The Wings song Paul McCartney never meant to play live: “It’s pretty experimental”
Not every song is meant to be performed in a live setting. Just because you laid it down in the studio doesn’t mean anything to a crowd of people, and sometimes it’s better to just play the hits rather than have to worry about arranging everything for the live stage. Paul McCartney may have been just getting back into the swing of things once Wings began, but he thought that ‘Loup (1st Indian On the Moon’ was always meant to stay in the studio.
If the band could have gotten their act together, there was a good chance that Red Rose Speedway could have been a double record. They had all of the songs lined up for a decent double album of material, but since the band didn’t exactly set the world on fire with the album Wild Life, the idea of them trying their hand at a double album on their second try was always going to be a gamble.
Although the album did work decently well as a single release, there were some glaring omissions from the tracklist. Sure, a song like ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ may have been a delightful song to listen to, but why the hell did they decide to keep something like ‘Hi Hi Hi’ off the actual album?
While we can spend time playing ‘what-if’ scenarios all day, it’s all about the album in front of us, and ‘Loup’ is one of the baffling inclusions that was strange to see make the record. There were other fleshed-out songs, but hearing the track in the context of the rest of the album feels like four minutes of an interlude before getting the medley to close the record.
That’s not to say that the song is a total wash. The riff is catchy, all things considered, and given the number of effects they put into the song, this might be the closest thing to prog that the band has in their catalogue. It’s not exactly something that Macca thought should have been performed live, though.
When looking back on his body of work, McCartney thought that the track could have worked a lot better as a studio museum piece, recalling, “You’ve got some other proper songs on the album. But then we’ve got something like ‘Loup’, where it was sort of a bit of fun for us. It’s pretty experimental. But we didn’t ever play it live, it was just something fun that only existed in the studio”.
That’s far from the first time McCartney thought a song wouldn’t fit a live setting. He may have been able to bring a lot of his Beatles songs out of hibernation during his solo tours, but how would a song like ‘For No One’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home’ have worked when placed against songs that feel like live tracks like ‘Jet’ and ‘Get Back’?
Whereas RAM has had many songs that haven’t met the stage at some point, ‘Loup’ feels like it never got its fair time in a live setting for a good reason. The band sound like they’re having fun on the track, but just because you can hear the band having fun doesn’t mean that the song is an instant classic. If anything, it’s just a detour before the main event, and as far as interludes go, you could certainly do way worse.
