I don’t want to overstate Paul McCartney’s achievement. Memory Almost Full is as good an album as this devotee of frivolity can make in his mid-sixties. It’s one of the few times his modesty doesn’t sound like arrogance (‘That Was Me’ actually sounds as if Macca had absorbed Bertolt Brecht’s theory of aesthetic distance). A line from the rather wonderful ‘The End of the World’ encapsulates how this album stands in relation to the rest of his work: “This wasn’t bad / So a much better place would have to be special.” He could return to silly love songs on the next one (not that I see that as a bad thing mind you). Craft does have its disadvantages, craft and character flaws are often synonymous. While I commend McCartney for preferring patness to smugness on Gratitude, he’s spent every album since 1970 proselytizing the wonders of this or that domestic virtue. Whether you take him on his word this time depends on your tolerance for the pulpit – it’s why I’m a proud atheist.

Universal