Tag Archives: Wings

‘Band On The Run’ at 50

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To mark the 50th anniversary of its release in December of 1973, most fans were expecting an LP of Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band On The Run in Half Speed Mastered form. This would follow the pattern of previous releases for McCartney, RAM, Wings Wild Life and, earlier this year, Red Rose Speedway.

What we didn’t expect was that Band On The Run would be accompanied by a whole bonus LP featuring previously unheard music that is being termed “underdubbed mixes”. In other words, early mixes without overdubs.

These “underdubs” aren’t newly created in 2023. They come from 1973 and were prepared by the album’s engineer, Geoff Emerick. They’re basically a previously unreleased mix of Band On The Run, but without any of the orchestral and string overdubs written by Tony Visconti that were used on the final release. Interestingly, the tracklisting for these “underdubbed mixes’ doesn’t follow the original sequencing of album. The bonus LP mirrors the original analogue tapes as discovered in the MPL archives (see the changed running order below).

As Paul McCartney said:

“This is Band on the Run in a way you’ve never heard before. When you are making a song and putting on additional parts, like an extra guitar, that’s an overdub. Well, this version of the album is the opposite, underdubbed.”

There’ll be three physical releases for the 50th Anniversary, and these will be available from February 2, 2024.

You can get a stand-alone Half Speed Master of the original LP, cut from the original master tapes from 1973 by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. The single vinyl album configuration mirrors the US tracklist, which added the song ‘Helen Wheels’ to the end of the LP. The 50th anniversary album includes the original inner sleeve and poster featuring a series of Polaroid photos taken by Linda McCartney during the making of Band On The Run :

Then there’s the 2 LP edition featuring the original US album, remastered at half speed as above, plus a second LP titled Underdubbed Mixes Edition. The two LPs are housed in a premium slipcase. The set includes two Linda McCartney Polaroid posters:

The 2 LP slipcase version can only be purchased from Universal Music’s own online stores around the world, as well as from Paul McCartney’s own online store.

And there’ll be a 2 CD set, with one disc containing the original US album, and a second disc with the “underdubbed” mixes. There’s a double-sided fold-out poster of Polaroids taken by Linda included:

Band on the Run (Underdubbed) will also be released digitally. The album itself has also been newly mixed in Dolby Atmos by Giles Martin and Steve Orchard – but there is no physical edition of this mix.

Here’s the running order for Disc Two – Band on the Run (Underdubbed Mixes):

1. Band on the Run
⁠2. Mamunia
⁠⁠3. No Words
4.⁠Jet
⁠5. Bluebird
⁠6. Mrs. Vandebilt
⁠⁠7. Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five
⁠⁠8. Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)
⁠9. Let Me Roll It

Paul McCartney & Paul Muldoon Announce a New Podcast

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The podcast, which is called McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, starts on September 20. It promises listeners a fly-on-the-wall opportunity to sit in on recordings of conversations made over many years between Paul McCartney and poet Paul Muldoon as they dissected the people, experiences, and art that inspired his songwriting.

The conversations between the two were a central part of their process in compiling the book The Lyrics: 1965 to the Present, released in hardback in 2021, and just about to be re-published in paperback form – with added chapters.

Over two seasons and 24 episodes the podcast will let us in on how that book came together. We’ll be able to hear what is described as “a combination master class, memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most beloved figures in popular music”.

Each episode will focus on one song from McCartney’s catalog and will span early Beatles through to his solo work.

You can listen to a promo for the new podcast here:

A longer introduction to the podcast series is here: Welcome to McCartney: A Life in Lyrics.

For more background on how it all came about there’s also an interview in The Verge with Justin Richmond, Executive Producer of the podcast. It’s really interesting. “The idea for the podcast came through McCartney’s production team, from the person in charge of special projects. The sort of system that [McCartney and Muldoon] came up with to write [The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present] is that Muldoon turns up to McCartney’s house, turns on his phone, and records a conversation between the two of them. Eventually, the pandemic happened, lockdown, etc., and some stuff was delivered over Zoom.” 

“My read on it is that after the stress of getting the book together was relieved, they were sort of realizing that they have hours of Paul McCartney being candid in a really special way. It’s not like this was expertly recorded in the studio. It’s not as if he was sitting down to be Paul McCartney of The Beatles to give an official interview about the band. These [recordings] really have the tenor of someone sitting down with a friend and having a leisurely chat about times past. And McCartney’s “times past” happens to be, for him, The Beatles and Wings and a litany of incredible solo work.” 

Season One drops weekly starting September 20. It will feature twelve episodes examining ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘When Winter Comes’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, ‘Here Today’, ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Jenny Wren’, ‘Too Many People’ and ‘Helter Skelter’.

Season Two will follow with an additional 12 episodes in February, 2024.

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics is a co-production between Pushkin Industries and iHeartPodcasts.

(If you don’t want to wait for each weekly episode and need to binge the whole series all at once you can subscribe to Pushkin+ to get access to all of Season One on September 20).

The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1, 1969-73 – A Review

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Cool cover, huh?

That cover is a harbinger of what is contained inside.

Let’s get straight to the point – this is one of the best studies of Paul McCartney and his solo music you are going to find. Epic and essential, full stop.

The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair is the first installment of what will become a multi-volume set. As its subtitle suggests, Volume 1 captures the life of McCartney in the years 1969-1973. That’s immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which he had to recreate himself as both a person and a performer. In musical terms, this first volume takes us from the LP McCartney through to Band On The Run.

This book is a seriously in-depth and revealing exploration of McCartney’s creative and personal life. The thought and research that has gone into it is immediately evident. But it’s not scholarly and cold in tone (as some highly researched books can be). It’s actually a real page-turner! Kozinn and Sinclair write in a conversational and descriptive style that belies the hundreds of interviews, extensive ground-up research, and the thousands of never-before-seen documents they’ve trawled to give us a very approachable and personal story. They are very good storytellers and it is almost guaranteed that every couple of pages you will learn something you didn’t know about Paul McCartney and his music.

Kozinn and Sinclair initially set out to do a book about McCartney’s solo time in the studio, detailing recording dates, personnel, etc. – a bit like Mark Lewisohn’s 1988 book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but looking at Paul’s solo career. However, following a couple of interviews with former Wings drummer Denny Seiwell and the discovery of a treasure trove of additional information that he had, the pair decided to change tack and broaden the scope of their book considerably.

Once you read this book you’ll have a renewed insight into the music McCartney created across this period. In fact with the clever connections the authors make and the stories they tell you’ll never be able to hear some songs in the same light again. Take for example ‘Another Day’. In late 1970 and early 1971 the song was being recorded and worked on as part of the preparations for the album Ram. But Paul, knowing that in February 1971 he had coming up a key court date in the messy ‘divorce’ proceedings that were under way with his former band mates, wanted a new single to be out and played on the radio to coincide with his and Linda’s court appearance. He settled on that single being ‘Another Day’ to send a subtle message that nothing could faze him. Despite his life and business dealings being publicly picked over, for him this was just another day: “It’s just another day, du-du-du-du-du, it’s just another daaaaaay!”

Alongside the copious information on every page there are many illustrative photographs and memorabilia scattered throughout as well, as are frequent breakout boxes containing the aforementioned dates detailing his recording sessions.

If this truly is the first of a multi-volume set, let’s hope that subsequent volumes arrive much faster than Lewisohn’s 2013 biography of The Beatles. Ten years later we are still waiting for Volume 2 of his epic…..

Kozinn and Sinclair however say they’re well under way with preparations for The McCartney Legacy Volume 2. It should be in stores in late 2024. It will cover the years 1974 – 1980. We can’t wait to read the next installment!

Volume 1 is getting rave reviews. The only criticism of it we’ve seen so far is that the font used is a bit small and spindly to read! (FYI it looks like a slight variation of a font called Brandon Text Light).

You can read a generous extract of The McCartney Legacy here to see if you like what you see.

If audio books are more your thing, here’s an extract from the Introduction, read by Simon Vance, to further whet your appetite:

The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 is published by Dey Street books (an imprint of Harper Collins).

It’s available in hardcover, paperback, e-book and, as mentioned, an audio book and audio CD:

The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 1969-73 is highly recommended.

Paul McCartney’s 7″ Singles Box

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Just as we recover financially from the Beatles’ Revolver re-issue and box set frenzy comes another *tempting purchase: a new box set of 80 7″ singles from Paul McCartney:

The 80 singles (containing 159 songs) are to be released December 2 and represent half a century of Paul’s musical life with releases dating from 1971 (‘Another Day’), right up to 2022 (‘Women and Wives’).

The box set features recreations of 65 singles – complete with their original B-sides (using restored artwork from 11 different countries) as well as 15 singles which have never before been released on 7”. These 15 singles are made up from tracks previously released on 12”, picture discs, CD singles & promos, digital downloads, music videos, two previously unheard demos, and a previously unheard 7” single edit (click here for the complete track listing).

As you can see in the video and images, the singles are housed in a custom wooden art crate designed and built in Derbyshire in the United Kingdom. It includes a 148-page book with a foreword by Paul McCartney, an essay by music journalist Rob Sheffield, plus extensive chart information, liner notes, and single artwork.

Each box will include a randomly selected exclusive test pressing of one of the singles, so in theory if you get a set only 37 other people in the world are likely to have the exact same box set.

The set will be available to download (or stream), and two songs have already been made available. Both have only previously been available as a rare US promo 7″ single: ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ (2022 Remaster – in Mono):

And ‘Too Many People’ (2022 Remaster – in Mono):

To summarise, the numbered, limited-edition box set collection of 80 x 7” singles contains:

  • Recreations of 65 singles/promos using restored original artwork from 11 different countries (including 2 from Australia!)
  • 15 singles never-before-released on 7” including singles previously released on 12”, picture discs, CD singles/promos, digital downloads, and music videos
  • 2 x previously unheard demos
  • 1 x previously unheard 7” single edit
  • 1 x EP 
  • 1 exclusive test pressing randomly selected from the manufacturing process
  • 148-page book containing foreword from Paul, essay by Rob Sheffield, recording notes, release dates, and chart information on each of the singles – each single included is shown on the attached insert, which will be packed into each box
  • Remastered and cut at Abbey Road Studios, London 
  • All housed in a two-piece, four-walled FSC-approved Redwood pine and Birch Ply wooden art crate manufactured in the United Kingdom.

* Tempting that is until you get to the checkout page! Being in Australia we pay a premium for our lousy exchange rate and for shipping. If Australians were foolish enough to shop at the UK Universal Music site we’d be looking at this box costing £614.99, plus shipping £99.99, making a grand total of £714.98. That is a staggering $1265.02 Australian Dollars on today’s exchange rate. The smarter move would be to go to the US Paul McCartney Store. There the box is US$611.98, plus $61.20 in import taxes. Shipping, apparently, is free. That makes a total of $1019.24 Australian Dollars. That’s a big difference…..but still a hell of a lot of money. 😦

Wild Life Gets 50th Anniversary Half Speed Master

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50 years ago, on December 7, Wings released their debut album Wild Life – recorded over an eight-day period at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Now it joins McCartney and RAM in getting the Limited Edition, 50th Anniversary Half Speed Master treatment:

Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine arrived at the studios on 25 July, 1971 to begin recording with engineers Tony Clark and Alan Parsons.

“They rehearsed for a while, sang some old songs, wrote some new ones and in time headed for the big city studios. In three days they had laid down most of the tracks and by the end of a couple of weeks the album was finished. In this wrapper is the music they made. Can you dig it?”, wrote Clint Harrigan for the original album’s back cover liner notes.

On PaulMcCartney.com Paul wrote: “Wild Life was about spontaneity: the opening track ‘Mumbo’ was recorded in one take. I’d read that Bob Dylan had just made a quick album and I really liked the idea, because we tended to take longer and longer to make records. The early albums by The Beatles hadn’t taken long and it seemed to me that Dylan was getting to that. I was a great admirer of his – and still am to this day – so I thought, well, if it’s good enough for him, let’s do it.”

The 50th anniversary edition of Wild Life is cut at half speed at Abbey Road using a high resolution transfer of the original 1971 master tapes. The Half Speed 50th will be released on February 4. It is available for pre-order now.

Grail Wings Picture Disc For Sale

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It’s not often you see one of these come onto the market, so it’s worth mentioning.

The UK online second-hand store eil.com currently has a Wings Back To The Egg vinyl picture disc for sale. This super-rare, 1979 UK original promotional-only picture disc is an exclusive in-house edition conceived by Paul McCartney’s company MPL Communications for distribution only to friends, family and label executives, and was never made available for retail sale.

Widely believed to be limited to just 200 copies, or fewer, this example comes from the archive collection of a retired music industry executive.

The picture record displays the same image on both sides. Only the printed matrix number at the end of the perimeter text differs from side one to side two. Here’s the rear cover:

It is a genuine original and near impossible to find, and comes with a cool £1,995.00 price tag. (That’s US$2,720.00, or around $3,640.00 Australian dollars).

Find out more at eil.com where there’s more detailed info and pictures.

Linda McCartney Retrospective – Aussie COVID Delay

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A couple of weeks ago the weekend edition of my local newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, carried this front page article in it’s lift-out arts section:

The article inside also appeared in sister paper, the Melbourne Age.

(click on the images above to see larger versions)

This was announcing something of a coup for the regional Art Gallery of Ballarat in Victoria in securing what was to be a fascinating exhibition of Linda McCartney photographs called Linda McCartney: Retrospective. The exhibition was one of the main attractions of a bigger event called the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, showcasing photography and photographers from around the world. The exhibit was set to run from August 24 through to October 24.

Sadly though it has all been postponed indefinitely due to the Delta strain of the COVID-19 virus putting the whole state of Victoria into a strict lockdown. Due to a separate outbreak it has also put Sydney (where I write this today) and many parts of the state of New South Wales also into lockdown……

It is all very disappointing. This would have been the first time this extensive look back at the career of Linda McCartney (1941-1998) would have been shown in Australia. Curated by Paul McCartney, along with his daughters Mary and Stella, Linda McCartney: Retrospective features more than 200 photographs, including images of the McCartney family, the 1960s music scene, and a series of prints from the McCartney’s time in Australia between 1975 and 1993 which have never been shown before.

From the exhibit website: “Linda McCartney’s photographic career spanned from 1965 to 1997, during which [she] bore witness to the evolution of pop and youth culture as we know it. Linda’s early portraits of the burgeoning New York 1960s music scene capture the vulnerability of future world conquering rock stars. Known for her portraits of Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, among many others, she was the first female photographer whose work was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1968, with a portrait of Eric Clapton. Linda McCartney: Retrospective showcases some of the most iconic artists and moments from the 1960s music scene alongside intimate family portraits. The photographs capture the world as she experienced it, representing the people, places and landscape around Linda in her inimitable, spontaneous and experimental style.”

The exhibition that was to be shown here has some images exclusive to Australia, but the core works have been shown at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery in 2019, and also last year at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. This video give just a taste of what we’re missing:

See also lindamccartney.com for more.

The Ballarat International Foto Biennale site says “New Dates To Be Announced“, so……fingers crossed.

Wings Greatest – Strange Bulgarian Pressing

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There’s nothing we love more than discovering a strange or different pressing of a very well-known album – and this one, Paul McCartney and Wings’ Wings Greatest, fits the bill perfectly.

It’s the official Bulgarian release on the Balkanton label, and we were alerted to it by old friend Andrey – who helps maintain the fantasticly comprehensive The Beatles Get Back in the USSR site.

This copy of Wings Greatest is not only distinguished by its unusual labels (see below), but also the fact that it comes with one less song than every version we can find released anywhere else in the world. You can see that Side 1 is missing the track ‘Live and Let Die’. In every other market Side 1 has six tracks. In Bulgaria they got just five:Just to refresh your memory, here’s the US Capitol version of this 1978 compilation LP:

If you were browsing in a second-hand bin (and this LP comes up for sale a lot), you could very easily flip straight past the Bulgarian version without noticing that it’s actually quite rare.

We wonder if there was some sort of a licencing issue in Bulgaria with the song ‘Live and Let Die’ because it is from the soundtrack of the James Bond film of the same name? It would be part-owned by United Artists. Maybe that was it?

Now you can see on the rear cover in the place ‘Live and Let Die’ should be the words “Manufactured under licence by Balkanton in Bulgaria”.

(As usual, click on the images above to see larger versions)

My Love – McCartney’s Wings

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Back in 1973 when Paul McCartney and Wings released the vinyl single ‘My Love’, in most places around the world that’s how it was credited on the label: Paul McCartney and Wings.

For example, here’s the UK pressing:However, in a couple of territories they obviously didn’t get the memo detailing just how the band should be credited on the label.

We’ve just picked up a New Zealand pressing which is interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it’s on the green Apple label. The other is the name of the band – McCartney’s Wings: Seems that this mistake may have been caused back in England when a few copies of ‘My Love’ also escaped into the public arena there with that very same band credit – McCartney’s Wings. Here’s a UK pressing that was probably quickly withdrawn and replaced with the proper band credit (seen on the UK pressing above):

And it looks like at least four other countries (Sweden, Israel, France and Venezuela) also stuffed up:In the rest of the world it is definitely Paul McCartney and Wings that performed ‘My Love’……..but we’re glad to have a unique New Zealand pressing now in the collection.

As usual, click on the labels to see larger versions. And if you know anything more on the back story to this one, please use the Comments section to let us know.

Mike McGear – ‘McGear’ LP

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Look what has just arrived from the UK:It’s the long-awaited 2019 re-issue of Mike McGear’s McGear LP.McGear was produced by Paul McCartney, and features him playing on various tracks too, along with the other members of Wings. It features songs co-written by McCartney and his brother Mike McGear, and was originally recorded in 1974.  This 180 gram re-issue LP comes in a replica of the original UK and US gatefold cover:

It joins a nice, original Australian pressing already in the collection. The Aussie version from 1974 came in a non-gatefold cover, and so all the credits, etc are located on the rear cover:

McGear is re-mastered and re-issued by Cherry Red Records. There’s also a 2CD, 1DVD box set available featuring lots of out-takes and other rarities.