Paul McCartney is to reveal how he reinvented his career after The Beatles in a new book all about “love, family and friendship” with his band Wings.
The 82-year-old music legend has been working with prize-winning historian Ted Widmer to produce 528 page book called Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run which will be released in November. It will feature more than 100 photographs, some never seen before, alongside over 500,000 words, based on dozens of hours of interviews with McCartney and numerous key players in the band’s orbit.
Announcing the project, Sir Paul McCartney said: “I’m so very happy be transported back to the time that was Wings and relive some of our madcap adventures through this book. Starting from scratch after The Beatles felt crazy at times.
“There were some very difficult moments and I often questioned my decision. But as we got better I thought, ‘OK this is really good.’ We proved Wings could be a really good band. To play to huge audiences in the same way The Beatles had and have an impact in a different way. It was a huge buzz”
Ted Widmer added: “Wings was about love, family, friendship and artistic growth, often in the face of tremendous adversity. It was a joy to relive the madcap adventures of a special band, by listening to their stories, and compiling this oral history.”
As the Sixties came to a close, Paul McCartney was faced with the daunting prospect of being a solo artist for the first time but the Liverpool legend soon put together a band including his wife Linda and perhaps unsurprisingly, found success again. But the like all bands, not everything went completely smoothly along the way.
Despite a lack of previous musical involvement, Paul wanted Linda involved with the band and his music, so they could be together when they went on tour. She played keyboard whilst drummer Denny Seiwell and former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine also joined up.
The band’s first two albums, Wild Life (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973) were viewed by some as being disappointing compared to Paul’s work with the Beatles.
And speaking on Radio 4 in 2016 Sir Paul admitted to begin with the band were not great.
“We were terrible. We knew Linda couldn’t play, but she learned, and looking back on it, I’m really glad we did it … I could have just formed a supergroup, and rung up Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and John Bonham.”
He also told Radio 4’s Mastertapes the formation of the band came at the right time for him as he had been overdoing the boozing after the Beatles split.
“I was depressed. You would be. You were breaking from your lifelong friends,” he said. “So I took to the bevvies. I took to a wee dram. It was great at first, then suddenly I wasn’t having a good time … I wanted to get back to square one, so I ended up forming Wings.”
But the band’s fortunes would quickly change after the release of the title track of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.
As the group began to change members, the McCartneys and Laine then released 1973’s Band on the Run, a huge commercial and critical success including the top 10 single Jet and the title track.
It wasn’t completely plain sailing though as two band members had just quit including Seiwell the night before they were due to go to Lagos, Nigeria to record the album.
McCartney said in a 2010 interview: “I think everyone was blissfully happy until they were asked to go to darkest Africa. It was like, you know, we’ll come to rehearsal next Monday – but Africa? Are you kidding? And looking back on it, it’s a valid question. OK, for me the attractions were artistic, instinctive. It was like… the music of Africa will colour our feelings, we’ll be steeped in the ancient African rhythms – that sort of thing. Also the fact that we’d have a reasonably state-of-the-art studio down there.”
He added with a laugh: “It turned out to be an unbuilt studio, but it was enough, and we helped to construct vocal booths and things. It became part of the fun. No, I didn’t actually get a hammer out myself, but they got carpenters in and we told them what we needed – a big wooden box with a door in it and Perspex windows. They just didn’t have vocal booths. I suppose they were used to recording live African bands rather than suave westerners.”
Wings would remain at the top of the charts with other classic albums including Venus and Mars in 1975 and At the Speed of Sound, as well as 1977’s Mull of Kintyre which was number one in the UK and sold over two million copies.
The book narrative will also follow the various incarnations of the band as they survived a mugging in Nigeria, appear and played unannounced at UK university halls and tour in a sheared-off school bus with their children.
There was also the “Wings Over America” Tour: One of the biggest tours of the ’70s and the first time Sir Paul had played in the States for a decade.
It was their first full-scale North American tour, selling out stadiums and arenas, including Madison Square Garden and the LA Forum. The triple live album from the tour became a massive hit.
Their final tour in 1979 in the UK was also a more stripped-down but still successful run, including a legendary show at the Glasgow Apollo, where “Coming Up” was recorded live. Other memorable moments include an emergency plane landing on the way to Nashville and several brushes with the law over marijuana possession.
Book Publishers Penguin say that Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is a “rousing, stereophonic celebration of the songs, collaborations and performances that would shape the soundtrack of the late 20th century”.
It is edited by Ted Widmer and organised around nine Wings albums, this oral history will shed new light on the immediate aftermath and seismic global impact of The Beatles’ break-up, as the musical landscape and tastes began to splinter and diverge along with societal views.
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is part of a larger reexamination and appreciation of the group and their catalogue.
This includes the 2024 theatrical release of the rare Wings live-in-studio performance film One Hand Clapping and its accompanying album; 50th anniversary editions of the Wings albums Band on the Run (released February 2024) and Venus and Mars (releasing March 2025).
There is also a forthcoming documentary on Paul McCartney’s solo and Wings-related musical work of the 1970s from Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Morgan Neville. The release follows on from Sir Paul recently being on a recent successful world tour. During those gigs he played Wings songs including Live And Let Die, Let Me Roll It, Junior’s Farm and Jet.
This is not the first time Sir Paul has become a Paperback Writer. In 2021 he released a book of song lyrics, unseen photos and letters which served as his version of an autobiography. Called ‘The Lyrics’, the book recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career – from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present.
* Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Edited by Ted Widmer will be released on November 4 published by Allen Lane.
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