How Paul McCartney came up with the Wings band name
Paul McCartney knew what he didn’t want. As his initial solo career took a critical beating with two poorly reviewed LPs in McCartney and Ram, McCartney decided that he would temporarily give up making music under his own name. What he didn’t want were the pressures and expectations that his name carried. He wanted a clean slate, so the solution became obvious: it was time to start another band.
McCartney was on his own among his former bandmates. John Lennon had the Plastic Ono Band, but that was little more than a backing group. George Harrison would later form the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, but that would be further down the line. McCartney wanted a fully functioning band, one that allowed other members to contribute along with his own writing.
McCartney’s first call went to Denny Laine, the former singer of The Moody Blues. McCartney’s wife Linda was already in, and the lineup was rounded out by Denny Seiwell, the drummer who played on Ram. A new band was born, but McCartney didn’t have a name to call them yet.
“We were thinking of all sorts of names. We had a new group and we had to think of a name,” McCartney recalled. “We had a letter from an old gentleman in Scotland, which said, ‘Dear Paul, I see you are looking for a name for your group. I’d like to suggest The Dazzlers.’ So we were nearly The Dazzlers, with the big sequinned jackets.”
That idea turned out to be too flashy. “But we thought, ‘No, we need something a little more earthy’, so we thought of Turpentine. But I wrote to the guy in Scotland and told him that and he wrote back, ‘I don’t think you’ll be calling yourselves Turpentine because that’s something used to clean paint off,’ so we thought of Wings,” McCartney added.
The name Wings came about when Linda was giving birth to the pair’s daughter, Stella. “I thought of the name Wings when Linda was in hospital having Mary [sic] and had persuaded the hospital to let me have a camp bed in her room to be with her. I wanted something that would become a catchphrase like The Beatles. You know, people would say things like, ‘We’ve got beetles in the kitchen,’ and there would be some crack about it being us.”
Linda was having complications, and for the first time in his adult life, McCartney began visiting the hospital’s church in order to pray. Through that religious imagery, the name of the band suddenly appeared. “Anyway, I was thinking for some reason of wings of a dove, wings of angels, wings of birds, wings of a plane. So I said to Linda, ‘How about Wings?’ It was a time when most people would be thinking about a name for a child, and there we were talking about a pop group,” McCartney recalled.
The name came right in time too. Stella McCartney was born in September of 1971, a full month after Wings had finished recording their debut album, Wild Life. A December release was on the horizon, and the band still didn’t have a name. With her successful birth, Stella proved to be the necessary creative spark for McCartney to start the next chapter of his career.
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