HELEN WHEELS IS THE NAME OF MY LAND ROVER. SHE WAS just a little Land Rover when I bought her in Scotland. I needed something to get around all that rugged countryside. The four-wheel drive made her perfect for going up and down steep hills.

I’d always wanted to do a road song, but all the ones we knew were American – ‘Take It Easy,’ ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ ‘Route 66’ above all. I loved the versions by both Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry. Wings were playing live a lot at this point. In fact, the year before, we’d been touring around Europe in an open-top double-decker bus. In the summer of 1973, when I was writing songs for what would become the Band on the Run album, Wings had been travelling all over the UK on tour, which probably also influenced this song.

What’s interesting about ‘Route 66’, as my wife Nancy and I discovered about ten years ago, is that the place-names in the song are actually in the correct order. We used the song as a map of sorts.

There’s a humorous aspect built into the very idea of a UK road song. Because the US is three thousand miles across, it allows for some latitude, whereas you could almost spit across the UK. So you need a longer journey. As luck would have it, I had an eight-or-nine-hour journey from Scotland to London. It’s a journey I used to make a lot, in both directions.

From London it took four hours to get to Liverpool. We would sometimes stop over in Liverpool to break up the trip. Another four or five hours up to Glasgow, then turn left. Starting in Scotland, it was always fun to go south through Cumbria, particularly in daylight. Kendal is in the Lake District, but the ‘Kendal freeway’ is meant to be a joke because Kendal is a total bottleneck, as anyone who’s tried to drive through it will confirm.

With Mary and Helen Wheels. Scotland, 1970

We used to have a roadie, called Mal, who claimed he liked that moment on any journey when there were still two hundred miles to go. The lines ‘M6 south down to Liverpool / Where they play the West Coast sound’ are meant to be an amusing reference to the interaction of The Beach Boys and The Beatles. ‘Sailor Sam’ represents another form of interweaving. With ‘Sailor Sam’ I was initially just wanting a rhyme for Birmingham, and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute; Sailor Sam’s in “Band on the Run”.’ He makes a little guest appearance here, a cameo as in a film. And then I put the lid on it by saying Sailor Sam ‘never will be found’. That seals the deal with the ‘Band on the Run’ overlap. Intertextuality, as they call it in posh circles. The songs are talking to each other.

The conversations are transatlantic. ‘Spend the day upon the motorway / Where the carburettors blast / Slow down driver, wanna stay alive / I want to make this journey last’. The carburettor comes indirectly from Chuck Berry, who pioneered what you might call the ‘erotics’ of the automobile, particularly in ‘No Particular Place to Go’. I suppose what I’m saying is that, for some people, ‘carburettor’ isn’t a word they’d expect to find in a song. It’s a nice word, though, isn’t it? Car-bur-ett-or. I’m not particularly mechanical, so it’s probably the only part of an engine I’ve ever heard of! And it has the English ‘car’ in it.

In any case, the idea of doing an English road song was challenging but rewarding. I like the idea that a song like this still has legs. And I actually still have Helen Wheels. She’s still running. They’re built to last, those things.