Paul McCartney’s memoir of his immediate post-Beatles years, Wings: The Story Of a Band On the Run is out this week and over the weekend the Guardian ran an exclusive extract.
The portion they went with focuses on the earliest days of his solo career, from autumn 1969. That September, John Lennon had told the other Beatles that he was leaving the group, but all four had agreed to keep their demise a secret for the time being. McCartney was in limbo.
Exhausted by the business and legal wrangling that had driven a wedge between him and his friends, and still at the bargaining stage of his own grief at the Beatles split, he and his new wife Linda retreated to the Scottish farmhouse he had bought in 1966.
More than anything, he needed time and space to think. “When I think back on it, the isolation was just what we needed,” McCartney writes. “Despite the harsh conditions, the Scottish setting gave me the time to create.”
This entailed learning how to shear sheep and how to make a table, but also being Paul McCartney, he started recording. “So I got the four-track machine in the house and just started doing bits and pieces. I would sit around the house with a guitar. From that, I started writing; just making instrumental pieces.
"It’s something I still like to do to this day. That was how it started: just me in the living room at home, with the machine. I wasn’t trying to aim for popular success. I was just doing this because it was fun… It meant I hadn’t given up. It was some kind of continuum.”
These were the songs that would end up on McCartney, the solo album that would be released the following April. “I didn’t really think it was going to be an album. It was just me recording for the sake of it. I’d get up and think about breakfast and then wander into the living room to do a track.
"The spirit of the times was, do it yourself, keep it simple, don’t get overblown. You’ve done the Beatles, you’ve done A Day in the Life, you’ve done Sgt Pepper. Now come back to basics.”
The standout on the album is, of course, Maybe I’m Amazed; one of McCartney’s greatest love songs and one that highlights the role Linda played in helping her husband recover from his heartbreak at the Beatles’ split. “I was trying to put into words how it felt to be a young married person starting a life with this lovely girl, who I didn’t really know yet, but I was getting to know her. So there was a feeling of nervousness. Maybe I’m afraid of this thing? Which is true. The whole thing is scary when you fall in love with someone. There’s two sides. Yeah, it’s blissful. But then there’s also this scary side.”
“(I) played the piano, drums, and the guitar solo, bass. Then we did some harmonies, and Linda was very good. We used to do that for fun around the house… We’d split off into these two parts. We’d work out how to do it. So Maybe I’m Amazed was me being amazed and afraid at the same time of being a grownup in a marriage for the first time ever.”
Wings: The Story Of a Band On the Run is published this coming Thursday (November 6).
