Station II

‘Station II’ is the penultimate track on Egypt Station, Paul McCartney’s 17th solo studio album.

‘Station II’ is a continuation of the opening soundscape, that takes us back to the station.

It’s an imaginary station and, you know, I like the idea that it’s a train station, or it’s a radio station. It’s just some imaginary place. So we had fun just making up a soundscape.

And then at the end of it, we thought, well it’d be a nice idea to vaguely, in this big station, hear someone plugging in a guitar like it’s a busker come in to play some songs and earn some money. So you hear him plug in and he plays a riff. It’s the beginning of one of our songs called ‘Hunt You Down’. So he plays, and then it gradually gets louder until it becomes the real song.

That started with a choir piece that Paul had worked out on the keyboard. Then we brought in David Campbell to help arrange the choir. We went into a cathedral to record that, which was really cool. It started with us in the studio. Paul had worked out some chords that he wanted the voices to do. Then we started creating different ambient noises, some of which came from tape loops. He had a little portable reel-to-reel player, the one they used on Revolver for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. That was done on this little Brenell tape machine. We created some of the sounds on that, like slowing down guitars.