FEATURE:
Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run at Fifty
Ranking the Nine Tracks
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THE third studio album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney on 7th April, 1973, rehearsing with Wings before their British Tour/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Kay/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
by Wings (or Paul McCartney and Wings), Band on the Run turns fifty on 5th December (in the U.S. 30th November in the U.K.). A classic album from a band that many had written off prior to the release of their third studio album, this classic was unleashed into the world on 30th November, 1973. An early Christmas treat for fans of Paul McCartney and Wings! Mostly recorded out of EMI's studio in Lagos, Nigeria, it is the band – forgive the pun here… – spreading their wings. Paul McCartney wanted to record somewhere a little more exotic than he was used to (I guess, at this point, the U.K.). The band suffered some upset and upheaval just before leaving for Lagos when drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough left. There was no time to do anything about the situation, so Wings became a trio of Paul and Linda McCartney plus Denny Laine. The studio conditions in Lagos were quite grim. The McCartneys had song lyrics and demos robbed from them. Maybe an international move they regretted, there was additional work at London’s AIR Studios.
In spite of all of that hardship and setbacks, Band on the Run is the ultimate Paul McCartney and Wings release. One of Paul McCartney’s best albums of the 1970s. An all-time classic that I have a lot of love for. I first heard it when I was a child. I knew The Beatles’ music, though this sounded different yet similar. Not used to Paul McCartney outside of the band, I was hooked on Band on the Run pretty quickly, mind. It is timeless and filled with variety and strong moments. To mark the upcoming fiftieth anniversary, I am going to rank the album’s nine tracks (I am using The Beatles Bible as reference when it comes to the songs and details etc.). There might be some obvious placings, though a few might not be! Prior to the big 5-0 of Band on the Run on 30th November (5th December in the U.S.), here is my ranking of…
ITS wonderful songs.
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NINE: No Words
“Written by: McCartney-Laine
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: vocals, guitar
Ian Horne, Trevor Jones: backing vocals
Denny Laine’s first co-writing credit on a Wings release, ‘No Words’ was written before the release of Red Rose Speedway but wasn’t recorded until the Band On The Run sessions in the summer of 1973.
I’m kind of an odd-job man in this group. I look on Band On The Run as definitely their album. We’re not a group anymore. I’m one of the three or I’m an individual. If it was Wings, I’d feel more a part of it. But it’s not my songs and I’d like to feel more involved and contribute as much as they do. I did write one of the songs on the album and Paul helped me out with it. I’d like to do more like that.
Denny Laine
The basic track was recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, and was completed in September 1973 following Wings’ return to England. The orchestral arrangements were by Tony Visconti, and were recorded at George Martin’s AIR Studios in London.
In search of a new direction, and possibly to give an injection of something different, Paul and Linda, along with Denny Laine, had gone to Lagos in Nigeria to make their next album. In late September, shortly after they returned we got a phone call at our home from Macca. After he talked briefly to Mary she handed me the phone.
‘Hi Tony, I love the strings on T.Rex records, did you write them?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Can you really read and write music?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh right, in that case will you write strings for the album I’ve just finished?’
‘YES!’
The next day, a Sunday afternoon, Mary, our ten-month-old son and I made the short trip over to the McCartneys’ home in St John’s Wood. Mary and Linda sat in the living room with the McCartney children making a fuss over our little Morgan. In the same room Paul sat at the piano with me sitting next to him and played me snippets of songs on a portable cassette player, while on a second one he recorded his comments and his piano doodlings for string ideas. Some ideas he wanted me to strictly adhere to and some were just sketches that I was asked to improve upon. For a song called ‘Drink To Me (The Picasso song)’ [sic] he said, ‘Just do your thing, but in the style of Motown strings.’
I was thrilled to be doing this for one of my idols but not so thrilled when he told me he needed all seven arrangements by Wednesday.
I hardly slept for two days. I also had to book and strategize the session, starting with the sixty musicians needed for the title track, ‘Band on the Run’, down to the string quartet for ‘No Words’. When I arrived at AIR Studios I’m sure I looked bedraggled, I definitely felt it. I was greeted by Paul, Linda and Denny along with their great engineer Geoff Emerick. The sixty musicians are already there and I braced myself to begin the tedious arm waving (my bad style of conducting) and note correcting. The very first thing we did was the interlude between the first and second parts of ‘Band On The Run’; it proved to be very difficult because the first section is in an entirely different tempo from the next. We just kept doing take after take until we got the transition to work smoothly. Only some of the sixty musicians were wearing headphones, so it was a genuine job of conducting to bring them in and to keep them together. The rest of the day went a lot smoother. For the most part Paul acted the jovial perfectionist, which made it all seem like fun.
Tony Visconti
Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy”.
EIGHT: Bluebird
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar
Linda McCartney: backing vocals
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
Howie Casey: saxophone
Remi Kebaka: percussion
Written during a holiday in Jamaica, ‘Bluebird’ continued the themes of personal emancipation explored by Paul McCartney on his 1968 song ‘Blackbird’.
When you write something satisfying, it’s a feeling that makes you want to do it again. It’s an ‘at home’ songs, when I would have some free time, sitting around with a guitar. It’s a bird flying in, from the point of view of the bird. It’s actually the bird singing it, so it’s mystical, I suppose. It could work in a mystical Chinese movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragen; it’d fit in something like that.
Paul McCartney
Billboard, 17 March 2001
McCartney used the flight of a bluebird as a metaphor for the power of love to set a person free from mental and physical constraints. Whereas ‘Blackbird’ had been written about the civil rights struggle in the United States, ‘Bluebird’ was more personal, and reflected his contentment with Linda McCartney and the stability after the dissolution of The Beatles’ business partnership.
Recording for ‘Bluebird’ began in Lagos, Nigeria, and the song was completed at George Martin’s AIR Studios in London. Coincidentally, the percussionist on the song was a Nigerian working in the English capital.
The only other musician on the album, other than the orchestra, is, funnily enough, African! We were gonna use African musicians, but when we were told we were about to pinch the music we thought ‘Well, up you, we’ll do it ourselves then, so there’s no question about it.’ Then we were back in London working at AIR Studios and this old friend from the past named Remi Kabaka turns up. And he’s from Lagos! He played on one of the tracks, he plays a bit of percussion on ‘Bluebird’, so he’s the only one who ended up doing anything on the album.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney In His Own Words, Paul Gambaccini”.
SEVEN: Mamunia
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar
Linda McCartney: backing vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
Meaning ‘safe haven’ in Arabic, Mamunia was the name of a house in Lagos, Nigeria, the city where much of Wings’ 1973 album Band On The Run was recorded.
According to issue 41 of Club Sandwich (1986), the fan club publication from McCartney’s MPL Communications, Paul and Linda McCartney once stayed at a hotel with a similar name, La Mamounia, in the Moroccan city of Marrakech. The spelling was slightly different, but the misconception that ‘Mamunia’ was named after the hotel was believed by many.
The lyrics are chiefly concerned with rain in Los Angeles, although the song was inspired by a 1973 visit Wings made to Tunisia. In the song, rain acts as a metaphor for rebirth and renewal. McCartney’s statement that the weather “ain’t bad, don’t complain” bears a similarity to John Lennon’s words on The Beatles’ 1966 b-side ‘Rain’.
Fittingly, the song was recorded in a heavy storm in Lagos, Nigeria, the first song to be taped during the Band On The Run sessions. One of McCartney’s road crew kept a rhythm on a bass drum on the recording, though was uncredited.
Paul McCartney’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar on ‘Mamunia’ recalls his work on the 1968 White Album sessions, notably his songs ‘Rocky Raccoon’ and ‘Mother Nature’s Son’.
‘Mamunia’ was the original b-side to the ‘Jet’ single, although early pressings were withdrawn in early 1974 and the song was replaced with ‘Let Me Roll It’. The change occurred as ‘Mamunia’ was being considered for a single release in its own right”.
SIX: Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals
Denny Laine: vocals, guitar
Ginger Baker: percussion
Pierre Le Sève: spoken word
The longest song on Wings’ 1973 album Band On The Run, ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me)’ was written during a dinner party Paul and Linda McCartney had in Montego Bay, Jamaica with the actor Dustin Hoffman.
On one of our Jamaican holidays we had heard that Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen were around, shooting the film Papillon. We were invited to visit the set and Dustin asked us back to his house for dinner. He was asking me how I write songs; I explained that I just make them up. He said, Can you make up a song about anything?’ I wasn’t sure, but he pulled out a copy of Time, pointed to an article and said, ‘Could you write a song about this? It was a quote from Picasso, from the last night of his life. Apparently, he had said to his friends, ‘Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore,’ and then gone to bed and died in his sleep. So I picked up a guitar, started to strum and sing ‘Drink to me, drink to my health…’, and Dustin was shouting to his wife, ‘He’s doing it! He’s doing it! Come and listen!’ It’s something that comes naturally to me but he was blown away by it. And that song became ‘Picasso’s Last Words’.
Paul McCartney
Wingspan
The issue of Time magazine was dated 23 April 1973, and the article in question was titled ‘Pablo Picasso’s Last Days and Final Journey’. Hoffman later described watching McCartney compose the song as “right under childbirth in terms of great events of my life”.
FIVE: Jet
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
Howie Casey: saxophone
The first single to be released from the Band On The Run album, ‘Jet’ was – like The Beatles’ ‘Martha My Dear’ – named after one of Paul McCartney’s pets.
We’ve got a Labrador puppy who is a runt, the runt of a litter. We bought her along a roadside in a little pet shop, out in the country one day. She was a bit of a wild dog, a wild girl who wouldn’t stay in. We have a big wall around our house in London, and she wouldn’t stay in, she always used to jump the wall. She’d go out on the town for the evening, like Lady And The Tramp. She must have met up with some big black Labrador or something. She came back one day pregnant. She proceeded to walk into the garage and have this litter… Seven little black puppies, perfect little black Labradors, and she’s not black, she’s tan. So we worked out it must have been a black Labrador. What we do is if either of the dogs we have has a litter, we try to keep them for the puppy stage, so we get the best bit of them, and then when they get a bit unmanageable we ask people if they want to have a puppy. So Jet was one of the puppies. We give them all names. We’ve had some great names, there was one puppy called Golden Molasses. I rather like that. Then there was one called Brown Megs, named after a Capitol executive. They’ve all gone now. The people change the names if they don’t like them.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney In His Own Words, Paul Gambaccini
Curiously, by the time of 2021’s The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, McCartney was claiming that Jet was not a dog but a pony belonging to his daughter Mary.
‘Jet’ was actually the name of a pony, a little Shetland pony that we had for the kids on the farm. My daughter Mary was born in 1969, so in 1973, when the song was written, she was four. Stella would have been two, so they were little. But to know that Jet is a pony is about as important, or unimportant, as knowing that Martha in ‘Martha My Dear’ is a sheepdog.
I remember exactly how the song started. We were in Scotland. I had my guitar, surprise, surprise. There was a big hill which had the site of a fortress on top of it, an old Celtic fort. It’s now primarily an ordnance survey marker. It was an extraordinarily good vantage point. The kind of place where you could imagine the Vikings coming up the hill while we poured oil on them or, if that didn’t work, threw some spears at them. There were some lovely little spots on the hillside where we all liked to hang out.
I had told Linda I’d be gone for a while, and as I lay there on this beautiful summer’s day, I let my mind wander. Some of the imagery is drawn from the relationship between Linda and her father [Lee Eastman]. He was a cool guy – very accomplished – but he was a little bit too patriarchal for my liking. I got on well with him, but he was a bit strict. That’s partly where the ‘sergeant major’ comes from. He also comes partly from Gilbert and Sullivan and ‘the very model of a modern Major-General’. Partly, too, from Bootsie and Snudge, the UK television sitcom, which had a character called Sergeant-Major Claude Snudge…
Anyhow I made it all up, played it on the guitar, came back to the farmhouse and played it for Linda. I asked her what she thought. She liked it! And that was what came out of my afternoon up on the hill. This wasn’t Mount Sinai and I didn’t come back with the Tablets of the Law, but I did come back with ‘Jet’.
Paul McCartney
The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present”.
FOUR: Mrs. Vanderbilt
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
Howie Casey: saxophone
An album track from the 1973 Paul McCartney and Wings album Band On The Run, ‘Mrs Vandebilt’ later became a fixture of McCartney’s live shows.
The name was a misspelling of the Vanderbilt family, the US dynasty of Dutch descent whose patriarch, Cornelius Vanderbilt, made a fortune in the 19th century through rail and shipping empires.
The lyrics, however, contained little more than a passing mention to the family – notably in the lines “When your pile is on the wane/You don’t complain of robbery”, a reference to the family’s financial decline in the 20th century. Instead, McCartney used the name as a starting point for a scenario of his own invention.
‘Mrs Vandebilt’ was a good one. I didn’t know anything about her but I just knew she was like… a rich person.
Paul McCartney
Wingspan”.
THREE: Let Me Roll It
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
The song which closed the first side of Wings’ 1973 album Band On The Run, ‘Let Me Roll It’ was interpreted by many as an echo of the stripped-down production of the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album and Lennon’s single ‘Cold Turkey’.
I still don’t think it sounds like him [John Lennon], but that’s your opinion. I can dig it if it sounds that way to you.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney In His Own Words, Paul Gambaccini
By 2021 McCartney was more willing to admit the similarities to his former bandmate.
Bog echo. We always called it bog echo because it’s like the echo in a toilet, known to us as a ‘bog’. We’d shout up to the control room, ‘Can we have the bog echo, please?’ And they would ask, ‘Do you want it at 7.5 inches per second or 15 inches per second?’ We would say, ‘We don’t know. Play them both.’ The echo was on tape in those days. Short bog echo, long bog echo. It was very Gene Vincent. Very Elvis.
John loved this tape echo and used it more than any of us, so it became a signature sound on his solo records. I’m acknowledging that by using it here. I remember first singing ‘Let Me Roll It’ and thinking, ‘Yeah, this is very like a John song.’ It’s in John’s area of vocalisation, needless to say, but the most Lennon-esque thing is the echo.
The single most significant element in this song is not the echo, though. It’s not the vocalisation. It’s not the lyrics. It’s the guitar roff. The word that comes to mind is ‘searing’. It’s a searing little thing. We can talk about lyrics till the cows come home, but a good riff is a rare beauty. This one is so dramatic that people in the audience gasp when they hear it. Because it stops so abruptly, it feels like everything freezes. Time freezes.
Paul McCartney
The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present”.
TWO: Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five
“Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, piano, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: vocals, guitar
The final song on Wings’ 1973 album Band On The Run, ‘Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five’ was based on an idea that Paul McCartney had for some months prior to its recording.
McCartney’s starting point was the opening line, although it took some time for the rest of the song to be written.
With a lot of songs I do, the first line is it. It’s all in the first line, and then you have to go on and write the second line. With ‘Eleanor Rigby’ I had ‘picks up the rice in the church where the wedding has been.’ that was the one big line that started me off on it. With this one it was ‘No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty-five.’ That’s all I had of that song for months. ‘No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty… six?’ It wouldn’t have worked!
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney In His Own Words, Paul Gambaccini
As with ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me)’ before it, the song refers to other moments on Band On The Run, giving the impression of a unified body of work. In this case, ‘Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five’ ends with a reprise of the album’s title track.
When I read George Orwell’s 1984 I was just a kid, and I thought it was so far into the future I mightn’t live to see it. Like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey – impossibly distant. Now they’re well behind us.
The idea behind the song is that this is a relationship that was always meant to be. No one in the distant future is ever going to get my attention, because I’ve got you. But when this was written, 1985 was only twelve years away; it wasn’t the very distant future – only the future in this song. So, this is basically a love song about the future.
Paul McCartney
The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present”.
ONE: Band on the Run
Written by: McCartney
Recorded: August-November 1973
Producer: Paul McCartney
Personnel
Paul McCartney: vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums
Linda McCartney: backing vocals, keyboards
Denny Laine: backing vocals, guitar
The title track of Paul McCartney’s fifth post-Beatles album, ‘Band On The Run’ was a three-part song, inspired in part by a remark about the business meetings at Apple in 1969.
It’s just a good flow of words. I really don’t analyze stuff, and if I do I kind of remember what it meant about three months later, just lying in bed one night.
It started off with ‘If I ever get out of here.’ That came from a remark George made at one of the Apple meetings. He was saving that we were all prisoners in some way, some kind of remark like that. ‘If we ever get out of here,’ the prison bit, and I thought that would be a nice way to start an album. A million reasons, really. I can never lay them all down. It’s a million things, I don’t like to analyze them, all put together. Band on the run – escaping, freedom, criminals. You name it, it’s there.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney In His Own Words, Paul Gambaccini
The Beatles had often combined half-finished song fragments together, in works such as ‘A Day In The Life’, ‘She Said She Said’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, and the celebrated Abbey Road medley. John Lennon, in particular, often combined three unrelated ideas in one song, a technique used on ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, ‘God’, and ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’.
On ‘Band On The Run’, McCartney used the same technique, although unlike Lennon, the different parts stood in marked contrast from one another. The song begins with the band’s incarceration, “stuck inside these four walls”, in a gently melodic passage which gives way to thoughts of escape”