In the last few years, I was working in a soulless corporate record store; it wasn't as bad as the one I was working in before but still, it was quite tight in terms of what we were allowed to do. There was none of the surliness you would expect from people working in record stores, they conducted 'mystery shops' where they would pay people to go into the store and secretly mark the employees performance as a person behind the till out of ten. they would describe the employee thus giving management just enough to hunt them down and fire them.
In a lot of ways it was a lot like East Germany... or even Stalinist Russia: show trials, executions and a faux sense that the needs of the people (or customer) was the managements main focus. (It wasn't; retaining budget and forecast to subsidise the ridiculous over expansion of the company at the hands of an overconfident and under-skilled board of directors was.)
Anyway, I digress, if you wanted to know my life story you would probably have brought my autobiography, which you didn't, you cunts. AND if you wanted an insight into late 90s early noughties music retail, you would probably have brought a book about the rise of Amazon.
BUT I was working in this shop on the day that Paul McCartney reissued several of his albums. Among them, 'II'. Nowhere near as good as Band on the Run, from the mighty Wings, (The band the Beatles could have become) or even anything as good as the Beatles (Paul McCartney's other band), with the exception of everything they did pre 1965 and Let It Be, which even the Beatles completest concedes is utter sentimental shite.
Not like his other stuff then.
Turns out Macca, in his quest to stay current, had started pissing about with synthesisers and not in a 'use them like a keyboard' way; he was really pushing it. He appregiated the fuck out of 'Temporary Secretary'. For a split second, I thought I was in Detroit in 1986 at a Juan Atkins gig... Then he started singing about needing a secretary to help him type things up. Really fucking spoiled it.
Anyways, After going into great detail about Temporary Secretary and even naming the post after the track, I'm going to throw you a bit of a curveball... Macca's most successful foray into dance music wasn't Temporary Secretary, or even 'Twin Freaks' The bizarre remix album of loads of his top songs which he released in an attempt to seem underground in the early Noughties (although Punk Funk enthusiasts might want to attempt a re-edit of his version of 'Baby I'm Amazed') but was actually when Shep Pettibone retouched his minor 80s hit, 'Ou Est Le Soleil'
Of course, Pettibone, veteran of studio 54 and those kind of places was a sucker for a vocal, so he popped a verse of the original in there... now other than this verse, the track is pretty fucking standout even amongst todays house and techno classics, I had no choice, I had to cut it to shreds.
