“Cut my throat or get my magic back”: How taking Wings to Africa saved Paul McCartney
What do you do after being in The Beatles? After Ham the Astrochimp became the first primate to return from space successfully, he also immediately became the first living being to ever suffer from one of the rarest conditions ever recorded: post-lunar depression. Even as a chimpanzee, Ham knew that he had achieved a feat that he could never go onto eclipse. You get the feeling that Paul McCartney might have empathised with Ham’s tricky impasse.
As solo artists, the Fab Four were always somewhat fated to fail, not just because The Beatles were over, but because their revolution was, too. They had already brought technology into the fold of music, they had made pop baroque, they had packaged the avant-garde with populist appeal and sang of global love; they had done it all. Now, all that was left was for them was to try and take what they had given the world and write great songs with it. The problem was that every other artist had the same set of tools available, and they didn’t have the hangover of a fallen empire to contend with.
The rhetoric had simply changed surrounding the once-fabled songwriters. They were bygones by virtue of inevitability. McCartney might have received praise as a debut solo effort, but it was still shrouded in the shadow of The Beatles—even the title implied that. So, when he got funky with Ram, a masterpiece that latently heralded indie, it was initially deemed a peculiarity that the critics decided implicated him as searching and failing to find something new.
So, McCartney formed Wings, withdrawing somewhat from being the sole centre of attention. Sadly, their first two efforts, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, failed to catch on. The days of The Beatles were now over three years in the past; to McCartney, they felt like even longer. He had to roll the dice. As Linda McCartney told Sound when reflecting on the bold move that followed. “Paul thought, ‘I’ve got to do it, either I give up and cut my throat or get my magic back.”
The coarse language is indicative of the despair he was facing. In retrospect, this seems both peculiar and entirely understandable. On the surface, you imagine that if you’ve already got the Beatles’ discography behind you, had proven yourself as a solo artist with ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ alone and had the assuredness that Ram would, in time, leave certain naysayers with egg on their faces, then you could retire off to the Scottish highlands, dabble away in passion projects, and never worry about another review. However, humans aren’t like that, and Macca, in particular, has always wanted not just to stay relevant for his own ego but to contribute progressively to society. It is to his eternal credit that all his releases bear the hallmarks of a hunger to release something with the vitality of meaning behind it.
It was with this in mind that he decided to take Wings to Africa. His ears had been perked up by the sounds of Fela Kuti, so he decided to pay him a visit. However, drummer Denny Seiwell quit the night before the flight, and guitarist Henry McCullough confirmed his departure following a row a few weeks earlier. This left a three-piece on the brink. As the Wings track ‘Band on the Run’ suggests, he was thinking of giving it all away just to quaff tea and enjoy a pint a day. Kuti – a man who was prone to strutting around five-star hotels in nothing but the skimpiest speedos – was not the sort of fellow who would happily advocate retirement to his jaded peer.
It was a relationship that got off to a cagey start. “Roundabout the time when I was recording Band on the Run I went down to Lagos [Nigeria],” McCartney explains. “The first thing that happened to me was that I was accused of stealing the black man’s music.” This was a recurring theme throughout his previous tenure with The Beatles, and while a degree of appropriation was definitely occurring, it was much more a celebration that sought progress than anything demeaning.
Thus, when poor old McCartney was met with yet more disparaging claims when he arrived in Nigeria, the trip that meant to drag him away from negativity, he was quick to investigate. He heard the figurative shouts of “He’s come here to steal the music!” and he wanted to see who was yelling it. “So, I said ‘Who’s doing that?’ Because it was in the newspaper and it was Fela, of course! So, I got his number, and I rang him up and I said, ‘Hey man, come on. I’m not here to do that I just love the idea of it. I love African music. I just want the kind of atmosphere, but I’m certainly not stealing any of your stuff,” McCartney recalled.
So, Fela went to the studio, and McCartney played him his whiter than sliced Warburtons music, and Kuti nodded his approval. All McCartney wanted was fresh impetus, and now, as fast friends, Kuti was happy to provide some. Kuti invited ‘Macca’ “out to the African Shrine“. This was Kuti’s club just outside Lagos that operated as pretty much a separatist state. “I had this fantastic evening, really quite a wild experience there,” McCartney recalls. “Talk about the black experience! We were the only white people there and it was very intense, but when this music broke, I ended up just weeping.” After a musical handshake like that, the pair were bound to keep in touch.
Thereafter, Kuti became a central figure of McCartney’s African excursion. “He would come over with like 30 wives and fill the studio full of ganja. He was one wild cat. He used to have a bottle of whisky in which was marinated a pound of pot. But we turned out to be real good friends.” Naturally, he also had run-ins with Kuti’s favourite drummer, Ginger Baker, who also brought about some experiences that pushed the boundaries of wild, but fortunately, they were all above board and certainly snapped McCartney out of his slump.
Band on the Run is a record that showcases that liberation perfectly. The past was firmly put behind with a dose of good old fun. There are sultry cuts with ‘Let Me Roll It’, waltzy jams with ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five’, and the title track put him back among the big hits—all amounting to the same unbridled creative exploration that made The Beatles masters. He had never gone away, but now he was back down on terra firma.
