Past Times
TWO YEARS AFTER THE BEATLES’ BREAK-UP, PAUL McCARTNEY DECIDED TO WING IT WITH A NEW BAND. MARION McMULLEN RECALLS THEIR FLEDGLING TOURS 50 YEARS AGO
TAKE one global music star, his wife, their daughters, three dogs, a a band and crew and set them on the road.
That was how Sir Paul McCartney launched the first performances of his new band Wings 50 years ago this month. The former Beatle and his wife Linda left their London home in St John’s Wood back in 1972 for the first in a series of impromptu dates. The plan was for the group to simply turn up unannounced at universities across Britain and ask if they could play.
Their first date was a lunchtime concert before an audience of 400 at Nottingham University, followed by gigs at York, Hull, Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, Sheffield, Salford, Birmingham, Swansea and Oxford.
Entrance for the Nottingham concert cost 40p.
Audience numbers had doubled to 800 by the time Paul, Linda and fellow Wings bandmates guitarists Denny Laine and Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell reached Hull and admission prices had gone up to 50p.
Linda once said: “Paul persuaded me to join the band. I would never have had the courage otherwise. It was fun at the beginning. We were playing just for fun, with Paul’s group.”
Paul brought out his debut solo album simply called McCartney after leaving The Beatles in 1970.
It was recorded on his Scottish farm in Kintyre and featured the track Maybe I’m Amazed. Over the next 18 months, he gathered musicians to form a new band. Wings was the result.
The name of the group is said to have been inspired by the premature birth of Paul and Linda’s daughter Stella in 1971. She was delivered by an emergency caesarean section six weeks early weighing about 4lbs. Paul sat outside the operation room and prayed that she would be born “on the wings of an angel”.
Wings band member Denny Laine said he enjoyed the idea of going and playing the inpromptu live shows. He and Paul had first become friends when Laine was a member of The Moody Blues, who joined The Beatles on their second British tour. He said: “I went to a couple of sessions for the Sg Pepper album, we went to parties together, we went to see Jimi Hendrix together.”
An invitation to join Wings later followed and Denny said: “Paul knew I could sing, write and play, and so he rang me. It knocked me sideways a little because I wasn’t used to being a sidekick. That was the first time I’d been in a band with someone more famous than me.”
Paul said he had great memories of the university tour and told his official website: “We literally took off in a van up the M1, got to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, liked that name, ‘Great! Turn off here. But there wasn’t a gig, there was just a little village and nothing else. It was a signpost. Anyway we kept going until we got to Nottingham University and then it suddenly hit, ‘Ah, that’s it – let’s do universities.’”
The success of the backto-basics tour encouraged Paul to take Wings to a wider audience. The summer of 1972 saw the band heading to Europe in a converted opentopped double decker.
The upper level was furnished with cushions and throws so that they could relax between shows. The Wings Over Europe tour took them across the continent with concerts in France, West Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Hit singles like My Love, Live And Let Die, Jet and Let ‘Em In followed. The album Band On The Run won two Grammy awards and the group performed across the States in 1976 as part of their Wings Over America tour.
Their Christmas 1977 single Mull Of Kintyre also stayed at number one in the UK for nine weeks.
Live And Let Die became the theme tune of the 1977 James Bond film of the same name, which saw Roger Moore taking on the role of 007 for the first time.
After John Lennon was killed in 1980, Wings stopped touring and Paul became a solo artist once more. He would not perform live again until Live Aid in 1985.
He once said: “I used to think that all my Wings stuff was second rate stuff, but I began to meet younger kids, not kids from my Beatle generation, who would say: ‘We really love this song.’”