In Defense of We All Stand Together

One of the songs that invariably got a lot of airplay at Christmas, is Paul McCartney's We All Stand Together. Curiously, because the song has nothing to do with Christmas. The lyrics has no single reference to it, and the music doesn’t have the usual sounds that are characteristic of Christmas songs. The only connections are the song’s theme solidarity and the release date of the single, which was in December. And even that wasn’t the intention.

Video We All Stand Together

We All Stand Together is nothing more than ‘just’ a nursery rhyme, coming from a cartoon about the character Rupert Bear. The short film of Rupert Bear is screened in cinemas preceding McCartney's eighties movie Give My Regards To Broad Street. While this film isn’t a great commercial success,  the animated movie does catch on and especially that one song stands out. And so We All Stand Together got unsolicited increasing airplay on the UK and US radio stations. This unexpected attention eventually leads to the release as a single, at the end of 1984. The accompanying video clip of the singing frogs provides an international megahit. In several countries, only the Christmas singles by Wham! and Band Aid keeps the song away from the top of the charts. And so Paul McCartney becomes one of the few pop artists who has had success with a self-written children's song, although, as a Christmas hit.

But releasing a nursery rhyme as a single, isn’t a cool thing to do for a rock-artist. McCartney experienced this already in 1972 as he delivers Mary Had A Little Lamb in a recalcitrant mood, a song written for his three year old daughter. This earned him the scorn of the international music press and with this single it happened again. Nursery rhymes and the pop music industry seems to be a difficult combination, this is in contrast to other art forms. Take literature for example; no one there is complaining about a person like Roald Dahl, who wrote great stories for adults and children; the same counts for the Swedish writer Henning Mankell. They got praised for their diversity, not criticized. 

So for some, We All Stand Together symbols the alleged diminished capabilities of McCartney as a composer, since the breakup of The Beatles. And yet, thirty years later, the song is still immense popular, probably due to McCartney’s trademark: a wonderful and strong melody. Personally, I really love the creativity: not only musically, with all its twists and hooks, but also all the croaking frogs and different voices (except for the children's choir) that are sung by McCartney himself. And the sung bass line by the bullfrogs is from to time just plain funny. All this together makes the song to an example of great, creative craftmanship and far from being corny. 


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Related Posts:

The Beatles Christmas Quiz
10 McCartney Songs For The Christmas Holidays
30 Years Ago: Once Upon A Long Ago

André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

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