by Tom Doyle
Though hurt, McCartney, as ever, ploughed on. Toying with band names ranging from the half-decent (Turpentine) to the dreadful (The Dazzlers), the trading name of the new group was to come to Paul in a moment of acute panic provoked by life-or-death crisis.
In mid-September, Linda went into labour and was taken to King’s College Hospital in Southwark. Upon examination, it was revealed that there was a likely complication to the birth: she was suffering from placenta previa, a condition where tissue covers or part-covers the uterus, restricting delivery and causing heavy bleeding.
The decision was made by the doctors to perform an emergency Caesarean section. Hurried into a waiting-room, Paul, in his green surgical gown, suddenly found himself alone, ‘praying like mad’, for his wife and unborn child. Into his racing thoughts came an image of an angel’s wings, striking him with its simple, calming beauty.
The drama over, the McCartneys found themselves with a second natural daughter, Stella Nina, and a name for their new band: Wings.
For the next two months, the newly extended family disappeared to Scotland. As soon as October, however, the music press was announcing the name of the new band and reporting that they were rehearsing on the farm for upcoming live dates.
On 7 November, the McCartneys came out of hiding, reportedly wasting no unnecessary costs by travelling second-class on the train from Scotland to London in preparation for the following night’s launch of Wings and their album, Wild Life. Re-engaging with the music industry, Paul and Linda had decided to throw a party at the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square.
Indicating just how big a deal the bash was for the McCartneys, Paul had handwritten every one of the 800 invitations. In some ways, though, the party served to highlight how far removed the couple now were from hip London. Along with an incongruous raffle, the assembled guests – including Elton John and members of Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Faces – were entertained by former Cavern owner Ray McFall’s jazz band and a kitsch turn by Frank and Peggy Spencer’s ballroom dancing team. Then the guests were plied with food and drink as Wild Life pumped out of the club’s speakers.
The four members of the newly minted Wings grouped together for photographs: the moustachioed Seiwell looking 1970s-suave in grey suit and black turtleneck; Laine skinny in a retina-scorching red jacket; Linda hiding her post-pregnancy curves in a roomy dress adorned with white doves; and Paul, a touch bizarrely, in a wide-lapelled checked suit with rough white stitching. It turned out that when he had gone to pick the suit up from his tailor that morning, he’d been told that, sorry, it wasn’t ready.
‘Maybe not, but it’s a look,’ Paul replied, before deciding to wear the two-piece exactly as it was. All evening, puzzled members of London’s in-crowd came up to him to point out that his suit wasn’t finished. To this he would beamingly respond, ‘Yeah, I know. Great, huh?’
A reporter from Melody Maker asked the McCartneys why they’d chosen to launch the band on a Monday night in Leicester Square.
‘Why not?’ Paul responded, with typical elusive cheerfulness.
‘We thought it would be a nice idea,’ said Linda, making it sound like an office do, ‘to invite a whole lot of our friends to a big party where they could bring their wives.’
‘EMI are paying for it,’ Paul pointed out, unwittingly revealing that under no circumstances would he have shelled out from his own pocket for this kind of shindig.
The party did the trick, though, in heralding the arrival of the new band. Five days later, the first shot of the quartet appeared on the cover of Melody Maker, along with the words ‘Wings Fly!’ Inside, under the provocative headline ‘Why Lennon Is Uncool’, McCartney attempted to dispassionately respond to the public abuse hurled at him by his former friend, which, as suspected, had stung him far more than anything he could throw back at John. Touching on ‘How Do You Sleep?’, he said, ‘I think it’s silly. So what if I live with straights? I like straights.’
It was perhaps with this comment alone that, in the eyes of the excruciatingly cool rock elite, McCartney indelibly cast himself as ‘straight’, sounding more like a bowler-hatted banker, commuting into the city every morning on the 8:12 from Cheam, than an eccentric millionaire rocker living in remote Scotland in a rundown two-bedroomed farmhouse, subsisting on joint after joint.
‘He says the only thing I did was “Yesterday”,’ Paul added, sounding a touch more bruised. ‘He knows that’s wrong.’
Further riled, having read the interview, Lennon fired off a blistering letter that appeared in the next edition of the music paper, ending: ‘If we’re not cool, what does that make you?’
Wild Life was met with a colossal wave of disappointment. As a Dylan-inspired attempt to bottle the lightning of live recording, it was lacking in thrills. Paul’s second album in seven months, it sank faster than even the poorly received but creatively buoyant Ram. The record-buying public seemed baffled by how this formerly perfectionist creator of so many peerless Beatles classics could turn out such half-finished scraps. For those weaned on the mini-symphonies of Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, this really wasn’t good enough.
The truth seemed to be that McCartney, high and happy, was simply indulging himself, without anyone to tell him no, or to edit or jettison his weaker ideas. Worse, with the gibberish words of side-one leading tracks ‘Mumbo’ and ‘Bip Bop’, he apparently couldn’t even be bothered writing lyrics any more. Later, when listening to the latter, Paul would cringe. ‘When you allow yourself to be playful,’ he says, ‘the morning after or the month after or the year after, you can just think, Oh, maybe that was a bit too playful.’
The best moments in Wild Life were to be found further down the track list: the early stirrings of the McCartneys’ animal-rights sympathies in the mournful rocker ‘Wild Life’, the lovely Paul-and-Linda-do-the-Everly-Brothers cooing of ‘Some People Never Know’. Amid the gentle waves of harmony in ‘Tomorrow’, a follow-up song of sorts, an insecure McCartney pleaded with his lover not to let him down, as if recalling the female figure in ‘Yesterday’ who had once broken his heart by leaving.
At the end of the record, in the orchestrated piano ballad ‘Dear Friend’, Paul addressed John directly, declaring his love for him and, in a highly sentimental tone, sadly asking if this really was the ‘borderline’, the end of their friendship. ‘That’s much more loving,’ Paul says of the conciliatory song. ‘It’s like, “Oh come on, mate.”’
Sales-wise, in Beatle terms, the album stiffed, prompting EMI to cancel the release of the proposed double A-side single ‘Love Is Strange/I Am Your Singer’. ‘I like the record,’ Paul now says of Wild Life, before accepting, ‘It wasn’t perhaps as good as some of the others.’ At the same time, McCartney points out that validation for his records can sometimes come from the most unlikely or fleeting of encounters. Shortly after the release of Wild Life, he was motoring down Sunset Strip in Los Angeles when a camper van, driven by ‘a typical Woodstock type’, pulled up beside him. Spotting McCartney, the grinning hippie waved a copy of the record out of the van’s window before shouting over to tell him that he was heading up into the hills with the LP, doubtless to get high and listen to the album in much the same state as it was created. ‘He said, “Great record, man”,’ remembers Paul. ‘To me, that was it.’
Others weren’t so enthusiastic. Rolling Stone head-scratchingly wondered whether the LP was ‘deliberately second rate’, theorising that it was perhaps an exercise in creating banal music that would infuriate Lennon by outselling his apparently more meaningful records. This ridiculous notion was instantly disproved by the fact that, in a perhaps commercially hobbling move, on its initial release in the US it didn’t have any words at all on its cover. In an effort to prop up the record, Capitol hastily affixed a sticker to the remaining stock bearing the legend ‘Paul McCartney & Friends’.
Still, the photograph that appeared on the front of Wild Life seemed to say it all: Paul was now just a member of a band, and one that, to his mi
nd, needed no introduction. In the pastoral scene, foregrounded by hazy sunlit foliage, the barefooted members of Wings – positioned at the bottom of the picture, almost as an afterthought in the framing – balance on a horizontal branch a few feet above a stream.
Second from left in the line-up, McCartney stands knee-deep in the river, strumming an acoustic guitar, too distant from the camera for anyone other than the sharp-eyed – and maybe this was the entire point – to recognise him as Beatle Paul.
As Wings were splashing around in the country, the glitter-and-glue stomp of glam rock was fast becoming the soundtrack of the times, making The Beatles, and their solo efforts, seem hopelessly passé, only a year and a half after their demise.
In an effort to toughen up his new band’s sound, as hard-rock-tinged pop began creeping into the charts, Paul decided to expand Wings to a five-piece by drafting in a lead guitarist. Over twelve intensive days of rehearsals in January 1972 at the Scotch of St James club, an old hangout for The Beatles and The Stones just off Piccadilly, McCartney worked up new songs with the band, inviting down, through a tip-off from a roadie, Henry McCullough.
Painted by Melody Maker as ‘an eternal drifter wandering from gig to gig’, McCullough, from Portstewart in Northern Ireland, was a proper road-worn rocker with many touring miles to his name. Three years earlier, during Joe Cocker’s star-making set at Woodstock, McCullough had been part of the backing Grease Band who had successfully heavied-up Lennon and McCartney’s ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
As such, he was only slightly daunted by the prospect of working with a Beatle. ‘But I was a little bit,’ McCullough admits. ‘I mean, this is Paul McCartney. I grew up with The Beatles. But we had a long talk and he told me what the score was going to be and it was all very exciting. I wasn’t scared. He was easy to be about if you were in the gang, y’know. After a month or two, you got used to his face.’
McCullough further proved himself to be a perfect fit when he quickly settled into life on the McCartneys’ farm: ‘It was all good fun. You could get dirty. There was nobody afraid of getting shite on their boots.’
The band now complete, Paul began itching to get out on the road. But, recognising how difficult a high-profile re-entry into touring might be, nearly six years after The Beatles had taken their last bows at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in 1966, he began formulating a plan.
This time, he would do things differently. He hinted as much in the press. ‘I just want to get into a van,’ he said, ‘and do an unadvertised Saturday-night hop at Slough town hall or somewhere.’
Or, as it turned out, anywhere.
You banned yourself from playing any Beatles songs live with Wings in the early days . . . that must have been tough?
Yeah, but I wanted to grow Wings from a seed. And that was what we ended up doing. However, this meant that, y’know, if you had a bad spring and you didn’t get enough rain or enough sunshine . . . you were fucked.
You’d find that you’d had a pretty poor song harvest?
Yeah! And we had some pretty bad weather in the early days.
4
Road to Anywhere
They gathered on the pavement for one last photograph before leaving. Out in the road at the front of the Cavendish Avenue house they stood, a scruffy assemblage of longhairs. At its centre were the McCartneys and their daughters, along with the Seiwells – Denny’s wife Monique holding baby Stella, underlining the sense that they had now become one big family. To their right, looking like tufty escapees from The Faces or The Stones, were brother-in-law roadies Ian Horne and Trevor Jones. To their left, Henry McCullough and Denny Laine, the latter pulling a comically vacant Stan Laurel face. All wore big winter coats to keep out the February chill. All waved to the camera, except for the too-cool-for-school McCullough, who kept his hands deep in his pockets.
Behind them stood a green Transit van and an Avis rental three-ton lorry stuffed with their equipment. Given his head entirely, Paul was at last getting his wish – as expressed to the uninterested Beatles during their dying days – of embarking on a low-key, last-minute tour of small venues or civic halls. The plan for this upcoming jaunt was a similar one, if far looser, and in keeping with the laidback mood of the times. Everyone – musicians, roadies, kids, even dogs – was to pile into the vehicles and take off up the motorway, heading for university towns, in search of somewhere to play.
This tapped into McCartney’s romantic notion of the vaudeville or circus troupe heading off over the horizon, en route to anywhere. Moreover, the scheme allowed him to ward off his fears about returning to live performance. He was, he confessed, ‘very nervous’. The nightmare scenario, in his mind, was facing row after row of reporters at the front of the stage, sitting in judgement with their pads, scribbling snippy notes about how he wasn’t as good as he used to be.
Instead, by not pre-announcing shows, he could keep one step ahead of the press. In effect, he thought, he could outrun his critics.
And so, on the morning of 8 February 1972, this strange coterie of hippies, kids and animals set off, pointing the noses of their vehicles in the direction of the M1 motorway, destination unknown. ‘We were,’ says Paul, with barely disguised pride, ‘a bunch of nutters on the road.’
It was an emboldened Paul who faced the beginning of 1972. With Lennon’s cutting accusation that McCartney created anodyne ‘Muzak’ still ringing in his ears, he determined to push into new and, for him, uncharted territory, by toughening up his sentiments and stepping into the unlikely arena of the protest song.
After the low-blow trading of the previous year, John and Paul had reached some kind of détente. Surprisingly, given his growing reputation as a peacenik in all areas except for his more bitter personal relations, it was Lennon who first extended the hand of friendship. Trying to repair the damage, John used journalist Ray Connolly – the same writer who had faced McCartney’s swift denials that he’d quit The Beatles in the infamous Q&A press release – as a go-between to hand-deliver a letter to Cavendish Avenue. A visiting Jim McCartney took the envelope from Connolly at the front door, before unhappily warning the writer, ‘If I were you, son, I wouldn’t get involved in all this.’
On the last weekend of January, Lennon and McCartney hooked up for the first time since the ruckus began. Saturday saw Paul and Linda fly to New York and accept an invitation to come over to the apartment the Lennons were renting at 105 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, where the couple had now taken up permanent residence. Over dinner, John and Paul chatted amicably, if still a touch guardedly, and agreed to stop slagging one another off in public, whether in the press or in song. At the same time, it seems, the fact that Lennon was living in such a febrile counter-cultural environment, hanging with hirsute radicals and becoming increasingly politicised, rubbed off on McCartney.
The following day, as events quickly unfolded on the other side of the Atlantic, Paul found his cause to support, his enemy to kick against, however lightly. On Sunday 30 January, in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, a march by a civil rights organisation representing the Catholic minority suddenly descended into rioting. Under attack, albeit from a group of rowdy teenagers, British soldiers fired live rounds at the protesters, resulting in 26 unarmed civilians being shot. Thirteen died on the day, escalating the Troubles that were to violently stain the UK for decades.
McCartney, along with much of the civilised world, was outraged. Giving an interview to US radio station KHJ in the hours after the event, Paul talked little about Wings, instead railing against the British government, reportedly using ‘strong language’ that needed much in the way of editing by the station before it could be broadcast. The next day, the McCartneys flew home, but not before booking a session at Island Studios in west London for an impromptu recording session on Tuesday 1 February for Wings’ first single, the hastily penned response ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’.
Paul had always thought that Lennon was ‘crackers’ to write over
tly political material. This, however, doubtless because of McCartney’s Irish heritage, felt different. ‘It took us aback,’ says Paul. It wouldn’t harm his image, either, of course, to be seen to be making such a potent statement. ‘I knew what I was doing,’ he admits.
At the studio, a TV crew from ABC in the States filmed the band rehearsing a harder-edged version of the song than would appear on the slightly vanilla-sounding 45, with Paul seen in the footage lustily belting out his lyrical protest. In truth, it was fairly tame stuff: Great Britain was ‘tremendous’, but its creation of a police state in Ireland and its imprisoning of those with a passion for ‘God and country’ was totally unacceptable.
In the two-minute TV news segment, Paul sat with Linda, being interviewed, while laughing at the continual interruptions of one of their dogs howling in the background. No, said Paul, he wasn’t worried about being an entertainer making a political statement. In fact, from his impassioned demeanour, it was clear that he was enjoying having an agenda.
‘I don’t now plan to do everything as a political thing,’ he told the unseen reporter, before repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger to emphasise his point. ‘But just on this one occasion I think the British government overstepped the mark and showed themselves to be more of a sort of repressive regime than I ever believed them to be.’
EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood, more used to having to deal with the controversies stirred by Lennon than McCartney, tried to talk Paul out of releasing the single: ‘He rang me up and said, “Woo, y’know, don’t do this.” I said, “Hey, man, y’know, although I’m not a protest songwriter normally, this time there’s no stopping it. I’ve gotta do this. It’s gotta happen.”’
For his part, as a young Northern Irishman recruited into a band who were overnight making such a pointed comment about the divisions in his homeland, Henry McCullough was strangely ambivalent about the whole affair. ‘I never thought about it once, and that’s the God’s truth,’ he says. A travelling musician, the guitarist had been out of the country and on the road when the Troubles began to intensify in Ireland in the late 1960s. ‘I don’t think it was a bad thing to miss that tragic period,’ he points out.
