“It was very intense”: The one concert that reduced Paul McCartney to tears
There was a good chance that The Beatles would have still been performing had Paul McCartney had anything to say about it.
Even though it was impractical for any of them to play and be heard over the screaming crowds that came to see them, McCartney has never stopped since the band broke up, always happy to play whatever songs can put people in a good mood when they leave the stadium. But while there’s a certain emotional catharsis that comes from singing ‘Hey Jude’ with thousands of people, McCartney felt that the best shows he had ever seen were far more intimate.
But when he first left the Fab Four, those intimate shows were the only real choice that he had. He didn’t want to go out on the road as “former Beatle Paul McCartney”, so if he was going to form another band, he wanted to build everything from the ground up all over again. And if he was starting at zero, that meant going back to the clubs that he had to play in the days when the Cavern was considered the height of luxury.
It wasn’t easy for him to manage playing at different universities whenever Wings came to town, but it was much better than diving back into the arena rock realm. He wanted to have that experience of going back to those stomping grounds, but it took a while for the rest of the world to come around to his way of thinking. For a long time, he was considered the one who broke up the band, and it wasn’t until Band on the Run that everyone started to take him a bit more seriously again.
While RAM was unfairly maligned in its day for being too quirky, Wings’ third album was the perfect example of Macca making the best out of a bad situation. Anyone would have been at half-capacity after half of their band quits on them, but after venturing to Nigeria, he managed to put together the kind of breezy album that most people had been waiting for ever since they heard tunes like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’.
But a lot of that came down to McCartney internalising the kind of music that he had heard whenever he went out at night. He never wanted to be accused of appropriating the music for his personal gain, and when you listen to what Fela Kuti could do with his band, McCartney couldn’t have reached that level if he tried. This was someone who had internalised that music since he was a child, and it was a thing of beauty seeing him performing during the days when the band were out of the studio.
McCartney may have been a ray of sunshine whenever he made a new record, but hearing Kuti play alongside his band was enough to leave him in shambles, saying, “You were right in the depths of Africa. We were the only white people there, and it was very intense. But when this music broke, I ended up just weeping. It was one of the most amazing musical moments of my life. The band was unbelievable. It’s my favourite Fela song, and I don’t even know if there’s a record of it.”
If you’re playing with that much gusto and passion, though, a couple of mics set up in a room was never going to do that music justice. This was the kind of material that people needed to feel in their guts before they even played a note, and when listening to what Kuti could do on his own records, there was no point in thinking that McCartney could bring his whimsical spin on anything that they could do.
Band on the Run does have a few moments influenced by the sounds in Lagos like ‘Mamunia’, but the lion’s share of the record was never about trying to capture what Kuti was doing. They came down there to appreciate the music, and getting the chance to make one of their masterpieces down there was their way of capturing what that sense of musical jubilation meant to them.
