On 16 April 1973, America’s ABC TV network broadcast a one-hour special entitled James Paul McCartney. Its aim was to restore a public image dented by two recent drugs-busts, two singles that had been the subject of broadcasting bans and a third that many radio stations had refused to play; it also acted as a substitute for a getting-to-know-Wings tour. Unimpressed that Paul’s Scottish drug offence had been adjudged merely technical, the US Immigration Service had revoked his visa.
The special’s British makers were Associated Television, the same organisation which had bought up Lennon and McCartney’s back catalogue with Northern Songs four years earlier. As much as Paul might hanker for an hour’s prime-time exposure on ATV’s national network and syndication to American ABC, the company’s chairman, now Sir Lew Grade, was ordinarily the last person for whom he’d want to work.
That he did so now was a result of his determination to make Linda his musical equal. Although he and John had lost the copyrights in their entire Beatles oeuvre, Northern Songs continued to have them under exclusive contract as composers and to expect further Lennon–McCartney works yielding the same rich rewards as in the past. Instead, Paul was providing songs credited jointly to Linda and himself, of which Northern could therefore claim only 50 per cent.
The result was a lawsuit from Northern’s US subsidiary Maclen, claiming back $1 million in royalties. Maclen (i.e. McCartney–Lennon) had originally been set up as a conduit for Paul’s music with John; he was thus being sued by a company bearing half his own surname. In the wake of his High Court victory, more tortuous litigation threatened, with an outcome by no means as assured. Then Sir Lew, that consummate deal-maker, offered a solution: he’d drop the lawsuit if Paul would make the TV special (and also write theme music for an ATV drama series, The Zoo Gang).
As part of the peace settlement, Paul’s company, McCartney Music, entered into a seven-year co-publishing agreement with ATV Music for the songs he wrote with Linda. In return, a number of his post-Beatles song-copyrights, which had automatically gone to Northern Songs, would revert to McCartney Music at the expiry of the agreement in 1980.
Normally in television specials dedicated to a single entertainer, the star brings on guests to share duets or take part in comedy sketches. But James Paul McCartney dispensed with this formula: the whole hour was purely Paul, assisted by Linda and Wings, in film- and studio-sequences aimed at pleasing absolutely everyone.
So here he was with Wings playing ‘Big Barn Bed’ in front of a bank of TV monitors, then by himself perched on a stool, stroking a left-hand guitar and humming ‘Blackbird’ as Linda knelt in front of him with her camera, adding the occasional diffident harmony. Here he was now out of doors, defiantly reprising ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with Wings, a largeish flock of sheep nudging his piano and Linda in a Victorian gown and picture-hat, seated on a swing and playing a tambourine.
Here he was now indoors again, playing ‘My Love’ from Red Rose Speedway, another ode to Linda, like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, so far beyond his usual Wingspan that the dream-voices which had whispered ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ into his ear might have returned.
In an early example of pop video, here was ‘Uncle Albert’ (minus the ‘Admiral Halsey’ section) with Paul as a mustachioed business executive, attended by Linda as a bespectacled PA, ringing up a whole harem of Uncle Alberts. Cut to a tribute to his roots: a filmed sequence of Liverpool docks and terraced streets and a pub reunion of the extensive McCartney clan with Paul leading a sing-song of old favourites–his no less than theirs–like ‘April Showers’ and ‘California Here I Come’. Here were the show’s only guest stars, his dad and his two favourite aunts, Gin and Millie.
‘Are there any celebrities here?’ another aunt asked him, showing how in Liverpool even the biggest star can never feel too big-headed.
‘Gerry Marsden’s here,’ Paul answered without a blink.
Next came a big-production pastiche of a 1930s Hollywood musical with Paul, mustachioed again, leading a Busby Berkeley tap-routine in a pink tail suit; a CinemaScope version of ‘Your Mother Should Know’ in Magical Mystery Tour. ‘Learn to tap-dance’ had been advice given to the Beatles, and most Sixties pop names, as insurance against the day when their music blew over, but no one else had followed it so diligently.
Nineteen-thirties camp gave way to scenes from the new James Bond film, Live and Let Die, and Wings performing its title song with special effects untroubled by any health and safety considerations. At the end, Paul’s grand piano was made to explode, with the unforeseen result of knocking guitarist Henry McCullough flat on his back and raining chips of blazing wood on the studio audience.
Only one part of the extravaganza featured songs from the Beatles years. A selection of ordinary Britons in the street, shoppers, van-drivers, mums with small children and the like, sang half-remembered, mostly out-of-tune versions of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. It proved their universality but also belittled them, relegating them to the same pub-singalong past as ‘April Showers’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
The reviews were worse than for any of Paul’s solo albums to date. Melody Maker voiced a general sentiment in calling the special ‘overblown and silly’. The most extreme hatchet-job appeared in New York Sunday News under the byline of Lillian Roxon, who’d once been a close friend of Linda’s but felt she’d been dropped when Paul came along. Roxon particularly hated the pub-singalong sequence, which Linda hadn’t wanted Paul to do, and in which she’d certainly looked ill-at-ease among the pints of ale and overloaded ashtrays. The Roxon review portrayed Paul in the bosom of his family as ‘sweaty, pudgy and slack-mouthed’ and Linda as ‘catatonic with horror at having to mingle with ordinary people… disdainful if not downright bored… her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw… incredibly cold and arrogant’.
In May, Paul took Wings on their first UK tour, to promote the Red Rose Speedway album and the single ‘Live and Let Die’ (not included on it) which was to be released to coincide with the Bond film’s London premiere. On the tour, as on the album, their billing now became ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’, in case anyone out there still didn’t get who their front man was.
Everything possible was done to kill any Beatle echoes and suggest the cutting-edge of contemporary rock. Before setting out, Wings made a one-off appearance at London’s trendiest new venue, the Hard Rock Cafe, in aid of the drugs charity Release. There Paul saw a young band named Brinsley Schwarz, who’d weathered an over-hyped launch to reveal genuine talent, notably in vocalist Nick Lowe. Realising how they would enhance the image he wanted for Wings, he hired them as a support act.
The tour was Britain’s first close look at the woman who’d presumed to take John Lennon’s place. At that time, females in rock bands were still a rarity, female keyboard-players still more so, and wives playing in their husband’s bands totally unknown. No one who saw Linda onstage with Wings doubted she was there under the falsest of pretences and at her own egotistical insistence. And unfortunately her quiet, oblique charm failed to work outside a radius of about three feet. Although Paul introduced her to audiences in homey style as ‘Our Lin’, she came across as aloof, unsmiling, even resentful at having to share him with so many others.
Everywhere Wings went, she was criticised and mocked with a bile that once had been reserved for Yoko Ono. Pop reviewers–in these days largely male and unfettered by feminism–poured scorn on her wispy vocals and the careful way her limitations as a keyboard-player were camouflaged by Wings’ real musicians.
Like Paul, she now sported the ubiquitous early-Seventies ‘mullet’ hairstyle of spiky topknot and long, dangly bits at the back. Added to her blonde hair, high forehead and prominent cheekbones, it gave her somewhat the look of David Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. Glam Rock ethos was outraged by her fondness for lumpy quilted jackets and Argyll socks in unmatching tartans, and her admission that she didn’t shave her legs or armpits. A cruel chauvinistic riddle went around: ‘What do you call a dog with Wings? Linda McCartney.’
In her rare interviews, she was far from ‘cold and arrogant’, but disarmingly honest about her musical shortcomings. ‘I think [the criticism] was justified. I didn’t have any training and I was still learning piano when we started. Now I do know chords and I have a feel for music and I really love it, so I don’t think they’ll get me so much.’ Some hopes.
On 18 May, Wings reached Liverpool and played a sold-out show at the Empire Theatre. By now, the city’s once-booming docks had grown deathly quiet, great transatlantic liners no longer glided up the Mersey (bringing American rock ‘n’ roll among their cargoes) and Jim McCartney’s beloved cotton trade had all but unravelled in the face of cut-price competition from the Far East.
The Cavern club, where Paul had sweated out his musical apprenticeship, was scheduled to close down a few days after his Empire show. The dank vault, on whose matchwood stage pure magic had been born, would then be bulldozed as part of construction work on the new Merseyrail metro system. Although many of its old habitués protested (Paul not among them), there was no effort to save what in years to come would have been a precious-beyond-price heritage site. Liverpool seemed to be suffering the same amnesia about the Beatles as did the Beatles themselves.
But if Paul could dismiss them from his thoughts, the rest of the world had more trouble doing so. It was the reason why, after three years and a string of hit singles and albums, his solo career still wasn’t regarded as a success. Too many people were waiting for him to see sense and get back with John, George and Ringo. They little guessed that he himself still remained unsure he’d done the right thing in going it alone.
Publicly, he took every opportunity to stress what a weight off his mind–and soul–the Beatles’ break-up had been. ‘I take life much more simply,’ he told a Leicester radio station during the UK tour. ‘I wake up each morning and I think “Ah, I’m alive. Great! What do we do today?”’
Behind the chirpy smile and unruffled tone was a self-confessed ‘born worrier’ who more usually woke up feeling ‘a ten-ton weight’ on his shoulders because Wings still hadn’t reached the level of musicianship nor received the critical recognition he wanted. It scarcely counted with him that ‘Live and Let Die’ had become the most successful Bond theme to date, spending two weeks at number one in the Billboard chart. Nor that Red Rose Speedway had reached number one in the US and five in Britain and ‘My Love’ been hailed as an instant classic. He now hated everything he’d done on the album, believing he’d been trying too hard. Even Linda, usually the staunch defender of every note he sang and played, thought it ‘a non-confident record’.
The very fecundity of his talent brought nagging insecurity. What if he should wake up one morning and find his extraordinary facility with music and words had flown away in the night? As insurance against that awful day, he constantly worked the incomprehensible mechanism in his head, never passing a piano without sitting down and trying out yet another idea.
During a pre-tour holiday with Linda and the children in Montego Bay, Jamaica, he’d hung out with the Hollywood stars Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen, who were on location filming Papillon. One evening, Hoffman challenged him to come up with a song there and then about the recent demise of Pablo Picasso, whose dying words had reportedly been an exhortation to drink to his health. As a result, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ (a country number, of all things) was waiting to be used somewhere.
Wings were due to make a new album in the late summer (just as the Beatles used to) to catch the Christmas market. Feeling he’d exhausted the possibilities of British and American studios, Paul decided to make it in some more interesting, out-of-the-way place and asked EMI for a list of their recording facilities around the world. It turned out that they had one in Nigeria’s capital, Lagos. He booked Wings in there for most of September, visualising ‘gorgeous African music, African culture… lie on the beach all day, then breeze into the studio to record’.
Rehearsals took place throughout August in Scotland, where Wings had begun, though now in surroundings more spacious than Rude Studio. Paul had recently purchased nearby Low Ranachan Farm from its retiring owner, Archie Revie, so adding to the seclusion of High Park Farm as well as its very basic amenities. Low Ranachan had a large barn where the band could rehearse–hence ‘Big Barn Bed’–and a grey stone cottage where they could live. It was just over the hill from High Park, so Paul and Linda could come to rehearsals on horseback.
The Wings crèche was about to expand still further. Following their European tour, Denny Laine had married the 20-year-old ‘supergroupie’ Jo Jo La Patrie, who was now pregnant and installed in the cottage at Low Ranachan. The baby was due to arrive at around the time Wings departed for Nigeria, but Denny still intended to go with them.
The Low Ranachan barn sessions began on an optimistic note. ‘Paul had written some great new songs for the album,’ drummer Denny Seiwell recalls, ‘and we were sounding really tight as a band.’
But tensions soon developed between Paul and lead guitarist Henry McCullough. The bony Ulsterman was the most wayward member of the line-up, the only one besides Paul to have been busted for drug-possession, in his case while touring Canada with the Animals. A more immediate problem was his heavy drinking and the embarrassing scenes to which it could lead. At the McCartney family reunion shown in James Paul McCartney, he’d had a boozy altercation with his girlfriend, Sheila, then spent the rest of the night wandering the Liverpool streets barefoot in a rhinestone-studded jacket. And during a performance of ‘My Love’ on BBC1’s Top of the Pops show, he’d spoiled the rhapsodic mood by throwing up.
For some time, McCullough had been chafing at the way Wings’ much-touted family atmosphere could be broken at any time by some authoritarian gesture from Paul. After a one-off guest appearance at a London club with jazz singer Carol Grimes, he’d been carpeted and tersely informed that Wings members played only with Wings. One week, he opened his (still) £70 pay packet to find that £40 had been deducted, without consultation or warning, for the hire of an extra amplifier.
But the real bone of contention was Paul’s insistence that all Wings’ guitar breaks must be meticulously planned in advance while McCullough, still a bluesman at heart, played his best when improvising. On the ‘My Love’ session, for example, he’d departed from the script to extemporise one of the great slow rock solos. Paul couldn’t help but pardon him then, but made it clear that he shouldn’t make a habit of it.
The final breaking-point came two weeks before the band’s departure to Nigeria. ‘We were in the barn,’ Denny Seiwell remembers. ‘Paul wanted Henry to play something a certain way, and Henry didn’t want to do it. Both of them were just having a real bad day.’ Finally, there was an angry exchange which ended with Paul storming out, mounting his horse and riding home. Realising it was the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of being left alone with a loaded revolver, McCullough got in his car and drove away, never to return.
Seiwell, too, had grown unhappy about the way Paul ran Wings, in particular his apparent reluctance to divvy up the proceeds of their recording and performing successes. ‘At the start, it was understood that we’d all be part-owners of the band, and share in its rewards, but there was never a contract. It was all done on a handshake–on trust.’
Yet after two years, Seiwell was receiving the same flat salary of £70 per week when, as a top New York session-drummer, he used to earn $2000. ‘The European tour had sold out every night, but Paul said he’d still lost money on it. Things had gotten so bad with me financially that to pay off my American Express card, I’d have to go back to New York and do a few quick sessions.’
For his £70, he was expected to be on call 24 hours a day and do whatever was asked of him, however loosely music-related. During the European tour, Paul had simultaneously been working on a film about a cartoon character named Bruce McMouse who lived under Wings’ stage and interacted with them like Jerry from Tom and Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh. The human characters were filmed first at Elstree Studios, with the cartoon one superimposed afterwards. Hence the tough 6’ 2” Seiwell was required to converse with an imaginary talking mouse on his outstretched hand.
He also felt that Paul should not have let a talented guitarist like Henry McCullough go so readily. ‘The band’s musicianship really deteriorated after Henry left. Denny Laine was an okay guitarist, but nowhere near the same league. And without him, it was going to be that much harder to hide Linda’s mistakes.’
A few days before the band’s scheduled departure to Lagos, Jo Jo Laine gave birth to a son, to whom she and his father also gave the Christian name Laine. ‘I heard from Denny that when the baby was born, Paul and Linda hadn’t sent flowers or even a card. That got to me for some reason,’ Seiwell recalls, ‘and the night before we were to leave for Africa, I phoned Paul and told him I was quitting.’
This eleventh-hour loss of two key sidemen would have made most people call off the Nigeria venture, or postpone it until suitable replacements could be found. Denny Laine–still on for the trip despite his newborn son–thought it a fatal blow. ‘They were both such brilliant musicians. And Henry’s Irish sense of humour and Denny’s New York one made such a great combination. They were my kind of people.’
But Paul decided to go ahead anyway, if nothing else to show the defectors they weren’t as important as they believed. ‘I thought “Screw you”,’ he would remember. ‘“I’ll make an album you’ll wish you’d been on.”’
So a severely clipped Wings consisting of Paul, Linda and Denny Laine, plus the McCartneys’ three children, departed for Lagos on 29 August. At the airport, Laine half-expected Denny Seiwell to have had second thoughts and be waiting to rejoin them, but he hadn’t and wasn’t.
Nowadays many Western rock bands go to Africa to make albums but in 1973 Paul was a pioneer. And, as with many pioneers, what he found was not what he’d expected. He’d visualised Nigeria in terms of ‘gorgeous African music [and] African culture’, a riot of sound and colour that would make Glam Rock seem drab by comparison. He hadn’t visualised arriving as a VIP observer on the aircraft’s flight deck and realising that neither the pilot nor co-pilot seemed able to find the runway of Lagos airport among the misty tracts of jungle beneath. He hadn’t expected it to be monsoon season, when every afternoon brought ferocious rainstorms in drops the size of wet crowbars.
Nor had his concept of ‘African culture’ included the repressive military regime of President Yakubu (‘Jack’) Gowon, which membership of the British Commonwealth did little to restrain. It was only three years since Gowon had ruthlessly crushed the country’s would-be breakaway state of Biafra, causing a million deaths from genocide and famine–and providing one of John’s reasons for returning his MBE decoration to the Queen.
Also in the Wings party was Geoff Emerick, the Abbey Road sound-engineer who’d worked with the Beatles almost throughout their recording career and whom Paul had hired to sort out possible technical glitches in the month of recording ahead. For the quiet, suburban Emerick, downtown Lagos came as a stupefying culture shock. As the group’s minibus wove through nightmare traffic, Denny Laine reported seeing a man knocked off his bicycle and apparently killed, all without the slightest reaction from passers-by. Noticing quantities of white-sheeted figures among the crowds, Emerick asked the bus-driver who they were. ‘Lepers,’ came the casual reply.
EMI’s studio was located in Wharf Road in the port area of Apapa, facing the Atlantic, a link with Liverpool in more ways than one. Paul’s uncle Will Stapleton–the only member of his family thus far to do time in prison–had been serving on a merchant ship called the SS Apapa, bound for West Africa, when he’d pilfered £500 from a cargo of banknotes, and had come ashore in Lagos to spend some of the loot.
Paul’s instinct about bringing along Geoff Emerick was one he soon had cause to bless. The studio possessed only the most basic taping and mixing equipment and had no soundproof recording booths. An adjacent lean-to served as a record-pressing plant, whose operatives currently worked ankle-deep in rainwater.
Emerick set to work on making the control desk fit for purpose while Paul charmed the studio manager and tape-operator–whose names turned out to be Innocent and Monday–and persuaded them to bring in carpenters to build soundproof cubicles. When their labours seemed to be flagging, he picked up a hammer and joined in himself.
The trio then began laying down the tracks that had been rehearsed by a quintet at Low Ranachan–Denny Laine on guitar, Linda on keyboards, Paul on bass, drums and everything else. The atmosphere, Laine recalls, wasn’t that of a band but of two producer-musicians putting an album together. Paul never mentioned Henry McCullough or Denny Seiwell, and Laine surmised that he shouldn’t either.
They stayed in the upmarket suburb of Ikeja, occupying two rented villas–Paul and family in one, Laine and Emerick sharing the other–on a private estate with walls and round-the-clock security. Heather, Mary and little Stella quickly adapted to their new surroundings, catching multicoloured, befrilled lizards in the exotic garden, giving them names and keeping them as pets like the lambs at home in Kintyre.
Not so poor Geoff Emerick, who was terrified by the outsize spiders and other creepy-crawlies that shared his living quarters. Fun-loving Denny took pleasure in collecting the largest, least attractive specimens killed during the day and leaving them on his housemate’s pillow like hairier versions of the bedtime mints distributed by luxury hotels. Unable to stand this rock ‘n’ roll prankishness any longer, Emerick moved into a local hotel, whose cockroaches proved hardly less intimidating.
Ikeja’s many hangovers from British rule included a country club where Paul took out a membership so that they could all use the pool and relax between recording sessions. One pleasant discovery among the many unnerving ones was that no one objected even to the most overt smoking of marijuana.
Every expat they met stressed the need for perpetual vigilance in what was one of Africa’s most impoverished and crime-ridden cities and cautioned against going anywhere on foot after sunset, even in the protected environment in which they were staying. Thinking this couldn’t possibly apply to the short distance between the two villas, Paul and Linda decided to walk back to theirs one evening after a discussion of the day’s work at Denny and Emerick’s.
They had gone only a few yards when a car pulled up beside them and the driver called out, ‘Are you travellers?’ Mistaking it for the offer of a lift, Paul politely replied that they were all right, thanks. The car moved ahead, then stopped and five men got out, including ‘a little squat one’ holding a knife.
Linda, as always, put herself in harm’s way to protect Paul, shielding him from the knifeman and screaming, ‘Leave him alone! He’s a musician!’ Paul handed over the bag he was carrying, exercised his charm to the utmost, and the gang allowed them to go on their way. ‘Later, the people at the studio told us how lucky we’d been,’ he was to recall. ‘In Nigeria, robbery carried a death sentence, so thieves often killed their victims to stop themselves being identified. If we’d have been locals, we would have had it.’
The stolen bag contained lyric-sheets and cassette demos of album tracks rehearsed in Scotland that he’d intended to use as guides to the made-in-Africa finished versions. However, during his early songwriting days with John, he’d acquired the habit of memorising everything he wrote, both words and arrangements, so the loss was delaying but not disastrous.
Between visits to street markets with the children and looning around palm trees for Linda’s camera, he worked his two-person band relentlessly inside the rickety studio on Wharf Road. At times, the opening words of what would be his title track seemed only too apposite: ‘Stuck inside these four walls… sent inside for ever… if we ever get out of here’. And, at regular intervals, ‘the rain exploded with a mighty crash’.
One day, in mid-vocal, he suddenly turned pale and began to gasp for breath. Stumbling outside for air, he received the full blast of African midday heat and collapsed unconscious into Linda’s arms. ‘I laid him on the ground,’ she later recalled. ‘I thought he was dead.’ Rushed to hospital in the studio manager’s car, he was found only to have suffered a ‘bronchial spasm’ due to excessive smoking of the conventional sort.
Nigeria’s own pop music in 1973 was teemingly creative, though as yet little known outside the African continent. Its pre-eminent figure, Fela Ransome Kuti, combined the role of performer, composer and broadcaster with that of political activist and fierce opponent of the Gowon regime. He had lately exchanged his ‘slave-name’ Ransome for Anikulapo (‘he who carries death in his pouch’) and declared the commune of musicians and followers he’d founded in central Lagos an independent republic named Kalakuta.
Kuti also operated Lagos’s foremost music club, the Shrine, where he appeared with his band, Africa 70. Paul persuaded Linda and Denny Laine to accompany him to the Shrine, expecting to be feted the way he was in clubs everywhere. Instead, some of the house musicians began questioning him with a palpable lack of hero-worship about the Wharf Road recording sessions. The next day, Kuti went on the radio to accuse him of ‘stealing’ Nigerian music and culture.
The situation was potentially every bit as unpleasant as that encounter with the five muggers. Paul’s typically diplomatic solution was to invite Kuti to the studio to listen to what Wings had in the can so far. After doing so, ‘He who carries death in his pouch’ conceded there was no trace of stolen Nigerian culture.
An equally tricky musical encounter was with Ginger Baker, formerly drummer with Cream–and rock’s most famous ‘wild man’–who’d emigrated to Nigeria and set up a recording studio in partnership with Fela Kuti. Denny Laine had once played with Ginger Baker’s band, Air Force, and Jo Jo Laine had also crossed his path, leading him to observe later that ‘no sane man would ever go near her’.
Baker was known to be deeply offended because Wings weren’t using his ARC studio. To forestall possible trouble (which with him tended to take extreme physical forms), Paul agreed to record one track, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, at ARC. The passing of the twentieth century’s greatest artist was thus commemorated in hillbilly style as the monsoon lashed the roof and a red-bearded drummer, famous for launching sticks like guided missiles, provided the softest percussion of his life with a can full of pebbles.
The McCartneys said goodbye to their Nigerian colleagues and friends by hosting a beach barbecue–still no sign of militant vegetarianism–then returned to London to finish off the album at George Martin’s AIR studios with orchestral arrangements by Tony Visconti. Waiting for Paul at Cavendish was a letter from EMI’s group director, Len Wood, saying that on no account should he think of going to Lagos because of an outbreak of cholera.
His idea of himself and Linda as refugees or escapees crystallised in the album’s title, Band on the Run. One could argue that actually two-thirds of the band had gone on the run from them. However, they had indubitably broken out of the confines of normal recording and made a courageous journey through unfriendly territory with disaster often snapping, bloodhound-like, at their heels.
And despite all the problems and technical limitations, the end result was the one Paul had sought. In Lagos, he’d found a new style for Wings that put his transition from the Sixties to the Seventies beyond any doubt. The album’s title track and the one that followed it, ‘Jet’, both had a sound big, glossy and grandiose enough for the Glam Rock era, perfect to be performed in giant arenas, set off by video-screens and flashing lights as seas of punching forearms kept time.
His overall aim seemed to be a concept album like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where the Beatles had adopted musical alter egos whose recital unfolded an epic saga. Band on the Run’s cover had a feel of Pepper’s with its role-playing principals and supporting cast of camp icons. Paul, Linda and Denny Laine were shown in convict garb, caught in a prison spotlight together with six celebrity co-escapees: chat show host Michael Parkinson, singer Kenny Lynch, Liverpool boxer John Conteh, movie actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, and chef and Liberal MP Clement Freud.
In reality, Band on the Run was no Sgt. Pepper for the Seventies. The title song seemed to start telling a story, but soon dissolved into cartoony surrealism, its ‘Jailer Man’ joining forces with a ‘Sailor Sam’ evidently left on the beach since ‘Yellow Submarine’. The remainder consisted of snapshots from Paul’s home life, not one mentioning a band or a need to escape.
‘Jet’, despite having all the drive and euphoria of a mass jailbreak, was simply the name of his Labrador dog. ‘Let Me Roll It’ was a send-up of, or homage to, John and the Plastic Ono Band. ‘Mamunia’ commemorated the grand hotel in Marrakesh where Lord Grade had offered the deal leading to the James Paul McCartney TV special. ‘No Words’ was the first song Denny Laine had written for Wings, though (shades of Lennon–McCartney!) he’d needed Paul to help him finish it. ‘Helen Wheels’, i.e. Hell on wheels, was what Paul called his Land Rover in Scotland.
In another nod to Sgt. Pepper, overture numbers were reprised in softer, nostalgic versions at the end, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ morphing from country song to dramatic orchestral piece, then French radio broadcast and finally pub sing-song. Keeping faith with Fela Kuti to the last, there was not the smallest murmur of Nigeria.
Band on the Run was released in December 1973, to reviews as ecstatic as those of Paul’s previous albums’ had been dismissive. All the major rock critics who’d previously considered him a spent force now competed to praise him to the skies. Those who’d poured most scorn on his musical partnership with Linda were most vocal in applauding and empathising with it. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau described it as ‘a carefully composed, intricately designed personal statement that will make it impossible to classify McCartney as a mere stylist again’.
Best of all was the comparison with the two fellow Beatles whose solo work had up to then been rated far above Paul’s. Indeed, the qualities usually cited as marks of his inferiority were the very ones singled out by Landau for special praise–his ‘healthy propensity for playfulness and nonsense’, as against John’s and George’s ‘high-minded and overbearing seriousness’.
Paradoxically, the album made a slower chart ascent than any of its predecessors, taking seven months to reach number one in the UK–but then staying in the charts for 124 weeks. In America it reached number one on three separate occasions, eventually going triple platinum. It would be the best-selling album in Britain in 1974 and by the end of that year would have sold six million copies worldwide. The two singles taken from it also became hits, ‘Band on the Run’ reaching number one in the US and selling a million while ‘Jet’ peaked at seven both there and in the UK.
So, after three years of work, worry and self-doubt, Paul finally had everything he wanted. And did it satisfy him?