A hit song for the band Wings was “inspired by George Orwell”, according to songwriter Paul McCartney.
It does not take a detective to work out the song, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five, with the title just a year along from Orwell’s classic, Nineteen and Eigthty-Four. But The Beatles member was not adapting the suffering of a dystopia, and instead found himself a “love song about the future” on the Band on the Run track. McCartney had suggested he was so young when he first read Orwell’s novel that he didn’t believe he would see the future, though it inspired one of his very best songs. The song itself was inspired by a “relationship that was always meant to be.”
Writing of the song in his book, The Lyrics, McCartney suggested the song is about the universal love and a counter to his “silly love songs.” He wrote: “When I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four I was just a kid, and I though tit was so far into the future I mightn’t live to see it. Like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey – impossibly distant. Now they’re well behind us.
“The idea behind the song is that this is a relationship that was always meant to be. No one in the distant future is ever going to get my attention, because I’ve got you. But when this was written, 1985 was only twelve years away; it wasn’t the very distant future – only the future in this song. So, this is basically a love song about the future.”
The Wings frontman says Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five originated from just its first line, with McCartney finding suitable rhymes to fit into the track. He said: “With a lot of songs I do, the first line is it. It’s all in the first line, and then you have to go on and write the second line. With Eleanor Rigby, I had ‘picks up the rice in the church where the wedding has been,’ that was the one big line that started me off on it. With this one, it was ‘No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty-five.’ That’s all I had of that song for months. ‘No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty… six?’ It wouldn’t have worked.”
McCartney added: “Sometimes you try to avoid using the word ‘love’ in a song, but I also wrote a song asking what’s wrong with silly love songs. It’s something I think about. ‘Love’ is a staggeringly important word, and a staggeringly important feeling, because it’s going on everywhere, in the whole of existence, right now. I think about this whole planet and the whole human race.
“I think about how in China right now there are two people who love each other and they’re getting married and committing their whole lives to each other, or in South America right now there’s a mother having a baby and loving this baby and the father is loving the baby too.
“The point I’m making is obvious – that this ‘love thing’ is global, really universal. And it’s true not only for humans but also for animals, which we too often forget about, and that commonality outweighs the fact that it might be soppy. But you’re always trying to say it in a way that’s not stoppy. That’s what I write about.”
