Why Paul McCartney refused to play Beatles songs with Wings
During the initial start to his solo career, it seemed like Paul McCartney couldn’t win. The former Beatles bassist was being lambasted for breaking up the group when, in reality, John Lennon had been the one to divorce himself from the group first in 1969. Of course, it didn’t help matters when his first solo LP, McCartney, was a hodgepodge of home recordings and dashed-off lo-fi tracks.
McCartney attempted to course correct with the dreamy and lush Ram, but critics were relentless. Even McCartney’s former bandmates were starting to count him out. “I feel sad about Paul’s albums,” Starr famously told Melody Maker after Ram‘s release. “I don’t think there’s one [good] tune on the last one.” By 1971, McCartney elected to form a new band, Wings. He immediately decided that Wings had to differentiate themselves from anything that McCartney had done previously.
“I could have, obviously on the first Wings record, had a number of tracks that were ‘Eleanor Rigby’-esque,” McCartney told Billboard in 2001. “I would see other people do it, and there’s always been people who’ve done Beatle-y type things. Look at some of the bands who came out in the last five years; there’s a lot of Beatle-ish stuff. It’s good that they like it. I had to move on, but there were many people saying, ‘Don’t do this, stick with your old stuff, don’t take a new road.’”
McCartney elected to break in Wings by touring ad-hoc around Britain, playing at whatever universities opened their doors to him. The decision was made to avoid all Beatles material. McCartney wouldn’t even attempt previous hits like ‘Another Day’ or ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’. Instead, Wings almost exclusively played new material for audiences who were largely unfamiliar or uninterested in the new band.
Sticking to his guns proved to be a smart decision. Wings scored their first number one hit with 1973’s ‘My Love’. When the group were reduced to a trio for that year’s Band on the Run, McCartney finally emancipated himself with the album’s title track. With a fresh lineup and some real success under their belt, Wings launched the massively successful Wings Over The World tour in 1975, with McCartney finally bringing back Beatles classics like ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’.
“As time went by and the pressure was off, I could nod and wink at the Beatles stuff, so I could now do ‘Yesterday’ on a Wings tour, and it didn’t hurt,” McCartney said. “But until we had enough Wings songs and an identity as a group, I didn’t do any of that, even though the promoters were weeping, ‘Please finish with ‘Yesterday.’ And I’d say, ‘No, we’re not even gonna do it.'”
Watch Wings perform ‘Yesterday’ from the 1980 concert film Rockshow down below.
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