“I couldn’t stand”: The two Wings albums Paul McCartney didn’t think were good
It might not be expected that ‘good’ would even come into the equation when it comes to Paul McCartney’s work. After achieving nothing short of global domination in The Beatles, building from nothing to being one of the most famous men in the world all off the back of your own talent, you could’ve thought that would do a pretty good job of hushing the insecure voice inside. But as any creative person knows, to be an artist is to be a critic. No amount of success ever silences your own self-analysis of your work, and when it came to considering the Wings discography, McCartney’s inner judge was a harsh one.
But, any analysis of Wings should be looked at through the context, not just the de-facto information of McCartney’s career, but the emotional context. It feels essential to bear in mind that Wings was the artist trying to dust himself off and start again. Following the split of the Beatles, each early release from McCartney is a piece in a journey.
McCartney is, by his own admittance, his depression album, made completely solo in total isolation as he wondered if he even wanted to be an artist anymore. Ram was the clouds parting and the sun starting to come in again as he opened himself up to collaboration for the first time with people other than his old bandmates and found that it was a joyous thing.
That was the spark that started Wings. After realising how much he’d enjoyed the process of making Ram, of bouncing ideas off people and having fun in the studio crafting something as a group, he decided to start a band but start it from scratch. “I thought that to get a real band and to get a new direction, you’ve got to start at the bottom, square one — start there,” he said of that move, and so Wings was born.
That’s the thing with starting something new, though – it’s scary. By this point, McCartney had spent the majority of his life working with the same three other people. The boys in The Beatles were his musical foundation; their opinions were his litmus tests, and now, he was in a new team. So it’s understandable that this was the moment when that inner critic started talking louder, and that’s without even going into the external pressure from fans all waiting to see what McCartney’s new group could do.
The result was a self-sabotaging disappointment when the band’s debut record was released, and McCartney immediately thought it was over. “After I had heard Wild Life, I thought, ‘Hell, we have really blown it here’”, he said of their debut, and it didn’t ease up as he added, “And the next one after that, Red Rose Speedway, I couldn’t stand.”
It didn’t help that the albums kind of flopped, failing to get anywhere near the charting and sales success McCartney was used to. But, they were simply warming up. Just think, if he’d truly thrown in the towel, he never would have reached Band On The Run and saw everything pay off.
