however, that producer Trevor Horn (Buggles) had surprised him by confessing: “It's one of my favorites.” A comment that led him to reflect: “I can't hate it that much, can I? There must have been a reason I liked it in the first place.”

Even many years earlier, however, the Liverpool musician had expressed a scathing verdict on the song, simply calling it: “The weakest thing I've ever written in my whole life.” In the 1989 book “Conversations with McCartney” by Paul Du Noyer, he explained his fear that such a modest song might be remembered alongside his masterpieces: “I have a theory: in the future people might judge my entire output without taking into account the context of the post-Beatles period. The risk is going from 'Here, There And Everywhere', 'Yesterday' and 'The Fool On The Hill' to 'Bip Bop', such an insignificant little song.” And his final verdict was even blunter: “I've always hated that song!”
More than fifty years on, “Bip Bop” occupies an entirely marginal place in McCartney's vast catalogue, and few would ever consider it representative of his career, but it retains this curious negative fame that, in its own way, helps keep its memory alive.

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20/07/2026