Hear Me Out: ‘Band On The Run’ is Paul McCartney’s magnum opus
Attempting to pick one single song to define Paul McCartney’s career and talent would be impossible. As one of the principal songwriters in The Beatles and then as a solo artist and a member of Wings, McCartney is not only one of the best-selling musicians in history but undeniably one of the most respected and beloved. His decades-long career of experimentation, sound switches and evolutions could never be captured in one song, and his story could never be succinctly told in one neat package, but on ‘Band On The Run’, the man himself gave it a good go.
Perhaps more so than any stats or figures about his success, the most awe-inspiring thing about Paul McCartney’s career is simply the sheer number of experiences and the life he’s lived through. It’s baffling to think that somewhere right now, McCartney is going about his life, knowing that he’s the same man who used to play lunchtime shows at the Cavern Club back as a kid in Liverpool. He’s the same man who was chased down streets and flocked everywhere he went during Beatlemania, as one of the people in the eye of that historic storm. He’s the same man who wrote all those timeless songs, who sat in the studio with his bandmates and figured them out. He’s also the same man who had to grapple with the end, as he fell out with his four best friends and had to grieve the end of his life so far while the rest of the world mourned the band they knew and loved.
That really feels like the kicker: Paul McCartney is just a person. Despite being treated as a God in the music world, he’s merely a man whose talent took him far. But after the split of The Beatles, all four of these incredibly famous men turned their pens to attempting to not only work through their feelings regarding the split of the group but also to process the entire worldwide experience of the last however many years. All with various shades of anger, upset, annoyance and sadness, tracks like John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’, Ringo Starr’s ‘Early 1970’, George Harrison’s ‘Run Of The Mill’ and countless others attempt to figure out what on earth went on, and how these men felt about it.
A whole playlist could be built of songs McCartney wrote about his feelings surrounding The Beatles, the scale of fame they hit and the ways that impacted him. Really, throughout his solo stuff, that topic has acted as a grounding rod as he constantly returns to the memory of his friends and his reflections on these crazy years and the sheer fact that every ounce of his musicality will forever be connected to Lennon and the boys he learnt to make music with.
In the years following the split, McCartney tried and tried to get those feelings out and down on paper. Through tracks like ‘Too Many People’ and ‘Man We Was Lonely’, it’s clear he was trying to get it right but it wasn’t until 1973 and ‘Band On The Run’ that he finally managed it. Not only does the track seem to manage to do what McCartney was grappling with for a while as it considers his experience in The Beatles, but it absolutely exceeds anything he’d done before, standing as a true opus of his talent.
The lyrics are an easy place to begin with. Inspired by an offhand comment Harrison had made years prior about how the band felt trapped or like criminals on the run, having to forever duck and hide from fans and watchful eyes, McCartney used that idea as a key to unlock this mammoth consideration on the band. As the song moves between three distinct parts, McCartney reflects on it from different angles. In the first, singing about being “stuck inside these four walls”, he grapples with the isolation of fame and the way it impacted his relationships as he worried about “never seeing no one nice again”. In part two, he seems to deal with the immediate end of the band and the fact that after the split, McCartney genuinely considered quitting music, singing about how he thought of “giving it all away”. But it’s in the third where the song comes to life with a “mighty crash”. As the song picks up, he writes a narrative about the band on the run, reflective of scenes from A Hard Day’s Night where the group were chased down the streets. But with an optimistic, joyful edge, he seems to find a note of fun in it all.
But musically, ‘Band On The Run’ feels like the culmination and the pinnacle of everything McCartney had made up until this point. Throughout The Beatles, his compositions were getting more and more adventurous, leading up to big undertakings like the Abbey Road medley, where he clearly became interested in more narrative, theatrical tracks. After the split, it took him a while to find that spirit again, slowly regaining his confidence and joy in the craft through the making of Ram and the start of Wings. But ‘Band On The Run’ is not only a return to his previous form but a whole new scale of greatness as he manages to merge what feels like three songs, with three different energies, tempos and sounds, into one odyssey of a rock song.
Maybe Wings are to thank for it. When The Beatles first split, McCartney admitted that he was depressed. His debut carried that mood as he worked fully solo. On Ram, Linda McCartney and a small team of collaborators were allowed in as he slowly got his mojo back. But when he launched Wings, making a point of making the band start fully from scratch as if he was going right back to the start of his career for a full do-over, the energy behind his music got a full refresh, too. Seemingly boosted by the new group he had around him, maybe a return to a band atmosphere was exactly what he needed to not only process and articulate his feelings towards The Beatles but push himself into a whole new territory of greatness as an artist.
Either way, I dare anyone to listen to ‘Band On The Run’, sail through its changing sonic landscape and listen to the emotions this tale holds and try to claim that its not one of, if not the finest, moment in McCartney’s musical history.
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