Why did Paul McCartney refuse to play The Beatles songs with Wings?
After the split of The Beatles, Paul McCartney went through a few phases trying to find his feet again. At first, he went into hiding, making music as a recluse as he licked his wounds. Slowly, he opened up to collaboration again, first with his wife, Linda McCartney, and then eventually as part of a band again when he started Wings. However, there was one rule in the new band: no songs by The Beatles.
The journey McCartney went through after the breakdown of his band makes so much sense. The musician spent his entire youth and early adulthood in the group. His friendships with his bandmates were the foundation of his early life and the basis of his entire musicality and career. His own songwriting skills were inseperably tied to John Lennon as the two friends learnt to write together, so when it came to suddenly making music solo, it was a difficult readaption.
At the start, McCartney admitted to finding it incredibly hard, to the point where he even wondered if he wanted to make music anymore. “I was depressed. You would be. You were breaking from your lifelong friends,” he said, adding he wasn’t sure “whether I was still going to continue in music”. In the process of making his solo debut, McCartney was an experiment in finding his feet as an individual.
But quickly, McCartney realised that collaboration was what he loved. Ram proved that to him as he teamed up with his wife Linda and a core team of musicians to make an album that is packed full of the fun atmosphere it was born in, being reminded of how inspiring working with others is.
Soon after that, he decided to start a new band, Wings. However, he didn’t want to just get a new cast of musicians around him and attempt to pick up where The Beatles had left off. He wanted a full refresh as he said, “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.”
In order to do that, he made the rule that Wings would never play a Beatles song. “We decided not to do any Beatle material, which was a killer, of course, because it meant we had to do an hour of other material, and we didn’t have it then,” he said, adding, “I didn’t have something like ‘My Love’ that was sort of mine. I felt like everyone wanted Beatles stuff, so I was pretty nervous on that.”
Obviously, the fans in the room that had come along to see Paul McCartney of The Beatles were left disappointed. However, the decision was made in order to protect the new group and try to carve out space for this new project amidst the looming legacy of the Fab Four.
“We were always in the shadow of The Beatles. That was the big difficulty with Wings,” he said of the group, but still, they proved that building a band from the ground up and relying on talent rather than piggybacking off the past would pay off as Wings gained their own major success.
