by Tom Doyle
Seiwell, for his part, was getting sick of being broke and at the beck and call of the McCartneys. ‘I should’ve sat down with him and said, “Look, I need some sort of a document, a written agreement on paper as to what my share of this band is.” You’re playing with a Beatle, for fuck’s sake. And you’re one of the top bands in the world. You’re on call 24 hours a day. Whatever needs doing, whether it’s photo-shoots or press interviews or rehearsals or recording or special appearances at TV shows. It just wasn’t right.’
When Seiwell told Paul he’d had enough and that he wasn’t coming to Africa the following day, McCartney was initially stunned. Then he boiled over into rage.
‘I got off the phone,’ he fumes, ‘and I just thought, Well, thanks, nice. Thanks for letting me know in plenty of time. Then I just thought, Right, we’ll show you.’
Having been ensconced within Abbey Road Studios during his time in The Beatles, Paul was increasingly drawn to the idea of location recording. Knowing that EMI, whose slogan boasted of being The Greatest Recording Organisation In The World, had various studio facilities dotted around the globe, he had staff at the label draw him up a list of their locations. For a time he mulled over whether the band should decamp to Bombay, Beijing or Rio de Janeiro. But, given his burgeoning interest in African rhythms – and a vague notion that the trip could in essence become an intensely creative working holiday – he settled on Lagos.
‘We thought, Great . . . lie on the beach all day, doing nothing,’ he says. ‘Breeze in to the studios and record. It didn’t turn out like that.’
Once their plane had safely touched down in Lagos, on 30 August 1973, the Wings party – Paul and Linda and the kids, Denny Laine and engineer Geoff Emerick – suffered severe culture shock. It was the monsoon season in Nigeria, characterised by heavy storms and oppressive heat. Given the McCartneys’ freewheeling ways, no one had thought to check the weather forecast.
The scene that greeted them at Ikeja Airport was one of forbidding military presence. Machine gun-toting soldiers, under the rule of General Yakubu Gowon, who had violently seized power seven years earlier in 1966, stone-facedly stalked the terminal. Nigeria in the summer of 1973 remained a hazardous, volatile location. Only three years before, the country had been riven by civil war, which had led to almost three million casualties, whether through the direct effects of the conflict or its grim, lasting hangover of disease and starvation.
It quickly became apparent to the group that Lagos was in chaos. Hurtling to the studio through the alarming traffic, Laine was shocked when he saw a man knocked off his moped and apparently killed, with no one batting an eyelid. ‘Life don’t mean shit over here,’ he noted. Moreover, shit was literally floating through the streets, in open sewers. Emerick kept seeing figures wrapped in sheets and bandages. His driver calmly informed him that they were lepers.
Then the group were met with the sobering vision of the studio itself, essentially a sizeable shed, set two streets back from Lagos Lagoon in Wharf Road, in a suburb of the port of Apapa. The studio manager and the tape operator, who Paul was utterly charmed to discover were respectively named Odion and Monday, welcomed the party.
The studio itself, although it boasted top-grade cast-off equipment from other EMI facilities around the world, was in a woeful state. A subsequent search eventually located the microphone collection, stuffed into an old cardboard box. When no sonic screens to isolate the musicians’ equipment could be found, they were quickly built to order. Under McCartney’s direction, Odion and Monday were sent out to find wood and Perspex. On their return, Paul picked up a saw to give the pair a quick lesson in studio carpentry.
Even more surprisingly, through a soundproofed door at the back of the control room was a noisy pressing plant, housed in a lean-to shack, where Nigerian EMI employees stood ankle-deep in rainwater leaking through a corrugated roof as the smell of plastic filled the air.
Rather than stay in a hotel, the group had booked into a villa complex in Ikeja, on the edge of Lagos and an hour’s drive from the studio, with the McCartneys and their three daughters in one cabin and Laine and Emerick in another. The guitarist was amazed when, the morning after their arrival, he drew open the blinds to discover that a travelling African market had set up on their front lawn, selling camels and other native livestock.
The prankster in Laine enjoyed teasing the arachnophobic Emerick by leaving choice selections from the house’s dead spider display in the engineer’s bed. Sufficiently tormented, the producer decamped to a cheap hotel where he slept in a room overrun by cockroaches. Back at the villa, the McCartney daughters would chase translucent lizards around the exotic gardens in fits of giggles, catching them and collecting them in a large cage that they would proudly display to everyone.
The band and crew soon settled into these alien surroundings. Keen to start every working day with a swim, Paul was given temporary membership of a local country club in return for signing a photo of The Beatles hanging on its bar wall. McCartney’s international celebrity soon began to attract invitations – to a moonlit party on a nearby island where everyone was offered a buffet of local delicacies that included slices of oversized African snail; to dinner at the house of Chief Moshood Abiola, future president-elect and then chief executive of the ITT corporation, which was in charge of developing the country’s sanitation systems.
Only days into the trip, however, the McCartneys were given a rude reminder of the volatile environment in which they had placed themselves.
Wandering through the supposedly security-patrolled complex back to their own villa from Laine’s after a post-studio listening party, they were surprised to see a car draw up beside them. The driver rolled down his window and offered the McCartneys a lift. Paul smiled and told the driver, no thanks, they were happy to walk. The vehicle then motored a further twenty yards up the road and stopped, before its doors flew open and its five passengers jumped out and walked quickly towards Paul and Linda. One – a short, stocky Nigerian, Paul remembers – produced a knife, which he pointed at the singer’s throat.
A horrified Linda screamed, ‘Don’t kill him, he’s a musician!’ Her husband, sensibly, handed over his wallet, camera and bag – containing cassettes of his new songs – to the robbers.
‘We’d been told not to walk around,’ says Paul. ‘But we were just slightly hippie. Hey, don’t worry, feel good and it’s alright. So we got mugged. Crazy. All my recordings went and those were all the songs I’d written. The joke is, I’m sure the fellas who took it wouldn’t know what it was. They probably recorded over it all.’
As the car sped off, the McCartneys were left stunned. Only when they made it back to their villa did the full realisation of the horror of the incident begin to sink in. Intensifying their shock, the villa was suddenly plunged into darkness. The pair, shaken and paranoid, believed the thugs had followed them home and tampered with the lights, when in reality it was only one of the city’s regular power cuts. The couple retreated to bed, pulled the covers over their heads and hoped they would wake in the morning.
The next day, in the studio, the McCartneys were informed by the locals that the situation had in fact been even more dangerous than they’d imagined. A local hood called Crazy Joe, whose story had made it into the pages of Life magazine, had recently been publicly executed by the Nigerian police. If they had been black, Paul and Linda were told, they would almost certainly have been killed, since it was now a practice of Nigerian muggers to murder their victims, rather than leave them alive as potential witnesses. It was only because of the colour of their skins that their lives were spared, apparently, since most robbers believed that white people found it impossible to distinguish or accurately describe the features of black criminals.
‘Really,’ Laine says, ‘that’s the only reason they didn’t kill them.’
Having lost the tapes, McCartney frantically tried to remember the songs he’d written, relying on what he called his ‘Beatle training’ from the days when
he and Lennon, with no access to portable recorders, would have to commit a song to memory. The storming ‘Jet’, the singalong ‘Mrs Vandebilt’ and the mantra-like ‘Mamunia’ all sprang readily to mind, but many of the others had to be reconstructed, as Emerick put it, ‘on the fly’. Some verses of ‘Band On The Run’, for instance, were tweaked to reflect the group’s current circumstances, stuck inside the four walls of the small, cell-like studio, faced with grim uncertainty.
True to his upbeat nature, though, McCartney threw himself into the recording process, moving from drums to bass to guitar to the microphone with ease. And Linda’s contributions to the music – even if only simple keyboard parts and the gentle harmonies that she, Denny and Paul would use to colour the arrangements – were showing vast improvements from her tentative early days working with her husband. Paul had grown to live with the criticisms of his wife’s performances, although they still rankled. ‘It was like oil off a duck’s back,’ he says. ‘Bit harder to shift.’
If outwardly Paul was projecting utter confidence, there were other signs that inside he remained troubled.
One Friday afternoon, a fortnight into the sessions, while enthusiastically laying down a vocal, he suddenly turned white and started gasping for breath. He stumbled outside to find some air.
At the studio door, in the brutal heat, McCartney collapsed. For the second time in as many weeks, Linda was faced with the terrifying prospect of her husband’s life being in danger. ‘I laid him on the ground,’ she said. ‘His eyes were closed and I thought he was dead.’
Geoff Emerick shouted to the studio manager to call an ambulance. Given the parlous state of the Nigerian emergency services, however, it was swiftly decided that it would make more sense to take McCartney to hospital in the manager’s car. The star was unceremoniously bundled into the back seat and driven away. Back at the studio, Emerick and Laine half-heartedly continued work, nervously waiting for news.
Later that afternoon, Linda called the studio from the hospital to tell the others that Paul was recovering. For his part, McCartney remembers his return to consciousness as ‘floaty’ and strangely pleasant. The diagnosis was that the singer had suffered a bronchial spasm caused by excessive smoking. Viewed from another angle, the incident also bore all the hallmarks of a weed-induced panic attack.
In the circumstances, it would be understandable if strong Nigerian weed was heightening the singer’s paranoia. On one key night out, it undoubtedly had that effect.
As much as the band could try to block out their disquietingly exotic environment during studio hours, any attempt to cut loose during their downtime only served to remind them of just how far they were from home.
One evening the party decided to visit the Shrine, the open-air club on the outskirts of town owned by Fela Kuti, the self-styled tribal leader of the Nigerian music scene. Only three years before, Kuti had returned to Nigeria from a US tour, freshly politicised, having been inspired by the burgeoning Black Power movement in California and a reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Renaming his Koola Lobitos band Africa ’70, he had formed the Kalakuta Republic, a communal compound-cum-recording-studio where he could hang out and get high with his entourage, while practising polygamy with an expanding collection of wives.
The musician was already gaining a reputation as something of a folk hero through his championing of Lagos’s underclass, not least with his free health clinic set up at the Kalakuta Republic. But at the same time, his brazen spouting of anti-government views in his music and his provocative newspaper advertising columns had found him being singled out as a dangerous radical by the authorities.
Into this charged atmosphere stepped the McCartneys. At the Shrine, potent spliffs began doing the rounds at their table. Paul suddenly felt adrift in this unfamiliar environment: ‘We were a bit over-wasted and I got the screaming paranoias, being in this place on the outskirts of Lagos with absolutely no one we knew.’
Some of Kuti’s musicians joined the McCartneys at their table and the mood turned nasty. The ex-Beatle, already uneasy in his altered state, soon found himself being interrogated as to exactly why he’d come to Nigeria to record, the insinuation being that he was there to plunder African sounds. ‘It was very heavy,’ says Paul. Later Kuti and Africa ’70 took to the stage with the band leader in a grass skirt, surrounded by a host of his similarly attired, similarly topless wives. After a lengthy build-up, the group launched into their set of stirring Afrobeat and McCartney’s anxiety melted away. In a rush of relief from the ‘stress and craziness’ of his Lagos escapade, Paul burst into tears.
In the days following the visit to the Shrine, however, Kuti tried to provoke some sense of controversy over the group’s presence in Lagos, announcing on a local radio station that McCartney was here only to exploit the Afrobeat sound. A summit between the two musicians was hastily arranged.
Kuti arrived at the EMI studio, glowering bodyguards in tow, and took up a position at the back of the control room. After solemnly listening, arms folded, to some of the new work-in-progress Wings songs, he was satisfied that, the odd conga part aside, they bore no traces of Nigerian influences, and he left reassured.
‘I said,’ Paul recalls, ‘“Do us a favour, we do OK as it is, we’re not pinching your music.”’
‘He was trying to get money out of Paul, I suppose,’ reasons Denny Laine. ‘He wanted a piece of the action.’
Kuti wasn’t the only musician to be put out by Paul’s visit, either. Firebrand former Cream drummer Ginger Baker, a friend of Kuti’s, had one foot in the Nigerian music scene, having spent two years there building a state-of-the-art studio, ARC, near Ikeja Airport, which had been completed and opened only seven months earlier. On learning that the McCartneys planned to use EMI’s altogether inferior facility to record rather than his own, Baker felt snubbed. ‘I don’t know why Ginger would think we were going there to work in his studio,’ Laine muses. ‘I mean, maybe he thought he could talk us into it or something.’
In the end, ever the diplomat, McCartney agreed to record one song at Baker’s studio. ‘Just to give him a little bit of a hand-out,’ says Laine. The track, ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)’, had been written earlier in the year, in Jamaica, at a dinner party thrown by the McCartneys at their rented house in Montego Bay. In attendance was Dustin Hoffman, who was on the island filming the 1930s-set penal-colony escape epic Papillon. After the meal, throwing down a challenge, Hoffman asked McCartney if he could write a song on the spot. The actor produced a magazine with an article about the recent death of Pablo Picasso, whose last words were apparently ‘Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.’ Paul picked up a guitar and immediately began fitting a melody to the quote, thrilling Hoffman and his wife.
During the recording at ARC, to show no ill-feeling, Ginger Baker joined in, shaking a coffee can filled with gravel as a percussive accompaniment. Denny Laine, for one, believes that the furore stirred up by Kuti and Baker ultimately served to raise the African musician’s profile in the west. ‘After that, he came to London with Ginger and they did all sorts of stuff,’ he points out. ‘At the end of the day, it gave him a lot of publicity. Fela Kuti would never have been as popular as he was if we hadn’t gone there and done that album.’
Some hostilities lingered, however, even at the party thrown by the McCartneys to mark the end of their eventful seven-week Nigerian sojourn. During the high-spirited proceedings, EMI’s overseas manager casually walked over to Baker and informed him that he was set to fail in his desire to lure artists away from the company’s recording set-up. ‘We’re going to screw you,’ he whispered ominously. ‘This is EMI territory.’
And so the McCartneys returned to London, triumphant and ultimately unscathed by their African adventure. As a footnote to the tale, however, Paul was further unsettled upon his return to Cavendish Avenue to discover a letter from Len Wood, group director at EMI, urging him to cancel his trip to Nigeria due to an outbreak of c
holera in the region.
‘I wonder,’ says Paul, ‘whether I even would’ve taken my kids there had I known. It was quite a sort of heavy episode, really.’
Four weeks later, on a cold Sunday evening in the last weekend of October 1973, Paul, Linda and Denny stood posing in dark, prisoner-like garb, frozen in the glare of a searching spotlight, against a wall in Osterley Park, west London. Gathered around them, pretending to be clinging together for safety, were chummy Northern chat-show host Michael Parkinson, film stars Christopher Lee and James Coburn, light entertainer Kenny Lynch, boxer John Conteh and the hangdog, deadpan writer and TV wit Clement Freud. ‘It was a very odd mix,’ says Parkinson. ‘God knows how Paul chose those people.’
For the cover of the Lagos album, now entitled Band On The Run, the McCartneys – lying one night in bed, where much of their important thinking seemed to get done – had come up with a grand Sgt. Pepper-like concept. In passing reference to their drug busts and the fact that they sometimes felt like renegades, they had decided to stage a mock prison break, featuring famous faces of the period. Once the calls had been placed and everyone had agreed a date, this unlikely mob met at an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, where they enjoyed a long, boozy lunch.
In a room at the mansion house at Osterley Park, getting changed for the shoot, strong joints were passed around among those partial to a puff of grass. Outside, photographer Clive Arrowsmith arranged the company in their positions and shouted instructions to them from high on a ladder, the spotlight pointing at the subjects being positioned on top of a borrowed Post Office van. ‘Not knowing much about photography at the time, technically,’ admits Arrowsmith, ‘I shot it on daylight film, and it was a tungsten source so everything goes yellow.’
Even this happy accident was to lend something to the iconic image, which was to become almost as famous as the Beatles album cover that inspired it. Released five weeks later, Band On The Run was initially slow out of the traps, in commercial terms. Once it had gathered momentum, though, it was to prove unstoppable, becoming the most successful solo album by any of the ex-Beatles, making the US number 1 spot three times.
