(Credits: Alamy)
Legendary abstract artist Pablo Picasso once said: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”. Throughout his career, when inspiration called, he could often be found hunched over canvases, contorting faces in his signature primitive style. His colourful one-eyed creatures made him an art celebrity, which was bolstered by his becoming the first living artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre and the fact that more of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist. Everyone, it seems, wanted a piece of Picasso – including musicians.
His cultural hold was paid tribute to in everything from Russian stamps to a film portrayal by Anthony Hopkins. Picasso joined the likes of Elvis and Prince, his sheer level of talent intermingling with fame so closely he was recognisable with one word. In many ways, his work was the perfect launch pad for songwriting, borne out of boundless muses plucked from the air.
In his hands, mundane still-life scenes became geometric wonders – much like pedestrian interactions can become great metaphors in the hands of a good songwriter. In 1923, Picasso explained the process of transmuting people and objects into abstract art. “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting,” he said. “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them.”
When Picasso died in 1973, Paul McCartney was on holiday in Jamaica. McCartney had snuck into the set of Papillion to meet Dustin Hoffman, who, throughout their dinner together, made it clear he didn’t think McCartney could write a song about anything. After picking up a magazine that reported the artist’s death, McCartney riffed on his famous last words and strung together a tune. Not one to let Dustin Hoffman tell him he couldn’t pluck a song out of the sky, he went on to release ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ on Band on the Run. Hoffman compared watching McCartney compose it “right under childbirth in terms of great events” of his life.
He might have been onto something because of all the songs written about Picasso, from Neil Diamond’s jazzy ‘The Last Picasso’ to Adam and the Ants’ ‘Picasso Visita El Planeta De Los Simios’, the Wings track spoke most to Picasso’s artistry. Where Diamond referenced his literal worth (“The last Picasso / Was just acquired by some old museum”), McCartney actually referenced his disjointed way of working.
“Picasso was kind of far out in his pictures; he’d done all these different kinds of things, fragmented, cubism, and the whole bit,” he later explained. “I thought it would be nice to get a track a bit like that, put it through different moods, cut it up, edit it, mess around with it – like he used to do with his pictures”.
He added: “You see the old films of him painting, he paints it once, and if he doesn’t like it, he paints it again, right on top of it, and by about twenty-five times, he’s got this picture. So we tried to use this kind of idea, I don’t know much about it, to tell you the truth, but what we did know we tried to get in the song, sort of a Cubist thing.”
Five songs inspired by Pablo Picasso:
- ‘The Last Picasso’ – Neil Diamond
- ‘Picasso Visita El Planeta De Los Simios’ – Adam and the Ants
- ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ – Paul McCartney and Wings
- ‘Pablo Picasso’ – The Modern Lovers
- ‘Blue Period Picasso’ – Peter Bjorn and John
