Paul McCartney’s Wings review – a fascinating story of the post-Beatles revival | Paul McCartney

TThe Beatles learned how to be a Beatle together. From 1963 to 1970, the four members of the group experienced a whole new kind of fame, while relying on each other to get through it. After the breakup, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to become a former Beatle? This had to be faced alone.

The burden of heavy expectations fell on the shoulders of the group’s main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also suffering from the emotional trauma of a severe personal split. They both leaned on their wives. While John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde artistic projects, Paul and Linda McCartney retreated with their children to their dilapidated Scottish farm, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep and tweaked new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As she later said: “It all started because Paul had no one to play with. He wanted more than anything to have a friend around.” The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received brutal reviews, deepening his crisis of confidence.

McCartney longed to play in front of crowds again, something he hadn’t done since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. But he couldn’t face doing it solo, as the spotlight was on him alone. So he asked Linda to help him start a new group. This authoritative and illustrated oral history, edited by cultural historian Ted Widmer, tells a story One of the most successful bands of the 1970s – and one of the strangest.

It is based on interviews (conducted for a new documentary about the band) with McCartney and former band members, as well as archival material. Widmer does an expert job of weaving this into a compelling narrative that includes cultural context – such as was found in charts at the time – and plenty of photographs, many of which have never been shown before. The result is a portal into a weirder era of pop music, a tale of the tension between celebrity and creativity, and a story with elements of Spinal Tap and Wacky Races.

The Wings’ staff diversified over the decade around a core of Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues. The group did not easily rise to great heights due to McCartney’s fame. In fact, he was determined to remake himself after the Beatles, waging a kind of guerrilla campaign against his fame. In 1972, he said: “A year ago, I used to wake up in the morning and think, ‘I’m Paul McCartney. I’m a legend.’ And it scared the hell out of me.” Wings’ debut album, Wild Life, released in 1971, was almost deliberately half-finished, arriving at another round of mockery.

McCartney then instigated one of the most bizarre episodes in rock and pop history, packing the other Wings members into a battered van, along with his children and dog Martha, and driving them on an unplanned tour of British universities. He would look at the map, locate the nearest university, look up the student union, and ask the open-mouthed social secretary if they wanted to have a party that evening.

For 50p, anyone could come and see Paul McCartney lead his new group through a ripping set of rock ‘n’ roll covers, new Wings songs, and no Beatles songs. They stayed in small, dingy hotels and B&Bs, as if McCartney wanted to recreate the uneasiness and squalor of his earlier tours with the Beatles. “If we do it this way, the old way from square one, there will come a day when we will be at square one hundred,” he said.

He also wanted the Wings to make their mistakes out of the eyes of critics, knowing, in particular, that they wouldn’t give his wife any room. Linda was struggling to learn the keyboard parts and vocal parts, duties she reluctantly accepted. Her unpolished yet poignant singing voice, which blends beautifully with Paul and Lynn’s, has become a crucial element of the Wings sound. But at the time, she was bullied and abused for her rudeness, and was the victim of severe verbal abuse reserved for the Beatles’ wives.

McCartney, a more eccentric artist than his reputation suggests, was a wayward decision-maker. His new group’s first two singles were a protest song (Give Ireland Back to the Irish) and a children’s song (Mary Had a Little Lamb). He chose to record the band’s third album in Lagos, prompting two of the group members to quit. But despite being robbed and the master tapes stolen from the session, the Wings album recorded there became the group’s most famous and successful album: Band on the Run.

By the middle of the decade, wings king I reached square one hundred. In cultural memory, this band has inevitably been overshadowed by The Beatles, obscuring the extent of their popularity. Wings has had more No. 1 hits in the US than anyone except the Bee Gees. The Wings Over the World stadium tour of 1975-76 was huge, making the band one of the highest-grossing live acts of the 1970s. We can now estimate the number of their songs, if we use the technical term, such as: Band on the Run, Jet, Let ‘Em In, Live and Let Die, to name a few.

“Wings Over the World” was at its peak. After that things slowly calmed down, commercially and musically, and the entire project was almost halted in 1980 due to McCartney attempting to take a large bag of hashish to Japan, which landed him in prison and was forced to cancel a tour. It was messy, but Wings wasn’t tidy at all. It had three different guitarists and four different drummers, and remained unbalanced by the fame and immense talent of the lead singer. Under McCartney’s contradictory, reckless and endlessly productive leadership, she mixed imperial rock grandeur with a home-grown spirit and a certain petrified insouciance. Wings was always meant to be a spin-off of the Beatles universe – but what a spin-off it was.