Paul McCartney & Wings

Initially reviled, then loved, before ending up somewhere inbetween those two extremes – Wings had the misfortune of being Paul McCartney‘s immediate post-Beatles musical project. Thus, appeasing a shocked and irrational fan base with anything new was always going to be an uphill struggle. To make matters worse, the band included – horror of all horrors – Macca’s wife, rock photographer Linda Eastman, already held responsible in some quarters for causing the Fab One to call time on the Fab Four after 8 dizzyingly momentous and gloriously successful years.

After a bitter, painful parting of the ways with his former comrades, McCartney disappeared to a Scottish Highland retreat to renovate a farm, write soppy songs about the Lovely Linda, milk a few cows and shear some sheep. His Beatle assets temporarily frozen in legal red-tape, and at a loss as to what to do next, it was – with his better half’s help – back to the drawing board.

Five years later, Wings would be one of the biggest acts in the world in their own right. Another half-decade on again, and Wings were no more – busted for possession of marajuana while on tour in the Far East, McCartney then abruptly brought the band to an end. Wingspan primarily covers this part of the Paul McCartney story – 1970-1980 – although several solo singles from the early Eighties have mysteriously crept in (more on those later).

Spread across 2 CDs – “Hits” and “History” – the 40 tracks offer a pretty comprehensive snapshot of what Wings were capable of. Certainly, McCartney’s only other retrospective – 1987’s All The Best! – failed to represent this period of his career quite as well as Wingspan does. Fear not this time, for the likes of Ebony & Ivory and We All Stand Together are nowehere to be seen.

The chronology is once again scrambled as it was on All The Best!, which is a pity since Wings evolved steadily with each release, and hearing the songs in the order they were recorded might have been more rewarding. Of course, CD technology still allows this, so make use of it! Also, in a bizarre move, the “History” disc actually contains a fair few Top 20 singles, some of them better-known than those on “Hits”. Hmmm.

CD1 opens with the #6 hit Listen To What The Man Said, from 1975’s Venus & Mars. Why? It’s mid-period Wings, confidently melodic and infectious pop, but hardly a suitable starting place. No, let us begin at the real beginning….

In early 1970, McCartney’s debut solo (self-titled) album reaches #1 while The Beatles’ final album Let It Be awaits release….it’s just Another Day, doo do do do dooo, as his first single from the following year might put it. The standout track, Maybe I’m Amazed (scandalously sidelined here to CD2), eventually became a Top 30 hit in 1977 and it remains one of his finest-ever compositions… worthy of being a Beatles record, no less. Impassioned, deeply personal and intensely romantic without being drippy. In some ways, it never got any better.

Several other selections from this era crop up on the second disc – The Lovely Linda, Man We Was Lonely, Junk and Every Night. A rustic sound for the most part, and far from the polished grandeur of latterday Wings, but no less appealing for that. Although, at this point, the band had yet to be conceived…. it was Paul & Linda McCartney on the record sleeves – and in the studio.

A couple of singles hit the charts in ’71, Back Seat Of My Car and the aforementioned Another Day – a low-key, acoustic and slightly melancholy song – not what people expected, one asusmes, but a #2 hit nevertheless – while Ram made it two chart-topping albums in a row. The Pepper-esque Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey makes it onto “Hits”, suggesting that the American market has some bearing upon this collection’s choice of material (it was an US-only single from Ram), while a handful of other tracks on the album appear on CD2. Then it was time for the birth of a proper, bonafide band – Wings.

After a tricky start with the moderately successful Wings Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway albums (from which perhaps only the evergreen slushfest My Love has stood the test of time) and the banned single Hi Hi Hi / C Moon, McCartney rediscovered his Midas touch in late 1973. The album? Band On The Run. Two massive hit singles, 124 weeks on the UK chart, and one in the eye for all those detractors who said he couldn’t cut it outside of The Beatles. Unsurprisingly, a good portion of the album is included on Wingspan. The euphoric, nonsensical Jet still causes goosebumps, while Let Me Roll It, Bluebird and the three-act title track are almost as magnificent. The same year saw McCartney realise a long-held ambition to pen a James Bond theme song, with the explosive Live And Let Die – still among the greatest 007 tunes ever made.

What Wingspan also thankfully overlooks are the slightly embarrassing early-70s singles Mary Had A Little Lamb and the notorious Give Ireland Back To The Irish. Instead, there’s just a solitary 1974 release – Junior’s Farm – before the golden era of 1975-1977 that saw Wings become a globe-straddling sensation, racking up huge sales all over the place and playing to a then all-time-largest live audience at one show on the US leg of the Wings Across America tour. The classic AoR of Silly Love Songs and the dreamlike march of Let ‘Em In were back-to-back #2 hits in Britain during 1976.

None of this however, and not even the level of sales experienced by his old band at the height of Beatlemania, could compare to the extraordinary success achieved by 1977’s 2-million selling Mull Of Kintyre. Everyone of a certain age must surely know this song better than they’d like to, but time has been kind to its simple charms. Now that the stigma attached to Mull of Kintrye has effectively passed for all but the most embittered punk-loving revisionists, it no longer overshadows the rest of McCartney’s (and Wings’) career.

There was time for a couple more hits in the shape of With A Little Luck (1978, daft but harmless) and Goodnight Tonight (1979, nothing special) before that Japanese customs official inadvertently finished Wings off. Actually, Wingspan fails to tell quite the full story, as arguably McCartney’s greatest post-Beatle song – Old Siam Sir, from the final Wings album Back To The Egg – is missing when it simply shouldn’t be. Not with two whole CDs’ worth of space available.

So, in terms of Wings, that’s effectively it. Yet this compilation continues onwards, covering McCartney’s next batch of solo efforts – the funky, helium-voiced Coming Up and the reflective Waterfalls from 1980’s McCartney II, the breezy Take It Away and gorgeous title track from Tug Of War (1982), his first solo UK #1 single Pipes Of Peace (1983) and even two versions of the 1984 smash No More Lonely Nights, from his own ill-fated Give My Regards To Broad Street movie. Strange. Why are they here? Only he knows.

The world awaits a true McCartney retrospective – please please PLEASE can we have a box-set covering his entire output from the 60s to his most recent Rock’n’Roll project? It would be worth every penny – Wingspan is a decent encapsulation of those *difficult* years. Out of favour with the critics, struggling to win over a generation of Beatles fans unable to accept that band’s demise, finding his way again with the love and comfort of a new-found domesticity (his wife and children followed him everywhere during the 1970s)….and you know what? He conquered the music world for a second time in the process, against all the odds.

“Yeah right!”, you may say dismissively…but 25 years ago, Wings were big, BIG news. How quickly we forget. This compilation proves that Wings WERE rather good indeed.