The artist that made Paul McCartney love Wings again: “Pity we didn’t know it”
It’s hard to look back at everything you’ve done as an artist and see a spotless track record. The whole point behind the greatest artists of all time is to have different periods of music where things can get a bit experimental, and that doesn’t always equate to having a massive string of hits. Although Paul McCartney usually wouldn’t have anything to worry about as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, he didn’t exactly have the greatest foot forward when working on his first solo projects.
Because looking at his position, Macca had gone through one of the worst non-romantic breakups of his life. He may have been looking to save his own skin and get as far away from Allen Klein as possible, but by looking at what the rest of The Beatles had to suffer through due to him suing Klein, he also understood that he would be losing his best friends after years of having the time of their lives.
So when McCartney and RAM came out, you can hear McCartney slowly starting to figure out what makes his material work again. There would often be a song that stuck out as recognisably ‘McCartney’, but listening to songs like ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’ made a lot of people wonder whether the songwriting genius had lost his edge. Even though those records are seen as classics now, McCartney still wasn’t convinced of himself when working with Wings.
After all, the band would be starting from scratch like The Beatles had done in the early 1960s, and even though it was a DIY operation, many people saw it as another continuation of Macca’s glory years. George Harrison had already said that seeing Wings should satiate anyone who wanted a Beatles reunion, but there was much more to it than that.
For all of the cynics complaining that all McCartney ever did was make toothless pop music, Wings’s back catalogue proved that was justifiably not true. Venus and Mars is a rock and roll show through the cosmos, Wings at the Speed of Sound flirted with disco territory and still managed to have hits like ‘Beware My Love’, and London Town could be the precursor to what the sounds of yacht rock would become in the years since.
Although McCartney had mixed feelings about Wings’s success for years, it wasn’t until a chance meeting with Bono that he realised what he had been missing, saying, “All of us in Wings didn’t enjoy it as much as we should have. Looking back now, you can think, ‘You know what? We did some great stuff.’ It was funny, because at Live 8, I was talking to Bono, and he was saying, ‘You know, man, a lot of the kids are listening to Wings now. I hear it all the time.’ And he’s kinda got his ear more to the ground than I have. So it made me think, ‘Oh yeah, you know, pity we didn’t know that at the time.’”
And while it’s hard to grasp that a band like U2 took the ramshackle sound of Wings at face value, McCartney’s baby could be heard better in bands in the indie scene. Not everyone might be making the multipart epic that ‘Band on the Run’ was, but listening to how rustic Wild Life sounds, many artists have taken that folksy sound into the indie scene as of late. And when looking at what Twin Freaks did with McCartney’s music, his melodies could still be current even if he didn’t have a hand in producing it.
But beyond the raw sound of today’s music, the love for Wings should really affirm what McCartney had been working towards. It was never going to be easy trying to get everything right after The Beatles, but with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easier to see what the former Beatle was doing when he ventured into the world of stadium rock.
