“Fabulous”: the one song that made Paul McCartney choose Denny Laine for Wings
There was no real arguing as to who the leader of Wings was during their inception. Even though Paul McCartney was left high and dry after The Beatles called it a day, this was meant to be his rebirth with a whole new set of people. It wasn’t necessarily a replacement for all of those priceless memories he had with his old mates, but even Macca had to admit when his new band was able to kick major ass on their own.
Granted, McCartney did have a fair bit of learning to do after he started to wane as a solo artist. Despite making some of the greatest music of the 1970s on albums like RAM, the press and the fans simply weren’t getting it and thought that one of their favourite artists in the world had lost his mind. If they had said those same things about Wild Life, though, they would have had a fairly convincing argument.
While there is a lot of charm to McCartney’s first effort with Wings, there are parts of the songs that sound genuinely unfinished, and since most of them were born out of jam sessions, that’s not necessarily an unfair assessment, either. Many of the songs are a bit toothless compared to what McCartney normally spits out, but considering how the band were in embryonic form at this point, it’s hard to really blame them for trying to find their feet.
Paul and Linda were the two main forces behind the group, but the major force that made them a band was Denny Laine. He had been one of the main power players behind The Moody Blues, and by the time he started working on albums like Venus and Mars and Wings at the Speed of Sound, he seemed to be on equal footing with his famous bandmate, especially when working on tracks like ‘No Words’ or ‘Spirits of Ancient Egypt’.
“I thought ‘Go Now’ was fabulous.”
Paul mccartney
Then again, it’s not like McCartney was trying his best to showboat. He still felt that the band needed to be at least a malevolent dictatorship, and when working on tracks for London Town, a lot of those moments came from Laine making sea chanteys like ‘Children Children’. If it weren’t for him wowing McCartney with the song ‘Go Now’ in the pre-Wings stages, though, Laine might have stayed the course with The Moody Blues.
Despite knowing each other since they were kids, McCartney remembered thinking back to the Moody Blues classic when pondering whether Laine should join the group, saying, “[Denny Laine] came round to see me and brought a guitar, and we played some things together. We showed him the chords and we went straight into the studios, worked on the backing tracks, and within two days, it was finished. I was thinking of getting another guitarist, and I knew Denny and thought he was a good singer. I thought ‘Go Now’ was fabulous.”
However, McCartney also invited a few detractors to Wings the minute that another songwriter was brought in. No matter what Laine was singing, he was always going to be compared to what John Lennon had done with his bandmate, and even for someone with his level of musical chops, that’s not the kind of pressure anyone needs on them.
Still, looking at the way that Wings worked out, Denny Laine is still one of the central characters in their story for a reason. Considering how much Paul and Linda played together on Macca’s solo albums, Laine practically WAS Wings throughout his career, and even if he was second fiddle half the time, he helped take McCartney from close to a rock and roll casualty to a stadium act.
