In Paul McCartney’s video for NEW single “Appreciate” — presented by Microsoft, incidentally — Macca is busted out of the human museum by his new buddy Newman the robot. Is it goofy? Of course! Endearing? Certainly. Here’s the concept as explained in a press release:

The video sees Newman on patrol in a museum of humans. Newman is drawn to one exhibition in particular. In a dimly lit sound studio he sees Paul McCartney sitting on a stool holding his iconic hofner bass guitar. Paul twitches making a sound on the guitar and to Newman’s astonishment he starts to come to life as the song “Appreciate” starts up. Paul comes closer to Newman staring at him through a force field that encloses him. Newman reaches through the force field and pulls Paul out of his exhibition. As the two of them move around the museum all the exhibitions start coming to life too.

And a little more from the mouth of McCartney himself:

I woke up one morning with an image in my head of me standing with a large robot. I thought it might be something that could be used for the cover of my album NEW but instead the idea turned out to be for my music video for “Appreciate.” Together with the people who had done the puppetry for the worldwide hit War Horse we developed the robot who became Newman.

There you have it. The song is good, the video is fun, and if we were living in the prime MTV/VH1 era we’d be seeing this thing all day every day. Andre Chocron directed, and Mervyn Millar and Ed Dimbleby designed Newman for Significant Object Ltd. Say “Hello, Newman” below.

NEW is out now on Virgin EMI/Hear Music.