The Wings concert that John Lennon ridiculed: “Just turn up at Bradford University and play”
Complex is one of the prevailing words used to describe John Lennon, and it seems particularly pertinent to his history of live performances.
From putting an end to The Beatles’ touring career in 1966 to playing landmark gigs at Madison Square Garden less than a decade later, the songwriter fostered a difficult relationship with live music, in stark contrast to his former comrade, Paul McCartney.
Back in 1970, when The Beatles finally reached the end of their tether and dismantled the band in a puff of acrimonious smoke, each member of the Fab Four went in their own distinct directions. After a few years of slagging each other off in musical form, John Lennon and Paul McCartney settled into their own respective corners of the musical world: with Lennon pursuing more experimental, politically-charged commentary, while McCartney was content in the world of pop and soft rock, alongside his newly established outfit, Wings.
Although the pair managed to bury the hatchet of ‘How Do You Sleep?’ after a few years to decompress, they never truly saw eye to eye when it came to their own musical output. After all, Lennon was using his platform as a means of political resistance and activism during the early 1970s, calling for an end to the war in Vietnam and adding a sense of confrontation to the ‘peace and love’ age of the previous decade. Meanwhile, McCartney was travelling around the provincial towns of middle England, shilling his soft rock stylings.
Lennon did return to the stage in the wake of The Beatles’ demise, but his characteristic cynicism didn’t subside when confronted with the adoring crowds of MSG in New York. “When I did the Madison Square Gardens show, I had a sort of deja-vu feeling that I’d done it all before and this was no better or no worse than it had ever been before,” he revealed in a 1973 interview with Chris Charlesworth.
In contrast, McCartney was quite happy travelling around the world with Wings, playing to fans new and old. While any other friend and former bandmate might commend McCartney for his undeniably successful and artistically gratifying new project, John Lennon couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to have a dig at the man he once called “the walrus”.
“I’ll probably go out on the road again before too long, but it’s just the itty-bitty things about it that I can’t stand,” he explained of his animosity towards touring. “If something comes up that interests me, then I may do it. I think I’d sooner play the Roxy here than a ballpark, but the complications of someone like me doing a show anywhere are endless.”
Turning his attention to Macca, he added, “I couldn’t do what Paul did with Wings and just turn up at Bradford University and play. It’d have to be something more organised than that.”
That quote most likely comes from Wings’ impromptu ‘University Tour’ in 1972, which saw them visit various campuses across England and Wales – although, to correct Lennon, the band never actually played at Bradford University, “We had to pass up Bradford the next day because they were in exams so we went back to Leeds and fixed up a lunchtime gig for the next day,” as McCartney once recalled.
Whether Lennon’s problem with the idea of Wings’ tour resulted from its spontaneous, impromptu nature, booked on the fly while travelling around the many motorways of this sceptred isle, or the mere fact that McCartney dared to set foot in the great city of Bradford.
Either way, his rather snobbish attitude towards his former bandmates’ new outfit was pretty misplaced. Wings might not have been the high-brow political activists that John Lennon was attempting to be, but they managed to connect with a vast audience across the globe with their distinctive and beloved sound. What’s more, the band did end up playing Madison Square Garden in 1976, a mere four years after they didn’t play at Bradford University.
