by Tom Doyle
Not that his involvement in the record was to go unnoticed, however. Amid the fuss to come with the subsequent release of the single, the guitarist’s brother was thumped in a pub in the Irish expatriate stronghold of Kilburn, north London: ‘It was, like, “Are you Samuel McCullough?” “Yeah.” “Is your brother Henry that played on ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’?” “Yeah.” Bang.’
For a line-up of individuals who might as well have bumped into one another while queuing for a bus, the five-piece Wings quickly bonded in rehearsals. As manufactured in some ways as any toothsome teen-scream pop band, the group, all except Linda, of course, were nothing if not professionals who could adapt to any musical scenario.
Mirroring the segment in Let It Be where the four Beatles are each shown separately arriving at Apple Studios in Savile Row, the members of Wings were filmed coolly rolling up one by one to the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall, the location for their first intensive batch of rehearsals. Inside, on the stage, the quintet were filmed rattling through old rock’n’roll standards such as ‘Lucille’ before working their way through a raw live take of ‘Wild Life’, along with the stomping ‘The Mess I’m In’, which owed much to The Band’s ‘The Shape I’m In’, released two years earlier.
More and more, Linda appeared comfortable and to be growing in confidence behind her keyboard set-up. But in truth there were already murmurs of dissent within the ranks over her role in the band. The forthright Henry McCullough even brazenly suggested to Paul that the band get a ‘proper’ piano player. ‘I’m quite ashamed of it,’ he says. McCartney instantly rebuffed the guitarist, firmly informing him that it was his decision alone who was in or out the band. ‘I was, like, “Alright”,’ says McCullough. ‘It was never brought up again, on my part anyway.’ But, at certain points, it seemed Paul wasn’t entirely convinced either that having his wife in the band had been such a great idea. Once, in a moment of irritation, he threatened to replace her with Billy Preston, the American keyboard player who had done such a fine job augmenting The Beatles during Let It Be. Later, a little uncharitably, he’d admit that Linda had been ‘absolute rubbish’ when she’d started playing. Then, in a spot of double-damning, he tried to qualify this harsh assessment by saying that George Martin had dumped Ringo from The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ session for exactly the same reason. His circuitous, slightly cack-handed point seemed to be: she’s getting better.
‘It was the weirdest thing,’ he says today. ‘There was me, having been one of the world’s most famous people, a member of The Beatles, suddenly playing in this semi-professional band kind of thing.’
There was no little amount of defiance in Paul’s decision to stick by Linda, not least when his contemporaries began to mock him: ‘We had people like Jagger saying, “Oh, he’s got his old lady in the band.” We had to take all that. I would think, Oh, fucking thanks a lot . . . tosser.’ Linda herself was ambivalent about the prospect of being a touring musician, telling a friend that she’d ‘just as soon have stayed on the farm with the horses and kids’. But Paul wanted her there, and so there she was.
Ultimately, McCartney saw Wings as an experiment. Acknowledging that he couldn’t replicate The Beatles, he was striking out in another direction entirely and now road-testing the band with this freewheeling, haphazard tour. ‘We didn’t even have hotels,’ he points out, almost incredulously. ‘Anyone else at least would’ve booked a hotel.’
Once they’d hit the road, the Wings touring party motored northwards and began scanning signs for a likely place to stop. Taken with the exotically named Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, they exited the M1 and headed for the small market town. Passing through its centre, Paul and Linda spotted a pony tied to a lamppost and, prone to making impulsive equine purchases, tried to find the owner and make him an offer for it, to no avail. Getting back to the matter in hand, the group discovered that, of course, there was no university in the tiny Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Undeterred, they headed back on to the motorway.
A safer bet, they decided, was to aim for Nottingham, a city where they reckoned they’d be guaranteed a gig. Arriving on the university campus around five o’clock, they sent roadie Trevor Jones ahead into the building to scout the location. Jones asked around for the social secretary and was directed to the bar, where he found student Elaine Woodhams. He told her that he was with Paul McCartney’s new band and they were looking for somewhere to play a spontaneous gig. In fact, he said, Paul was already waiting outside.
Initially sceptical and suspecting a practical joke, Woodhams was led by the roadie out to the van. The door slid open to reveal McCartney, turning the social secretary’s expression into a goldfish gape. A gig was duly arranged for the following afternoon and announced in a scrawl on the blackboard in the bar: Entrance – 50p. The word that the ex-Beatle was to break his concert silence here, of all places, quickly filtered through the campus. ‘It was a big deal for them,’ says McCullough. ‘But it was a bigger deal for us. It was, like, “This is it, the first fucking gig . . . let’s see what happens.”’
The following lunchtime, in the dinner-hall-cum-ballroom, Wings publicly took to the stage for the first time – Paul wearing a red-and-white pinstripe shirt under a pair of denim dungarees – before a crowd of 800, their number constrained by the fire safety limit. The band sounded lively, if a touch scrappy. Proudly displaying his rock’n’roll roots, Paul launched into ‘Lucille’ as an opener, before leading into the first airing of ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’. The rest of the set was largely comprised of songs from Wild Life (‘Bip Bop’, ‘Some People Never Know’), one from Ram (‘Smile Away’), and a filler blues jam fronted by McCullough (‘Henry’s Blues’). Running out of material, since McCartney had self-imposed a rule not to perform Beatles songs, they played ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ and ‘Lucille’ again. In a moment of dopey dizziness, they slipped into ‘The Grand Old Duke Of York’. Paul admits that not allowing himself to play any of his most famous tunes was ‘a killer . . . we had to do an hour of other material and we didn’t have it’.
Strangely, perhaps, one of the most satisfying elements for Paul in all of this was being handed the band’s agreed half-share of the door profits at the end of the gig, a bag of 50p coins, which were then evenly distributed by the singer among the musicians. Given the fact that, after signing with Brian Epstein’s NEMS management company in January 1962, The Beatles never handled actual money earned from their performances, this was something of an unanticipated thrill. It was the first time in ten years that Paul had seen any cash after a show, and he enjoyed the working musician’s dignity-of-labour aspect of it, feeling like ‘Duke Ellington divvying out the money’ to his band. ‘Two for you and two for you,’ says Henry McCullough. ‘We were like children. But it was all 50ps. You walked out of the university and your trousers were tripping you.’
By day two, the press were already gaining on them, and Wings felt they were losing the chase. Exiting the van at Leeds University, the band were accosted by a gaggle of reporters and TV crews. As their hunted leader, Paul immediately made the call: the gig’s off, everyone back in the van. Instead they headed for York, where a show was arranged at York University’s Goodricke College, only six hours before stage time. Too late to book the union’s theatre, the refectory was again the scene of the performance, with 550 students crammed into the space and another 400 stuck outside.
But Paul hadn’t quite managed to shake the reporters tailing him. A stringer from the Guardian was in the audience at York, noting that Wings seemed slightly old-fashioned when faced with a crowd that, in the hippie fashion, sat on the floor for most of the duration. McCartney was ‘seemingly oblivious of the passage of time’, since the highlights of the set were ‘old dancing numbers’. By the end, though, the crowd were apparently on their feet. ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ was played twice, with Paul quipping that they needed ‘to get some practice’.
The still-unreleased single was already
drawing some heat. On the day of the York gig, the BBC banned it on the grounds that it was politically biased and didn’t account for the suffering caused to many on the other side of the divide. Asked by the Guardian whether the gigs were actually secret fundraisers for the IRA, Paul ‘refused to be drawn’. The fact that his reply was noncommittal shows the strength of feeling in the wake of Bloody Sunday: the idea of passing around the collection hat for the IRA – who only months later intensified their terrorist bombing campaign – was not yet considered taboo. ‘We’re simply playing for the people,’ Paul said.
Literally escaping the controversy, one night Wings were forced to drive through a mob of protesters. While trying to leave the campus in their van, passing through the gates, students menacingly crowded around the vehicle, frightening everyone inside. Denny Laine, driving that night, says, ‘I put my toe down and they all jumped out the way. They were pretty threatening.’
For the most part, though, McCartney successfully managed to give both the media and his detractors the slip. Back in London, his assistant Shelley Turner playfully fielded calls from journalists fishing for information about the next destination of the tour. ‘They have taken a lot of sandwiches with them,’ she offered cagily. ‘They could turn up anywhere.’ Countering growing rumours that EMI, in the wake of the BBC ban, was refusing to issue ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’, Turner said that the record company was ‘100 per cent behind it . . . it will probably be in the shops next week.’
As the tour progressed, Wings and crew developed something of a routine around these guerrilla gigs. Each morning they’d pick up the map and decide where to go that day. Sticking mainly to larger towns and cities, they would arrive at a university in the early afternoon; Trevor Jones would be dispatched to make the gig arrangements, then a local B&B would be found before the roadies returned to the venue to set up the equipment.
Post-gig, the bounty of 50p coins was dished out and the party returned to the B&B for fish and chips or cheese sandwiches and a game of darts. Baby Stella would be placed in a makeshift cot fashioned from an opened drawer lined with blankets and pillows. Bottles of wine would be uncorked, smokes sparked up and the guitars whipped out for a jam through old rock’n’roll numbers. One night everyone sat around and listened to the tapes of the gigs recorded from the sound desk by Trevor Jones on a couple of reel-to-reels borrowed from Abbey Road. Disappointingly, they sounded rough. There was still much work to do.
If the universities jaunt was distinctly lacking in glamour day to day, and far removed from the luxury afforded to The Beatles during their touring years, it was overall an enjoyable experience for everyone, peculiarly British and very 1970s. Henry McCullough likens it to ‘a black-and-white Sgt. Pepper . . . you were staying with Mrs McGonagall on the promenade.’ The buzz for all involved was getting up in the morning and not knowing what the day was going to bring, or, even where you were going to end up. ‘It was just as exciting travelling in a green Transit as it was in a fucking Rolls,’ says the guitarist. ‘You probably had more room in the van.’
Before long, the touring party began to suspect that the student organisers were preparing in advance on the off-chance that Wings would drop in. On their arrival at Hull University, the PA was already set up in the concert hall. Driving around looking for accommodation, the band were forced a mile out of the centre of town to Pearson Park, where they booked into what McCartney remembers being a ‘third-rate’ hotel, run by, in Denny Laine’s opinion, an ‘asshole’ landlord. ‘Some little weird old guy,’ says Paul. ‘Got very annoyed with us because apparently one of the roadies was smoking something.’
Here there was an altercation between McCartney and the landlord, though not, as Laine remembers, because of dope-smoking. After the gig, the band returned to the bar, helping themselves to drinks (but leaving money) and eating their fish and chips, though neglecting to tidy up after themselves. ‘When the guy came down in the morning and saw all the mess,’ says Laine, ‘he got upset.’
McCartney happened to walk into the room at breakfast-time as the landlord was loudly telling off the roadies. An argument broke out and Paul – ‘accidentally on purpose’, according to Laine – elbowed the proprietor in the nose. Enraged, the landlord threatened to call the police. Nine-year-old Heather ran around the band members’ rooms, knocking on the doors to rouse them. The group and entourage quickly fled before they found themselves deeper in trouble.
A week into the tour, Linda talked to Melody Maker about how the tour was going and, specifically, how her eldest daughter was coping with rock’n’roll road life. The McCartneys, she said, had given Heather ‘the choice of school or coming with us, and she chose the latter’. Revealing her blasé, university-of-life attitude, Linda added, ‘I mean, this is an education in itself, isn’t it? We’re just a gang of musicians touring around.’
On one key date, however, Linda’s credentials as a musician were once again called into question. Having aborted the Leeds University gig due to the press attention, the band arranged a date for 16 February in the city’s town hall, a larger and more imposing venue. Taking to the stage a touch intimidated, Paul sang the opening bars of ‘Wild Life’ solo before turning to his wife and counting in her staccato piano introduction. There was silence. Linda had frozen. She mouthed to Paul, ‘I’ve forgotten the chords.’
‘The audience thought, This is good . . . this is a little joke they’ve got going,’ McCartney remembers.
Paul stepped over to his wife’s side of the stage and placed his hands on the keyboard before realising that he too couldn’t remember how the song began. Nervous laughter began to rise up from the stalls. ‘It looked even more like a joke, like a great big set-up thing,’ Paul says. ‘For a moment, there was panic.’ Then Linda suddenly remembered the sequence, began playing the simple, descending three-chord riff and the band fell in behind her. ‘We went into the song, our hearts beating fast,’ says Paul.
Very quickly, the novelty of the tour began to wear off. In Manchester, Wings played in a theatre in Salford where the owners worried that the band’s low-end rumble might somehow damage the scenery of the venue’s current production. In Birmingham, Wings visited Laine’s parents and then played a very average show at the university. In Swansea, with only 75 minutes’ notice, 800 fans – by now wise to Wings’ modus operandi – suddenly appeared. The element of surprise was gone. The game, it seemed, was up.
On 23 February, after eleven dates, the tour was over, with the plan to continue for another week abandoned. Denny Seiwell says it was proving a bore to have to find a B&B every day that had six free rooms and allowed animals. In addition, there were only so many fish and chip suppers an American drummer could stomach.
Two days later, ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ was released, a mere three weeks after it had been written and recorded. Following the BBC’s lead, the Independent Television Authority and Radio Luxembourg immediately banned it. Paul’s response was one of faintly comic defiance. ‘Up them!’ he said. ‘I think the BBC should be highly praised, preventing the youth from hearing my opinions.’ Radio 1 DJ John Peel was the sole voice to speak out in defence of McCartney, saying that the ban disturbed him. ‘The act of banning it,’ he argued, ‘is a much stronger political act than the contents of the record itself. It’s just one man’s opinion.’
For better or for worse, ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ marked the beginning and the end of Paul McCartney’s career as a protest singer. As relatively weak a song as it was, at least it was better than Lennon’s awful folk dirge ‘The Luck Of The Irish’, released later that year on his worst album, Some Time In New York City. In the end, the first Wings single reached number 1 in two countries – Ireland and Spain. ‘Basque separatists loved it,’ says Paul now.
As Abbey Road was to The Beatles, Olympic Studios in the south-west London suburb of Barnes was the preferred recording hive of The Rolling Stones. McCartney had used the facility in the past, not least during the sessi
ons for Abbey Road (only partly recorded at the famed St John’s Wood studio), which, although producing a fine Beatles album, had been troubled. As was quickly to be proved, it was not a lucky environment for Paul.
It was here that, irritating the other Beatles, Yoko Ono had laid up in a double bed installed in the studio, recovering after the car crash that she and John had suffered in Scotland in the summer of 1969, Lennon giving her a microphone so that she could, as she now remembers, ‘just experiment or do something’. It was here that Paul had fought against being press-ganged into signing the Allen Klein management agreement by his bandmates, a decisive moment in the disintegration of their long friendship. And now it was here, in March 1972, that he returned for the beginning of the difficult sessions for the second Wings album, Red Rose Speedway.
Employing a producer for the first time in his post-Beatles career, Paul brought in Glyn Johns, the studio name of the day thanks to his recent wave of successes with The Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin after his dedicated if ultimately failed attempts to create the Get Back album. A self-assured, headstrong character, Johns was in no way intimidated by McCartney on any level.
Wings set up in the grand, ballroom-like live room in Studio One at Olympic and began jamming their way through Paul’s new songs. Roundly unimpressed by the sounds emanating from the studio, Johns sat with his feet up in the control room, reading the paper and refusing to roll the tape. On day one, McCartney had asked the producer to consider him just the bass player in the group, in an attempt to underline his apparent desire for Wings to be a democratic and ‘normal’ band. Of course, when the blunt Johns began to treat McCartney just as he would any old musician, the shirking bandleader, he says, grew disgruntled.
