The Boys of Dungeon Lane review – Paul McCartney reunites with Ringo Starr | Music | Entertainment

In the middle of a trio of octogenarian new records from The Beatles’ drummer and The Rolling Stones is Sir Paul McCartney’s 20th solo album. And this time around, the 83-year-old is feeling particularly nostalgic with The Boys of Dungeon Lane, much like Ringo Starr’s latest music video. As with his previous album, McCartney III, Paul plays most of the instruments on this record; one that gets its name from a Liverpool road that sparked all the feels from across the years gone by – most embodied in the album’s lead single, Days We Left Behind.

A sentimental ballad with lyrics like “nothing stays the same, no one needs to cry”, it’s hard not to picture a young John Lennon meeting Paul in the mid-1950s. Similarly, Down South follows Macca’s memories of getting a lift from a lorry driver with George Harrison, while the nostalgia train speeds up when Ringo himself joins McCartney for an upbeat duet in Home to Us, reflecting on family life in Liverpool. It then all comes together with Salesman Saint, Macca’s tribute to his parents getting through the war with laughter and song, as their era’s brass band sounds are played alongside their son’s guitar strums. But it’s not all sensibility met with geniality on this album.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane starts wistfully but turns punchy with the opening track As You Lie There, before Lost Horizon’s rocky timbre takes us through raw, energetic memories of teenage youth, from the train going by to the sounds of ticking clocks and humming buses. Ripples on a Pond is similarly catchy and bouncy, before Mountain Top relives psychedelic experiences with magic mushrooms via a harpsichord. Overall, it’s a varied, poetic and accessible record. Hardly surprising from the world’s most successful living songwriter, whose musical talents continue to shine into his mid-eighties, even if his voice is beginning to croak.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out on Friday.