Paul McCartney & Wings
Reissues
Some reissues are so goddamn deluxe that they overshadow the artefact, like hand-painting and sticking sparklers in a turd. It’s a risk McCartney takes here, slavering the unloved first two Wings albums in gorgeous boxes stuffed with photo albums, coffee-table books, session note pads and his sketches for unaired, semi-animated TV specials. Surely the plushest packages imaginable, until they start flogging Liberace reissues inside diamond pianos.
On revisit, though, these are records overdue re-evaluation away from The Beatles’ supernova glare. 1971’s Wild Life
(6/10), recorded in a week, shares the home-made, throwaway feel of McCartney, particularly on the half-written rock’n’roll gibberish of Mumbo and Bip Bop, his shrugged response to T.Rex. The zoo blues title track is tiresome too, but the cod-Afrobeat Love Is Strange is strangely lovable, Some People Never Know pleasingly recalls Here, There And Everywhere and Tomorrow is a jaunty echo of Your Mother Should Know. Infant infiltrated home demos of fun ditties like Hey Diddle and banned politico-reggae debut single Give Ireland Back To The Irish add meat to a package that feels like McCartney’s tentative practice run at a second band. 1973’s Red Rose Speedway
(7/10), though still patchy, better emulated The Beatles’ juggling act of classic and cutting-edge. Stones rockers, 1950s throwbacks and lush, orchestrated easy listeners like My Love rub up against glam and Floyd psych as the expanded Wings ramp up their MOR gloss and plot Band On The Run’s break-out. Completist catnip is a tiring reimagining of the originally intended double album – a flimsy record bloated with Elvis and Who pastiches and yet more unnecessary reggae – and the unreleased 1882, a noir Rocky Raccoon about a boy executed for stealing bread for his dying mother. It’s one of the nuggets of joy buried in packages gilding a tarnished era.
Mark Beaumont