by Tom Doyle
The special wasn’t all bad. It opened with Wings performing ‘Big Barn Bed’ – the throwaway if grooving opening track from Red Rose Speedway, released under the more commercially viable name Paul McCartney and Wings in May – in front of a futuristic bank of televisions. Later in the running order, there was an impressively atmospheric, surreal clip for ‘Uncle Albert’, starting with a long shot of Paul scribbling solutions into a newspaper crossword and Linda making tea, as distortedly filmed through a fisheye lens. The picture melted into forks of lightning and dark thunderous clouds before fading into rows of Stepford Wives-like female typists working in a bureau. The camera passed through a throng of old men, all talking into curly-corded brown telephone receivers, before a ‘straight’ bespectacled and besuited McCartney appeared, sitting behind a typewriter, sadly replacing a phone on its cradle as the song ended. It was evocative stuff and richly redolent of The Beatles.
Elsewhere, there was a live recording of ‘Live And Let Die’, filmed at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, along with the other full-band ‘concert’ segments shot before an audience. This performance of the Bond theme was to prove more explosive than intended, however, when pyrotechnics stuffed inside a dummy balsa-wood piano turned out to be far more powerful than anticipated. When the detonation occurred at the end of the song, it threw McCartney back on his piano stool, lifted Henry McCullough clean off his feet and sent chunks of burning wood flying into the air and raining down on the shocked orchestra members.
The most misguided section of the programme, however, came with the footage filmed in a dockside pub, the Chelsea Reach, in Wallasey, Merseyside, featuring Paul’s extended family and friends, who had been invited for a boozy knees-up for the benefit of the cameras. The idea was clearly for Paul to show off his working-class roots. But Linda, for one, wasn’t keen on her husband presenting himself as a booze-chugging man of the people. ‘She had such a go at Paul over that,’ says Robert Ellis, who had become Wings’ official photographer. He remembers Paul arguing long and hard about wanting to shoot this sequence. ‘In the end, they filmed it and everybody in that thing is just cringing.’
It did make for uncomfortable viewing in its painful staged encounters with his relatives, including his father Jim and aunt Gin. ‘I’m the only one paying for drinks here this evening,’ Paul stiffly jokes, sipping a whisky and Coke and puffing on a Senior Service before being seen tapping his dad for a fiver. ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ he said later. ‘I’d come without me money.’ As the drink flows, the packed gathering, and even Paul, visibly unwind and break into spirited singalongs of ‘April Showers’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag’.
The members of Wings mingle with the crowd, supping nutty brown ales from dimpled pint-glasses – though, in Henry McCullough’s case, worryingly overdoing it. The guitarist vaguely remembers that Paul, possibly now seeing his bandmate as something of a liability due to his increased drinking, had McCullough staying with one of the McCartney relatives.
‘Get Henry out of the fucking way,’ says McCullough. ‘Maybe it was the right place for me at the time.’ The evening ended with the guitarist having a shouting match with his wife, somehow losing his shoes and wandering, wearing a fancy rhinestone-studded coat, lost and confused through the streets of Liverpool. ‘I plodded in my bare feet with this jacket that was flashing all over the place,’ he dimly recalls. ‘I was crawling to get home.’
When James Paul McCartney aired in the US on Monday, 16 April 1973 – premiering on ITV in the UK nearly a month later – John Lennon was watching at home in New York. He later commented, with notable warmth and tact: ‘I liked parts of Paul’s TV special, especially the intro. The bit filmed in Liverpool made me squirm a bit. But Paul’s a pro. He always has been.’
The critics were brutal, however. Melody Maker denounced it as ‘overblown and silly’. Linda’s former friend, Lillian Roxon, reviewing it in the New York Daily News, comprehensively savaged it and its participants, slagging Mrs McCartney’s various hairdos, calling Paul ‘sweaty, pudgy, slack-mouthed’ and loftily, if perhaps revealingly, announcing: ‘I can tell you right now, she didn’t marry a millionaire Beatle to end up in a Liverpool saloon singing with middle-aged women called Mildred.’
In interviews from the time, Paul stuck up for himself and the TV special, saying he’d received a wave of fan letters posted from remote locations in America after it was shown, the subtext being that it had touched the kind of ordinary people that snooty critics would never understand. ‘The funny thing was, only the hip people didn’t like it,’ he pointed out. ‘But we got millions of letters from mid-America saying they loved the show.’
More illuminatingly, he confessed to occasionally feeling burdened. ‘Sometimes I feel as if I have a ten-ton weight on my shoulders,’ he admitted, before shrugging off this statement with characteristic good cheer. ‘There’s many a person has committed suicide over the fact that his special wasn’t so good,’ he added. ‘But I wouldn’t give a crap.’
Still, even Linda felt it was ‘a terribly unsure period’. Paul himself admitted that sometimes he’d come home from Wings rehearsals with the nagging feeling ‘it’s not right, we could do much more’. He was, he allowed, ‘a born worrier’. Linda described Red Rose Speedway, which had been recorded in protracted sessions throughout the previous year, as ‘such a non-confident record’.
‘I don’t remember a lot about it actually,’ Paul now says of Red Rose Speedway. ‘I think the fact that I don’t remember it too well bears that out.’
The album certainly had its moments – the strident rocker ‘Get On The Right Thing’; the rolling Pink Floyd-echoing instrumental ‘Loup (1st Indian On The Moon)’; the dreamily strummed ballad ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’, inspired by a neighbouring farmer at High Park bringing a near-frozen lamb to the McCartneys for them to nurse. ‘He knew we were soft-hearted,’ says Paul. ‘He wasn’t sure it was gonna survive, so we took it in and warmed it up and fed it and it did survive.’
To close the record, McCartney attempted to repeat the trick The Beatles had so successfully pulled off in the second half of Abbey Road, knitting fragments of incomplete songs into a seamless medley. Only, this time, it didn’t work. The song cycle – ‘Hold Me Tight’, ‘Lazy Dynamite’, ‘Hands Of Love’, ‘Power Cut’ – was entirely forgettable, even to its creator. ‘I don’t remember it,’ he confesses.
The fact that Red Rose Speedway was slimmed down to a single album from a planned double spoke volumes. ‘Double albums are notoriously hard to pull off,’ McCartney admits. ‘If you’ve just got loads and loads of top, top material, then that’s the way to go. And I think you can see that by pulling the songs into a medley at the end, maybe I didn’t think I had loads and loads of top material.’
There was, however, one unarguable standout on Red Rose Speedway. ‘My Love’ was a magnificent McCartney ballad in the vein of ‘The Long And Winding Road’ and ‘Let It Be’, confidently recorded live with an orchestra at Abbey Road. It was also notable for a last-minute musical mutiny from Henry McCullough that produced the song’s beautifully liquid, entirely improvised guitar solo.
‘I was ready to put on a guitar solo along with the orchestra,’ says McCullough, ‘and whatever it was that was suggested to me to play, I wouldn’t play it. I just said to Paul, “Look, y’know, I’m changing the solo.” And he says, “Well, what are you going to play?” I said, “I have no idea.”’
‘I had to make a decision,’ says McCartney. ‘Either it was like, “No, stick to the script.” Or, it was, “Do I believe in this guy?” Yeah. And he played the solo, which had come right out of the blue. I’d never heard it before. And I just thought, Fucking great.’
‘The orchestra started and I hit a lick and that was it,’ says Henry. ‘I put my guitar down and I went into the control room and I knew that I’d either hit the jackpot or else it was shite. But if that had’ve been the case, then I would’ve withdrawn my horns. Anyway, I got lucky. To captu
re a solo like that in one take in a studio . . . it was just a stroke of luck, a gift from God really, and you get that in music.’
The increased respect that Henry had earned from Paul with this spontaneous move was soon to be destroyed, however. Filming a performance of ‘My Love’ for Top of the Pops, the guitarist, suffering the ill-effects of his imbibing, threw up onstage, sickening and embarrassing Paul.
Nevertheless, in May, Wings headed off around the country on their debut theatre tour of the UK, the first scheduled jaunt in Britain by any of The Beatles since 1966. Further underlining the idea that Paul felt like a variety-show turn, the bill included a hoop-throwing juggler. Interviewed backstage in Newcastle, McCartney enthused about the wonders of modern touring – better planning, improved sound systems – indicating that he wanted to do a lot more of it. ‘It hasn’t ground me into the ground, anyway,’ he said.
The McCartneys were now almost becoming part of the showbiz establishment – throwing a party (after a sold-out three-night run at the Hammersmith Odeon) in the reception hall of the Café Royal, where Paul starrily duetted with Elton John, and attending the premiere of Live And Let Die, Paul wearing a tuxedo and bow-tie but, wackily, no shirt.
Wings, finally, appeared to be stabilising. One of the comments around this time, from the increasingly dissatisfied Henry McCullough, told an entirely different story, though.
‘I don’t suppose we’ll be together forever,’ he mused dolefully. ‘I’m sure Paul’s got more of a tie to The Beatles. Wings has all the makings of a great group, but our battle is to not let it fall apart, as it could so easily do.’
You put together a really strong set of songs for the Band On The Run album. Did you feel that yourself?
Yeah, I thought they were a pretty strong set of songs. I think at this point I was getting it a bit more together. I’d been through the sort of raw stages of Wings. I was now settling with the idea of it.
6
Panic in Lagos
As the nose of the jet dipped on its approach into Lagos, Paul began to get the jitters. Invited into the cockpit to witness the landing, he heard an unsettling exchange between the pilots. Flying low over a thick, misty carpet of jungle, the captain began searching in vain for the airport, turning to his co-pilot and wondering aloud, ‘Is that it down there?’ McCartney was thinking, Oh my God, they must know.
There was already much on Paul’s mind. The night before, in London, he had received a phone call giving him the news he really didn’t want to hear: Denny Seiwell was quitting the band and wouldn’t be coming on the planned recording expedition to Nigeria the following day. Compounding the agony, two weeks earlier, Wings had suffered the first split in its ranks, when Henry McCullough had angrily walked out on the band. Virtually overnight, Wings had gone from being a sturdy quintet to an apparently shaky trio compromising Paul, Linda and Denny Laine.
Behind their happy hippie family façade, the discontent within Wings had been stewing for some time. For all McCartney’s protestations and gestures to the contrary, the supposedly democratic band was in reality little more than an autocracy. Even the compliant Denny Laine would get irked any time one of his friends asked after the guitarist’s ‘boss’. ‘He wasn’t really my boss,’ he now insists. ‘He was just a mate I knew for many years before I even joined Wings. But I allowed him to be the boss. That was fine by me.’
Henry McCullough, meanwhile, had become increasingly disgruntled. After appearing unannounced with jazz singer Carol Grimes at the Roundhouse in London, a newspaper review the next day mentioned that the guitarist had played on a few songs at the gig. Finding out about this, McCartney took him to one side and pointed out that he was on a retainer with Wings: ‘Paul said, “Look, Henry, I’m paying the wages. And when I pay the wages, you don’t play for anybody else.”’
Then, one week he received his pay slip and noticed that his £70 retainer had been docked £40 for the hire of an amp. ‘That’s not just tight,’ he laughs. ‘That’s welded, that is. I had to pay for the hire of an amp to fucking play alongside Paul McCartney.’
The guitarist had grown tired of McCartney forcing him to play the same parts over and over, and felt creatively shackled. ‘It’s like being in a show band,’ McCullough moaned. Denny Laine had long seen the rift coming, noting that Henry essentially wanted to get stoned and rip through lengthy blues solos, which given Paul’s inherent pop sensibilities, was always going to make for an awkward fit. ‘He had some musical differences with Henry,’ says Denny Seiwell. ‘Henry was at a tough point in his life. It probably was the beginning of the demise.’
On the upside, the songs that Paul had written for the third Wings album were clearly shaping up to be the best of his post-Beatles career. Keen to hole up far from the London music business, he, Linda and the band once again escaped to High Park. Running a generator in the unheated barn at Low Ranachan over the hill, the band set up a makeshift practice space, with Paul and Linda, in rural-hippie style, arriving at rehearsals every day on horseback.
McCullough, though, was beginning to air his frustrations through his playing. The guitarist would dutifully ape the riffs written by McCartney, then continually change them from one run-through to another, frustrating the bandleader. While Paul, missing the camaraderie of The Beatles, was keen on some levels to mould Wings in their image – with the intra-band banter and jokey jams and all hands on the mixing desk in the studio – he clearly still reserved the power of veto over the ultimate musical decisions.
‘Let’s be honest, he wanted to be in a band in a sense,’ Laine says. ‘But he would still have the final call.’
‘The thing is, if you come out of The Beatles and you go into another group, you’re not just anyone,’ Paul argues. ‘You’re the guy out of The Beatles. It was just natural for me to try and run the band in the way that I saw fit. I’m not trying to avoid the fact that I was the boss.’
Tensions between Paul and Henry escalated. ‘He didn’t really like the music that much,’ says Laine of the latter. ‘He was rebelling a lot and also drinking a lot too.’ In one afternoon’s rehearsal, McCartney, as he remembers, asked McCullough ‘to play something he didn’t really fancy playing’. Henry argued that the part ‘couldn’t be played’. Paul became rattled. ‘I knew that it could be played,’ he says. ‘Rather than let it pass, I decided to confront him with it.’
Once the session was over, Laine and the defiant guitarist disappeared to a pub in Campbeltown and downed a few pints, the effects of which further emboldened McCullough to stand up to his boss. He returned, lightly refreshed, to the rehearsal barn. ‘I’d had a couple of drinks,’ says Henry. ‘I wasn’t falling down. But I was angry because I had drink in me.’
An argument broke out between the two which ended with each shouting ‘Fuck you!’ at the other. Face to face with the incensed Irishman, Paul became a ‘bit choked’, stormed out of the rehearsal room and huffed his way back to High Park. Henry sat alone in the barn, raging. ‘Something had been cut,’ he says. ‘Or was just about to be cut. I think he left it to me to make up my mind and that’s what I did.’ McCullough dumped his guitar and amp in the back of his car and angrily revved away, never to return. ‘If I hadn’t got out then, I think I would have been sacked,’ he says. ‘It was the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was driving off the edge of a cliff.’
Now, two weeks later, Denny Seiwell had followed. In his tense phone call to McCartney, the drummer told Paul he felt that the band wasn’t ready to record following McCullough’s departure. What’s more, even though he accepted that McCartney’s finances were tied up in the ongoing dispute with the other Beatles over the fate of Apple Records, he couldn’t exist any longer on the retainer he was receiving from Wings. ‘We worked for £70 a week,’ Seiwell says. ‘But I was making £2,000 a week in New York as a session guy.’
For the drummer, money had been a constant bugbear. While on tour, the band were forced to pay their own expenses, meaning th
ey’d often return home skint. During Wings’ downtime, Seiwell was sometimes forced to return to New York to play a few top-up studio sessions just so he could settle his American Express credit card bill. The drummer reckons that, having been fiscally cosseted during his Beatle years, McCartney wasn’t in touch with the realities of financing a band.
‘It wasn’t just being stingy,’ he says. ‘Y’know, The Beatles made £50 a week in their pay packet. But if they wanted a house or a car, they went and they signed for it and Apple picked it up. But cash money in your pocket? You got £50 a week.
‘And this was only a couple of years later, so we got a raise,’ he laughs. ‘But we couldn’t sign for a house or a car. I had to go to Barclays bank and borrow £3,000 to buy an old, beat-up Mercedes to run around London.’
Gallingly, perhaps, in May Paul bought himself a Lamborghini and went on holiday to Jamaica. The loyal Denny Laine was happier with his lot: he was playing guitar with a Beatle, and he had a one-bedroom flat in London now, when only two years earlier he’d been dossing in his manager’s office. During the rehearsals in Scotland, Paul, rewarding his loyalty, pulled him tighter into the firm. The pair had climbed a hillside to smoke a joint at sunset when McCartney offered to share the royalties with him on the next album, telling him, according to Jo Jo Patrie, ‘Just think, man, you’ll get, like, quarter of a million.’ It was no coincidence, either, that it was the same month as the band were due to leave for Lagos and that Jo Jo had given birth to the couple’s first son, Laine Hines, at Campbeltown hospital.
