Video will appear as you scroll through the story
The Beatles · S11 E3
Band on the Run
Paul forms Wings and makes the album that silences every critic. Lagos, a studio robbery, and a record that proves McCartney needs nobody's permission
It's September 1973, and Paul McCartney steps off a plane in Lagos, Nigeria, with Linda and Denny Laine as his only bandmates. A week earlier, his guitarist and drummer both quit Wings, and Paul decides to make the album anyway.
"Band on the Run" (Paul McCartney, live at Glastonbury 2004). Thirty years after recording this in a sweltering Lagos studio with only two bandmates, Paul plays it for a festival crowd of over 150,000. Three musical sections welded into one song: a prison yard lament, a driving rock verse, and an anthemic chorus that sounds like freedom itself.
Starting Over
Wings had been a critical punching bag since 1971. Wild Life was dismissed as unfinished, Red Rose Speedway got lukewarm reviews, and Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" still stung. Paul chose Lagos because he wanted to get as far from the Beatles' shadow as physically possible.
Sources
Sounes, Howard. "Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney." Da Capo Press, 2010.
Band on the Run, Paul McCartney & Wings (1973)
The song shifts through three completely different sections that shouldn't work together but somehow do. Paul plays bass, drums, lead guitar, and keyboards across the track because there was nobody else to do it. Listen for how the mournful opening acoustics dissolve into a mid-tempo rock groove before the final section explodes into pure celebration. With a three-piece band in a stripped-down studio, he built something that sounds bigger than anything Wings ever recorded at full strength.
Sources
Miles, Barry. "Many Years From Now." Secker & Warburg, 1997.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Paul lose on a Lagos street corner?
“I was told I'd gone to Lagos to steal black music. Which was pretty hurtful, actually.”
— Paul McCartney
EMI Studios (ARC Studios), Apapa, Lagos, Nigeria
EMI's only recording facility in West Africa at the time. The studio had basic equipment, frequent power cuts, and no air conditioning. Paul chose it precisely because it was as far from Abbey Road as he could get.
Band on the Run
Let Me Roll It, Wings (1973)
Critics called it Paul's "Lennon song" because of its heavy, droning guitar and echoey vocal. The resemblance to Plastic Ono Band is hard to miss. Paul denied the comparison for years, but on later tours started segueing from this track into Hendrix's "Foxy Lady," finally owning the fact that this is the one Wings song where he stops trying to please everyone and just plays.
Let Me Roll It, Wings (1973)
"You gave me something, I understood." Four words that do all the heavy lifting. The rest of the lyric barely matters because the guitar tone says everything the words don't. Paul layers his vocal with tape echo until it sounds like he's singing from the bottom of a well, a production trick he borrowed directly from the Lennon playbook.
How many people were in Wings when they recorded Band on the Run in Lagos?
George Harrison stands backstage at Madison Square Garden and convinces Bob Dylan to come out of hiding for the first benefit concert in rock history. Next: S11E4, "The Concert for Bangladesh."
0 XP earned this session