I love this song and I love the short film it's from (the film being slightly longer and different to the music video). If you are one of those people who deride this track and believe that this was the nadir of McCartney's career or that this song is silly or unworthy for an ex-Beatle then you are a scurrilous blackguard and a rascal, standing against all that is boundlessly creative, imaginative, childlike and innocent, beautiful and magical and deserve to be cursed, mocked, ostracised, cast down into the depths of Hell, stripped naked, oiled and thrown into the flames to languish in the eternal moans of your wicked Rupert-hating brethren and have your bottom troubled by the hot trident of Satan himself. You're also very clearly just plain wrong. 'We All Stand Together' is brilliant.
My favourite bit is when those three big bullfrogs go "Bom buh buh buh buh buh buh bom." I like that operatic fish as well. There are so many different segments to this song with some astounding arrangements and singing it's almost symphonic. This is epic McCartney. Seriously, I do not understand why this song isn't universally praised. It's a really good song with a beautiful sentiment, interesting and creative and hugely commercially successful. I guess the fact that it doesn't feature guitars and can be enjoyed by children is too much for some people to get over.
The back cover has some nice pictures of the various players, including the bullfrogs and the fish. It is unknown just exactly what happened to The Frog Chorus after they scored this hit, but it seems apparent that the rigours of the music industry where too much for the poor souls to take. Management were quick to arrange licensing deals for posters, towels and pencils etc. and the Frog Chorus were chewed up and spat out, too burnt out even to release a follow-up. Shame, as a collaboration with Alfredo Frog surely beckoned.
It was produced by George Martin and the pair of them must have been glad of the time in the studio to get down to some proper work without that clown Lennon philandering and womanising and shoving acid down his throat and banging on about attention-seekling, self-referential Eggmen guff.
The B-side is 'We All Stand Together (Humming Version)' by Paul McCartney and the Finchley Frogettes, so in the tradition of many great hardcore punk bands I guess we could call this a split? Maybe not. It's a gentler arrangement with an even dreamier hummed vocal melody than on the A-side; a nice way to kick back and relax after the crashing and splashing of the Frog Chorus version.
The single was released in November 1984 for the Christmas market, reached #3 and spent 13 weeks on the chart before dropping off, only to have a Lazarus-like return in December 1985, re-entering the charts for 5 weeks and peaking at #32.
In 2004 the song had a re-release of sorts as a double A-side 7" with 'Tropic Island Hum'; a song from McCartney's more recent foray into children's film. Someone has put a nice video online of the record being played:
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