The Beatles learned how to be Beatles together. From 1963 to 1970, the group’s four members experienced an entirely new kind of fame, while leaning on each other to get through it. After splitting up, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to be an ex-Beatle? This one had to be confronted alone.
The heaviest burdens of expectation fell on the group’s main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also suffering from the emotional shock of an acrimonious personal split. Both of them leaned on their wives. As John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde art projects, Paul and Linda McCartney retreated with their children to their ramshackle Scottish farm, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep and tinkered with new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As she said later: “The whole thing started because Paul had nobody to play with. More than anything he wanted a friend near him.” The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received savage reviews, deepening his crisis of confidence.
McCartney yearned to play before audiences again, which he hadn’t since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. But he couldn’t face doing it solo, the spotlight trained on him alone. So he asked Linda to help him put together a new group. This authorised, illustrated oral history, edited by cultural historian Ted Widmer, tells the story of one of the most successful bands of the 1970s – and one of the strangest.
It’s based on interviews (given for a new documentary on the band) with McCartney and former band members, as well as archive material. Widmer does an expert job of stitching this into a compelling narrative that includes cultural context – like what else was in the charts at the time – and plenty of photographs, many previously unseen. The result is a portal into a more eccentric age of pop, a fable about the tension between celebrity and creativity, and a story with elements of Spinal Tap and Wacky Races.
The personnel of Wings varied over the decade around a core of Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues. The group did not soar effortlessly to high altitude because of McCartney’s fame. In fact, determined to remake himself after the Beatles, he waged a kind of guerrilla campaign against his own celebrity. In 1972, he said: “A year ago, I used to wake up in the morning and think, I’m Paul McCartney. I’m a myth. And it scared the hell out of me.” The first Wings album, Wild Life, released in 1971, was almost deliberately half-baked, and arrived to another round of jeers.
McCartney then instigated one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of rock and pop, packing the other members of Wings into a battered van, along with his children and his sheepdog Martha, and driving them on an unplanned tour of British universities. He would look at the map, identify the nearest university, find the student union, and ask an open-mouthed social secretary if they fancied a gig that evening.
For 50p, anyone who wanted could come and see Paul McCartney lead his new group through a ragged set of rock’n’roll covers, new Wings songs, and no Beatles songs. They stayed in grubby little hotels and bed and breakfasts, as if McCartney wanted to recreate the discomfit and squalor of his pre-fame tours with the Beatles. He said: “If we do it this way, the old-fashioned way from square one, there will come a day when we’ll be at square one hundred.”
He also wanted Wings to make its mistakes away from the scouring gaze of critics, conscious, in particular, that they would give his wife no quarter. Linda was struggling to learn keyboard and vocal parts, duties she had accepted reluctantly. Her unpolished but affecting singing voice, which blends beautifully with those of Paul and Laine, is now recognised as a crucial component of the Wings sound. But at the time she was bullied and abused for her presumption, a victim of the peculiarly intense vituperation reserved for Beatles’ wives.
McCartney, a more oddball artist than his reputation suggested, was a wayward decision-maker. His new group’s first two singles were a protest song (Give Ireland Back to the Irish) and a kids’ song (Mary Had a Little Lamb). He chose to record the band’s third album in Lagos, provoking two members of the group to quit. But despite getting mugged and having master tapes from the session stolen, the album Wings recorded there became the group’s most acclaimed and successful: Band on the Run.
By the middle of the decade, Wings had reached square one hundred. In cultural memory, they are inevitably overshadowed by the Beatles, obscuring just how popular they were. Wings had more US No 1s than anyone except the Bee Gees. The Wings Over the World stadium tour of 1975-76 was huge, making the band one of the top-grossing live acts of the 70s. We can now appreciate how many of their songs are, to use the technical term, bangers: Band on the Run, Jet, Let ’Em In, Live and Let Die, to name a few.
Wings Over the World was the zenith. After that things slowly subsided, commercially and musically, and the whole enterprise was more or less killed off in 1980 by McCartney’s attempt to take a large bag of cannabis into Japan, which landed him in prison and forced the cancellation of a tour. That was messy, but Wings was never neat. It had three different lead guitarists and four different drummers, and remained unbalanced by its lead singer’s outsize fame and talent. Under McCartney’s contrarian, impulsive, endlessly generative leadership, it blended imperial rock grandeur with a homemade ethos and a certain stoned nonchalance. Wings was always bound to be a spin-off from the Beatles universe – but what a spin-off it was.
• Ian Leslie is the author of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Faber). Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney is published by Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
