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“The rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun” “The night was falling as the desert
Paul McCartney and Wings “Band On The Run” (1973/2010)
Band On The Run/Jet!/Bluebird/Mrs Vanderbilt/Let Me Roll It//Mamunia/No Words /Helen Wheels/Picasso’s Last Words/1985
‘It
may be right, it be fine, it may get love but I’m not sure it gets mine, as
‘Band On The Run’ I just don’t get you…’
In 1973 an ex-Beatle millionaire, his wife and the
ex-leader of the Moody Blues were on the run. Not from the law or even the
censors (not this year, for once) and not even from the taxman as rivals The Rolling
Stones were the year before, but from themselves. Wings were probably the most
unstable band on the planet - well, till the Sugababes at least - going through
something like nine line-up changes during their seven years together, but 1973
was the first real test for them as a band, with both guitarist Herny
McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell leaving the group somewhere between
McCartney booking the band on a flight to Africa to record the album and the
five of them actually making the plane. Though Macca likes to simplify this as
‘they didn’t fancy roughing it in Africa’ the truth is a bit trickier than
this: Wings had long been promised an ‘equal’ share of tour money and recording
shares to make up for what they lost in publishing that never quite happened,
while Henry in particular was feeling restricted in what he was asked to play.
Ironically what Paul saved in airfare probably did him a favour as this album,
recorded in difficult circumstances, was the push he needed to finally make the
‘Let It Be/Get Back’ album of as-live recordings he’d been trying to get right
since 1969. Although many of these songs were written long before the band ever
touched down in Africa, this album’s half themes of escape and triumph over
adversity come across loud and clear and what’s more seemed to strike the right
chord with the record buying public back home in a way that this album’s timid
predecessors never quite achieved. Indeed, ‘Band On the Run’ is still held up
by most fans and critics as being Paul’s crowning achievement outside the
Beatles, a triumphant eclectic album that is still Macca’s best-selling album
outside compilations.
Perhaps one of the reasons this album has always
been so successful is because of the back story: the band recording as a trio
in a foreign land in a studio that didn’t even have glass in the studios, Paul
and Linda getting mugged on the way home one night and having all their demo
recordings for the album stolen, Paul collapsing from heat and exhaustion
brought on by smoking too many cigarettes and everyone thinking he’d died, a
cholera outbreak they only found out about when they’d got home when they were
being ordered by everyone to stay at home – you name it, Wings suffered it and
its made for revealing reading ever since the album came out. In fact, these
are stories that have been repeated so many times I won’t go into detail about
them again – you’ll soon find out more from the CD booklets and the various
documentaries included with each set if you own any of the quadzillion copies
of this album that have come out in the past forty-five-ish years. Suffice to
say, though, that reading about McCartney and friends struggling against the
odds is a lot more appealing than hearing about a multi-millionaire releasing
records because he wants to, rather than because he has to. Full credit to the Wings trio for sticking
with the plan and going through with it despite all the hassles when they could
just have gone home and put their feet up. But to some extent it’s a lie: not
that much of this album was actually made in Africa but back home in London’s
AIR Studios. It’s also an album that could have been made anywhere, with all of
the songs written before the trip and no local musicians invited to play
(ironically the only ‘outsider’ was Cream’s Ginger Baker, who was out there
making his own LP, came in for a chat and found himself playing congas on
‘Mamunia’). At the time the press lapped it up and its probably fair to say
that the album’s singles are sharper than anything Wings had made up till now
and far more worthy of the layers Paul’s fans anticipated. Without the back
story though, treated as just a McCartney and Wings album does ‘Band On The
Run’ deserve the huge accolades it’s been awarded? The answer, as ever on this
site, is yes and no –it is a great album and if it had been a colossal failure
we’d be plugging away why everyone should own it. But this record but not the
greatest by any means and is if anything Wings’ most inconsistent record,
ranging from inspired to insipid track by track.
Fra from being the obscure album we like to give a
heads-up on this website, ‘Band On The Run’ has been released on CD perhaps
more than any other AAA album (though Sgt Peppers cuts it close). Every time
its been released it comes with new bonus tracks added and can now be bought in
a deluxe four-disc set with a hardback book and a DVD of a tie-in documentary.
All of the bonus tracks added since the first CD in 1987 – the ‘McCartney
Collection’ disc of 1992, the 25th anniversary release of 1999 and
2010’s three separate formats – are an intriguing mix of classic moments that
shed even greater insight onto why this album is as popular as it is and curios
that really should have remained in the vaults forever. Yet even the four-disc
set that came out in November 2010 doesn’t feel complete or rounded somehow,
with ‘Band On The Run’, like its big brother ‘Sgt Peppers’, not exactly the
most substantial album around when you analyse it closely. It’s not that what
is here is awful (though ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ does get on the nerves a lot),
just that what people take to be the secret to life, the death and the universe
is quite often obvious padding. The title track makes little sense, tying up
three sections based around escape with nothing more than an ear-catcing
mellotron part and a catchy chorus to paste over the cracks. ‘Jet!’ is a great
song but that makes little or no sense either, a lyric about a suffragette and
the McCartneys’ family dog stapled together. ‘Bluebird’ is charming, but
frothy. ‘Mamunia’, named after the hoterl the band were staying in, is
gibberish even if you know that fact. ‘Helen Wheels’, a track only on American
copies anyway, is a glossy list of road signs. And goodness knows what’s going
on in ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, a track that’s clearly meant to be surrealist but
sounds more like the tape engineer has had a nervous breakdown and bunged a
whole load of tracks together. ‘Band On the Run’ isn’t the deep and
life-changing record so many people claim it to be and in terms of actual basic
songwriting is the weakest Wings album so far. So why is it so popular? Surely
not just the stories behind the making of it few people knew till later on
anyway?
No, it’s the sound. I don’t know why it took moving
halfway across the world to create the world’s best sounding prog rock album
Pink Floyd didn’t make, but if that’s what it takes more albums should be made
in Africa. Geoff Emerick, who struggled to capture the essence of Wings on ‘Red
Rose Speedway’ after reacquainting himself with Paul post-Beatles, nails this
album’s sound. Everything is crystal clear and sounds brilliant, whether it’s a
simple track with nothing going on or a complex suite of lots of things. There
isn’t much here, but the most is made out of the ideas everytime and unlike
some Wings albums the performances are sharp, note-perfect and full of
enthusiasm. The need to record effectively as a duo (with a backup vocalist)
means this album is often rough and raw and funky, but the band have learnt
from ‘Wildlife’ and made sure that they’re a band who know exactly how to make
the most out of the songs before they press record. Though many people dismiss
Denny LKaine’s contribution he was never more integral to the band than here
and he manages to mould and shape Paul’s basic ideas without getting in the way
and adding his own textures – exactly what you want from a loyal yet talented
assistant and its interesting that Wings will only ever sound this good again
on parts of ‘London Town’ (another album finished by just Paul, Linda and
Denny). Above all, though, Wings have their swagger back and sound confident
again – they aren’t the awkward band unsure if this will do as heard on ‘Red
Rose’ and ‘Wildlife’, yet not are they the smug know-it-alls who try to get
away with a bit too much as they are on ‘Venus and Mars’ or ‘Speed Or Sound’.
There are a lot of ideas thrown at this record, including a lot of bad ones,
but somehow it also comes out sounding as if it all belongs together. There are
far better Wings albums than this one, almost all of them are more consistent
(except perhaps ‘Red Rose’) and it pains me to see everyone ignore the other
albums and assume this is the only Wings record of any worth. But caught on the
fine line between ‘can we do it?’ and ‘yes we can!’, with a production
somewhere between fizzy and still and with just enough ideas to keep things
interesting, I can also see why this album is the first Wings album to be truly
loved.
It helps too that enough time had gone by for the
fuss over the end of The Beatles to die down and for fans to start
concentrating on McCartney’s latest stuff. Which in a way is a shame because
it’s the critics who inspired this album more than anyone else. This is a band
on the run, wishing they could go their own ways and be allowed to be
themselves. In a way it’s a return to the theme of ‘Sgt Peppers’ of having a
fictional band, but whereas The Beatles wanted to hide from sight because they
were too famous to let loose, so Wings are too infamous to count. ‘Wildlife’
and ‘Red Rose’ had come in for such a kicking that Paul must have dreamed of
being able to join another band and be anonymous – kind of what George Harrison
was up to when he signed up to Delaney and Bonnie’s band as a backup guitarist,
unbilled. But he also knows at the same time that it makes commercial sense to
have his name out there. Paul did, at least, get a second great cover out of
the concept, only this time instead of famous faces turning out for an
Edwardian concert in the park Clive Arrowsmith’s photograph is of a group of
villains on the run. Several famous faces take part, all of them instantly
recognisable to at least the British public of the time and the fact that
they’re living when the Sgt Peppers were all statues from a bygone age gives
this record a much more ‘immediate’ feel. Modern day commentators have rather
missed the point, now that cover stars like Kenny Lynch, James Coburn and even
Michael Parkinson have somewhat faded into the background nowadays, but these
were meant to be easily recognisable celebrities when ‘Band On The Run’ came
out, very much a part of the here and now in 1973 (whereas the only present day
figure on ‘Sgt Peppers’ was Timothy Leary, aside from a Merseybeat-looking fab
four). Its amazing, in retrospect, that Paul got so many famous faces to take
part during an era when he was deeply out of fashion and makes you wonder if
anyone turned him down (of the people here only Kenny Lynch is an old friend
and a one-time supporter of The Beatles who became the first person ever to
cover a Lennon/McCartney song although in 1973 he’d gone on to co-write with
rivals The Hollies; the rest are more obscure: a boxer, a tv presenter, a
raconteaur and a horror film actor. There is no reason given for why they’re
here, caught in the spotlight, except perhaps the link that they are all
famous, with ‘Band on The Run’ on some level an analysis of what it means to be
in the public eye, the spotlight catching you unawares before you’re ready. However
nothing on this album specifically says that – even the title track ducks out
of saying anything specific about who this band of people are or what they’re
fleeing. Why would these figures be on the run at all, never mind together?
Well, heaven knows, but as Macca points out on the audio documentary, there’s a
lot more to run away from than just the law and it remains one of Macca’s
brightest and best cover ideas, from the classy black and white and btown pose
down to the spotlight that seems to have caught the group unawares.
Macca had a major reason to escape of course. He was
still in 1973 seen by the public at large as the man who broke up the Beatles
and was deeply out of favour. In a way, though, ‘Band On The Run’ is him out on
parole, being readmitted to the community after serving time. Even Lennon had
stopped giving him a hard time in public and had public image problems of his
own the year before his ‘Lost Weekend’, while Klein fell from favour with both
John and George spectacularly (John was furious at how badly ‘Some Time In new
York City’ had been marketed; George was angry at the tax that had to be paid
on every copy for the ‘Bangladhesh’ benefit album). John even went so far as to
admit that maybe, just maybe, Paul had been right all along. This had a double
impact on this album for Beatle people, with Paul no longer the guilty party
automatically given a critical pasting and on the other hand boosting his
confidence that actually he had been right all along. The fact that Wings
managed to put together a stronger LP than either ‘Wildlife’ or ‘Red Rose
Speedway’ simply helped the album grow into something that bit bigger. It’s
like he’s been ‘released’ from prison and can finally show the world what he
can do: Macca’s confidence about what he could pull off will never be this big
again and aside from the cover and the back story, if there’s any reason for
this band’s success, both in the charts and as a record, it’s the sheer
confidence and bravado in almost every note of this album.
This also leads to the album’s half-theme. Not every
track covers the subject by any means, but ‘Band On The Run’ is all about
‘escape’, in the same way that ‘Wildlife’ is vaguely about ‘preservation’,
‘Venus and Mars’ is about ‘exploration’ and ‘Back To The Egg’ is about
‘regeneration’. Escape isn’t a usual subject for Wings - its more of a Lennon
subject than a McCartney one by and large - and is actually far more common
with other bands than with Paul. The Rolling Stones didn’t inspire many Beatles
or ex-Beatles throughout their career – indeed, many unkind critics claim that
the Stones always followed the fab four in one way or another by catching the
flu every time the fab four sneezed – and yet one thing that’s never been
pointed out is how close ‘Band On the Run’ comes to following the feel and
spirit of the Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’, recorded in self-imposed tax
exile in France. Both discs were recorded low key, with all the personnel more
or less living in the same place as the recording, away from home and the usual
comforts that go into making records. There’s the same feel of escape and
desperation on both of them too, although McCartney’s is – as you’d expect –
far more upbeat and bouncy about the whole thing whereas the Stones sound
downright depressed. Still, there’s a similar home-made, overcoming obstacles
message about both albums, that if you all pull together you can make even the
most miserable times fun.
So what were Wings doing in a half-built studio in
Lagos, Nigeria, during the monsoon season and shortly after a cholera outbreak?
Well, actually, Macca’s always been quite a brave musician, always trying to
put himself in adverse conditions to record from the Beatles days up and,
interestingly, it’s the few albums where Macca outwardly tries to repeat a
formula that come out the worst. ‘Red Rose Speedway’, for instance, went back
to the bosom of Abbey Road to repeat past triumphs and feels a rather cosy,
timid album as a result. He wanted to do something new, to break Wings out of a
tour-studio-tour cycle that had broken lesser bands than them. After all, Wings
hadn’t been formed the way most bands are, out of pressure to prove themselves
in a penniless state hungry for fame: it worked for The Beatles, it nearly
worked for Wings with their 1972 university tour, but Paul for one never had to
risk ghoing hungry to get his message across and could have lived off the money
he’d already made quite happily without making another note (which is what
Lennon more or less does in a year’s time). People don’t give McCartney enough
credit for his courage sometimes and never was Paul more brave than during the
making of this album (even if it was of adversity all of his doing) – you can’t
imagine John, George or Ringo doing this, but Paul had to do something
different, to push himself. By the way Paul can be heard on bootlegs and
interviews, as early as 1965, complaining about the Beatles being stuck back in
the same old four walls at Abbey Road when they could be ‘anywhere in the
world’ and it’s perhaps strange that it took him three years as a solo artist
and with Wings to make good on that promise of going somewhere completely new.
Having been through the rooftop concert, plans for
an aborted ‘Let It Be’ concert on board the QE2, a risky one-man solo album
made up largely of instrumentals and overdubs and most recently Wings tours of
universities up and down the country for 50p a gig, what’s odd about this
exercise is not that McCartney thought recording halfway across the world would
be good for Wings but that that the band never did anything similar again when
it seemed to work. Paul Simon, for instance, really got the bug for travelling
after ‘Graceland’ and recorded his follow-up album in Brazil – and yet
McCartney never recorded outside the mainland of the UK or USA again, barring a
brief trip round the Bahamas on a fleet of boats for ‘London Town’. Eager to go
somewhere new, Paul asked EMI for a list of every studio they had around the
world. Why Africa? It was EMI’s newest studio, only just opened and what with
Africa’s reputation for music Paul wanted to see what it was like (it might
have helped that James Brown played a famous gig there in 1970 too), with
romantic ideas about getting back to where music had come from. Very few other
acts ever recorded there though – the equipment struggled to cope with the
changing weather, there was noise in the background most of the time, the
mixing desk never did work properly and there were muggings and cholera
outbreaks all the time. Nigeria, too, was being run by a military government
who were deeply suspicious about the whole thing. Even at the time Wings was
attacked in the local press by protestor Fela Kuti who thought Wings had
arrived to ‘steal’ their local music.Things were so bad that, despite one of
the best-selling albums of the 1970s being recorded there (ironic given the
poverty that must have been all around the band) I’m not sure any other albums
were ever recorded here, with the exception of Ginger Baker’s Airforce taking
place at the same time.
With no guitarist and no drummer Paul undoubtedly
plays a bigger role on this album than any other Wings record – he gets to show
off his drumming skills for only the third album of his career for a start
(following on from two tracks on The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ and the whole of
‘McCartney’ LP) and they’re pretty fine throughout, basic but relevant and with
a distinctive feel. Who drummer Keith Moon even phoned Paul up to ask if he
could speak to Wings’ drummer to tell him how impressed he was with the licks
throughout the album as he couldn’t find the name on the back sleeve –Paul must
have loved taking that call and telling his old rival that he had played them
all himself! The guitar work, shared between Paul and Denny, is also pretty
startling: there’s a rawness and electricity about ‘Let Me Roll It’ especially
that crackiles with an energy other more Wings albums don’t have (perhaps
because of the knowledge the electricity is about to be cut off at any moment).
‘Jet!’ and ‘1985’ sound like the best ensemble playing of Wings’ career – and
yet its overdub city, with only the piano/drums and guitar laid down together
at the same time. Paul also dominates the writing credits and lead vocal work
on this album, as usual for Wings, but it would be a shame to dismiss this
album as yet another solo effort like many critics do. The always under-rated
Denny Laine plays a major role on this album and the breezy optimism throughout
owes at least as much to Denny as it does to Paul. Denny’s guitar solo in the
middle of ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’ is superb and his best outside the ‘Wildlife’ album.
He also plays a fair percentage of the inventive guitar parts here – most of
these recordings were ‘sculpted’ from a backing track of Denny’s guitar and
Paul’s drums according to the book that comes with the deluxe set – as well as
adding his distinctive harmonies.The harmonies too are gorgeous, with Wings
realising from parts of ‘Wildlife’ and ‘Red Rose Speedway’ that these are
actually their trump card and they should use them often. If only Denny had
contributed more songs to this album – and sadly ‘No Words’ is hardly in the
same league as his later tracks for the band – then his contributions would be
much better regarded by fans. Linda, too, does far more than just making up the
numbers, giving the band’s harmonies their raspy edge and adding distinctive
keyboard frills throughout (on a mellotron no less – the same instrument that
caused more than one musician to give up in despair in the 1960s due to the
difficulty in controlling the instrument). Because the band are back down to
being a trio she pulls her weight more than on any other album as nearly all of
these tracks feature her harmonies and her keyboard parts.
Perhaps the biggest marks, however, should go to
engineer Geoff Emerick – more or less the de facto producer of the record
whatever the credits say – who finally comes of age without George Martin to
oversee production this time around. It’s a credit to Geoff Emerick, staying in
a shack down the road on a tiny EMI salary when he could have got a gig with
pretty much any other band at the time, that this album comes out sounding anywhere
near as coherent as it does. It’s a shame Geoff didn’t work more with Wings
because he captures better than any other engineer/producer that distinctive
Wings blend of blissful harmony, back to basics rock and sky-high ambition
piled on top. Just listen to how low some of the ‘One Hand Clapping’
performances of these songs fall in comparison to the finished product (even
with Geoff engineering there too) – without the elegant overdubbing the band
sound heavy and overbearing, whilst the new mixes lack the clarity and breezy
confidence of Emerick’s recordings.
Overall, then, ‘Band On The Run’ is like a magic
trick. What could have been just another mismatched inconsistent suite of songs
like ‘Wildlife’ and ‘Red Rose Speedway’ ends up sounding more, thanks partly to
the fact that Wings are now pulling together as a team in adverse conditions,
partly Paul’s growth spurt in confidence now that he’s been proved ‘right’
about The Beatles affair and partly the lack of time to tinker around with the
songs and make them worse with polish as per so many future Wings album (although
many of these songs were in fasct mostly made in London). Far from being a band
on the run this is a band who know what they’re doing at last, their lost years
and cul-de-scas on their long and winding career path finally over as they
realise they can do anything and go anywhere – including Africa. There are lots
of things wrong with this album when you analyse it, songs that don’t go
anywhere or stick to one idea or make even less sense than McCartney’s supposed
horrors (‘Picasso’s Last Words’ is a lot less tuneful than [28] ‘Mumbo’ and a
lot more irritating than [29] ‘Bip Bop’!) It’s arguably a song or two short of
being an outright classic (even on the American copy where ‘Helen Wheels’ adds
another four precious minutes to the album). But what’s the use of worrying? It
sounds great and with Mccartney’s reputation on the rise across 1973 and the
public were ready to ‘forgive’ him. All it took was a so-so LP for him to go
stratospheric; the fact that he delivered one this brave and daring and which
sounded so good was all it took to give Paul by far the best-selling and most
loved album of his post Beatles career. If anyone is ever left alive in 2085
they will still be playing this album around the world, from Liverpool to
darkest Africa, where the locals might even have a plaque up on the wall that
one of the best-selling albums of all time was recorded here.
The
Songs:
Talking of confidence, few McCartney songs have ever
aimed as high as [54] ‘Band
On The Run’, which remains one of Paul’s bravest songs if not
necessarily his best or most coherent. Had it been recorded for either of the
two earlier Wings album it would have been shown up for being under-written and
over-produced, full of random mentions of Rupert The Bear’s pal Sailor Sam and
allusions to drinking down the pub. In truth parts of this song are more like a
football chant than a song. It’s also so vague: nowhere in the song does Macca
actually spell out what’s happening – sometimes this character trait can be
really annoying, as on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, but on this track for once
the very vagueness of the piece helps it work on many levels.It’s about freedom
in all its senses and forms, of being stuck inside ‘four walls’ and feeling
trapped there in this sad place before something (what?) comes along and
rescues you by giving you freedom and escape, a magic wand to help all your
dreams come true. It seems odd that Paul, as a connoisseur of ‘silly love songs
didn’t make it romance and the way the song is written it could just as easily
be drugs (no wonder this band is on the run!) Somehow though it all fits – just
about – thanks to a bravado showing that sticks three completely different
pieces in three different keys and tempos together. The highlight for me isn’t
the moody ear-catching opening with its ear-catcjing wobbly mellotron or the
catchy chorus which is as singalong as Paul rever got. Instead it’s the point
where the song stops, the guitar and strings – both the other side of a big
wall – start joining together in unity and the song becomes big and bold
instead of tiny and insecure. It’s so Macca, offering something technically
complex that’s somehow still musical and inherently upbeat, about the power to
change the world (or at least yourself). By drawing on the templates Paul’s
already used for [65] ‘Live and Let Die’, [49] ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ and the
unconvincing ‘Red Rose Speedway’ medley the year before, McCartney knows just
how far to push things here, linking three disparate sections in a way that
sounds less like a patchwork quilt and more like an epic. The rest of the song
is more puzzling, however. The opening
is a prison song so bad it wouldn’t have given Johnny Cash any sleepless nights
and the mellotron riff, while great, never quite fits. The big finale too is
just so much crashing about and after giving us the moment of release has
nowhere to go. Macca turns round and yells in our ear ‘I hope you’re having
fun!’, but the fun feels forced – the song just keeps going round and round in
a fizzy sugar-spiked joy rather than working out what to do with all that
freedom, like kids let out of school rather than kids realising they can change
the world.
The song, famously, was never intended as a single
until long after the album came out and, sort of, came out by public demand.
Many radio DJs, aware that this LP was getting lots of mileage in the press and
booming sales, played the title track and it soon became the most famous track
here, even with the high-flying single ‘Jet!’, hitting high in the charts
several months after the LP (with the record making #1 for a second time as a
result of all the extra airplay). Does this song deserve so much recognition?
Well, the plot makes little sense and all we have to cover over the cracks is
this album’s unique breezy confidence again and if you play it back to back
with, say, ‘Live and Let Die’ released a few months earlier it does sound
disappointing. But the hook that ties the song together – the head shrugging guitar
part matches against a melancholy fuzz keyboard while the drums sound like the
chain gang – is one of McCartney’s best ever. The transformation of the song
into something completely different works well too, making each of these parts
much more interesting than they would be on their own, although you have to say
that the radio edited version of the song does work rather better without the
repetition. Macca’s been trying to create a really good epic for a while and
‘Band On The Run’ succeeds where the others fail, not because of any idea or
technique but because this time Paul’s confidence is strong enough to pull it
off. Play this back to back with the closing parts of previous album ‘Red Rose
Speedway’ – [53] Hands of Love, Lazy Dynamite, PowerCut et al – and the
difference in terms of knowledge, belief and musicality then and now is
breath-taking. It’s just a shame that the song itself has somne good ideas then
seems to stop there, not so much running as standing still.
[55] ‘Jet!’ is more of the same, with supporters calling it McCartney
magic and detractors calling it McCartney gibberish ever since its release as a
‘trailer’ for the album. I don’t know what on earth this song means either, but
it sounds so good I’m under its spell all the same, with a great fierce chunky
riff doubled by Denny’s lead guitar and the horns while Macca’s rhythm thrashes
away before the song gets overwhelmed by a mellotron squeal and a chain gang
chorus. For years we believed that this album was really about Paul and Linda’s
jet black Labrador sensibly named Jet (perhaps because that’s what Jon Landau
thought in the Rolling Stone review released at the time and added to the back
of the deluxe album booklet), although Paul shocked us all last year by
revealing it was actually about a horse. Whichever the animal, one thing
remains clear: ‘Jet’ was a wild tearaway puppy/horse, quite unlike the other
pets the McCartneys owned and was always getting into trouble. It soon became a
family favourite, the yelled cry of ‘Jet!’ perhaps inspired by calling them in
after running away. That might not make much sense if you just read the lyric
book at face value (‘Want Jet to always love me’) but if you take the dog as a
symbol for someone else – Linda, perhaps, seeing as Paul is talking about
meeting her parents and she really was a wild child of the 1960s and a divorced
mother by the time Macca met her – then its actually quite a clever and moving
song about trying to live alongside someone without taming their energy or
zealous ideals. By the end of the song the narrator has given up trying to
bring them to heel – instead they’re enjoying the feeling of the wind in their
hair and a ‘ride in the sky’ and aware that they would never have experienced
these things without this sometimes difficult person in their life. The
occasional references to ‘suffragettes’ also puts this song at one with other
McCartney feminist anthems like ‘Lady Madonna’ and [13] ‘Another Day’. ‘Jet!’
is one of McCartney’s strongest rockers, made all the more exciting by the
call-and-response tension of the song that keeps dipping down into the minor
key only to explode into major key life again every time it seems to have given
up the fight, the narrator addicted and unable to walk away no matter how many
times he gets hurt. This song has, for a second song in a row, one of Macca’s
greatest riffs, marvellously doubled by Paul and Denny throughout, with a
fuzzing one-note keyboard distortion from Linda adding much to the song’s
production and giving a sense of motion and power. Many critics also rate this
as one of Paul’s best vocals too and while I don’t quite concur its certainly
full of a fire and a passion usually missing from Paul’s ‘nonsense’ songs
suggesting it meant something to him. It’s the chanted cry of ‘Jet!’ and the
following ‘wooh’s that catch the ear though, sung by everyone in the room Wings
could rope in at short notice. Perhaps most significantly of all, this song
doesn’t sound like usual – the backing sounds like Led Zeppelin and the vocals
sound like Rolls Royce, turning out a very different mode of transport to Wings
at all. This song scales new heights, though, whatever the inspiration and
whoever it sounds like.
AS we said Paul tends to go backwards when he tries
to recapture magic. [56] ‘Bluebird’
isn’t anywhere near as pioneering as the last two tracks and is just a re-write
of ‘Blackbird’ with the emphasis on descruiption rather than metaphor. It does
fit the album theme of escape and flight and is apt for a band named Wings, but
as beautiful as ‘Bluebird’ may be to follow there’s no extra dimension going on
here, just a journey across the sky (itself better done on B-side [224] ‘Flying
To My Home’). Hoswever there is a place for prettiness in music and ‘Bluebird’
is one of the prettiest Wings songs of them all, uniting all their great
strengths: a reggae-calyspo backing back when this sort of thing was still
daring in rock and roll, sumptuous harmonies (with Denny Laine especially
strong) and a lovely melody that rises and falls with real grace and panache.
What’s new is a beautiful sacophone solo from old Liverpool mate Howie Casey
that’s dreamy and gorgeous, nailing the song’s casual fliught through the
skies. The beginning of Wings’ horn section, the players will never get as much
room to show what they can do as here. Even so, these are the album’s dodgiest
set of lyrics (indeed ‘I’ll come flying to your door and you’ll know what love
is for’ is one of the weakest McCartney couplets of all time) and it says much that
Paul doesn’t seem to know whether to play his vocal straight, for laughs or
half asleep, varying his performance with each verse. It’s fun to hear him go
broad Liverpudlian in his pronounciation of ‘bluebird’ though!
[57] ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’ might not be known to everybody, but somebody must
have liked it as it was voted the track fans would most like to hear on Paul’s
last world tour and he duly obliged by adding it to the set list. It’s another
of this album’s tracks that would sound insubstantial on either previous Wings
album and is another muddle of ideas, metaphors and lines that don’t quite
work, rescued by the single best performance on the album and a production to
die for. Best of all is McCartney’s bass line, which somehow manages to be
menacing and comical all at once, powering the song through to a rather chaotic
false ending. Thematically, this is a song about overcoming obstacles and I’m
intrigued to know if it was written before or during the Lagos trip as it
certainly sounds like the latter – faced with robbery (actually mentioned in
the song), illness and loss of band members all Paul can do is tell us there’s
no point in worrying and that things will work out by themselves. Thanks to the
band’s and Geoff Emerick’s talents, how right he was. Macca even finds time to
take revenge on the title character who fans have never been able to pin down.
I’ve read that Paul might have based this part of the song on two of his
teachers, telling them to back off and let him alone – all the Beatles except
maybe Ringo always held the belief that they’d be important one day and never
let their schooling interfere with that (Paul, famously, scored all of his high
marks at school while paying greater attention to his dad’s TV set and only
half concentrating on his homework!) However, ‘Vanderbilt’ and ‘Washington’
seem very odd names for a Liverpudlian school – though I’d be willing to give
him the benefit of the doubt had he gone to an American one, so maybe they’re
Linda’s. Then again, Paul may have been inspired by the famous American Vanderbilt
family (perhaps specifically Gloria Vanderbilt, one-time girlfriend of Marlon
Brando and Frank Sinatra among other conquests), famous for their many
philanthropic projects from the 17th century to the 19th (although quite why
Macca's asking them to 'leave him alone' is anyone's guess - perhaps this is
his subconscious desire to sleep and rest hitting his perfectionist desire to
'struggle on' head first as per much of the ‘McCartney’ debut? Or maybe it’s
just a gibberish song that was fun to sing?) The dwarfish ‘ho, hey ho’ chorus
would sound daft on anything other song and yet it fits here – mimicking the
seven dwarfs’ work song with this very McCartney-ish tale about how working
hard and carrying on regardless of what life throws at you will see you through,
eventually. Finally, listen out for the rather unconvincing laughter at the end
of the track, which appears to be Paul aping ‘Sgt Peppers’ again and
specifically the laughter at the end of ‘Within You, Without You’ (only this
time it sounds like a funky party than a nervous social gathering).
For my money the album’s highlight and one of the
main reasons for this album’s strong reputation is the song [58] ‘Let Me Roll It’. Yet
again on this album the lyrics would be gibberish on any previous LP, but the
melody and especially the six-note guitar riff are so strong and the
performance of them so strong and committed that somehow it all works. More
than anything else it doesn’t sound like Macca: usually his love songs are
sweet and tender, where love is a healing positive thing the world needs more
of. Here, though, he sounds desperate, addicted to his lover like a drug and
it’s a powerful force that if turned on either of them could break them. Many
fans have commented on the fact that McCartney sounds more like Lennon on this
track and that’s not only true but deliberate, as Macca asked Geoff if he could
re-create the ‘echo’ that Lennon always loved adding to his voice to make it
sound tougher. It’s more than that though – this is more like a John song for
Yoko than a Paul one for Linda, at one with ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘I Want You
(She’s So Heavy)’. It’s all like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ done by an amateur dramatic
society as, far from chuckling in amazement at the depths of affection the
couple have for each other, the narrator is overwhelmed and can’t think of
anything else so turns this overwhelming feeling into a big production number.
The sudden release of tension during the chord change (during the line ‘my
heart is like a wheel...’) is pure genius, as the song literally and physically
rolls forward and shifts a gear upward at the same time as the words, lifting
the song along on a blissful cloud of love until the stinging guitar part comes
in again to steal the song’s thunder and put him back into his place. Amazingly
this song, which is delivered with a performance close to perfection here in
with all its blistering, tightly controlled angst and passion, sounds even
better in concert, the highlight of the setlist in both the 1970s and the 2000s.
Arguably ‘Band On the Run’ would have sold a zillion more copies had they made
this one of the singles, as ‘Let Me Roll It’ is Wings at their absolute best,
all coiled like a spring ready to strike in a glorious burst of precise chaos.
Clever programming means that the first side ends
with the bang of the last track and opens again on side two in a more
under-stated way – a running order that works far better than the more obvious
choice of switching these two songs around although side two is definitely this
album’s weaker half. [59] ‘Mamunia’
is another near-nonsense song about overcoming obstacles that, once again,
sounds as if it was written on site in Lagos (it was indeed named after the
hotel Paul and Linda were staying in on a sign written in Arabic; when Paul
asked a local what it meant he was told the closest English phrase was 'safe
haven'). While no classic, ‘Mamunia’ has the clearest and cleverest message of
any of the tracks from this album, telling us that problems might just be
blessings in disguise and echoing John Lennon’s assertion in the Beatles B-side
‘Rain’ that rain fall is a natural part of life without which we wouldn’t be
here and it makes the sun shine ever stronger when it comes out. Adversity is
really an opportunity, a chance for change and finding out what you’re made of.
This time round, it’s the comparatively pedestrian tune that can’t keep up with
the words, as it’s rather a lumpy one-note affair that only really gets moving
in the poppy chorus. However, the arrangement of it is clever, at least,
starting off quietly and worriedly before gradually flowering into an
I’ve-seen-the-light gospel type ending (in fact I’d have liked to have heard
more of this in the last verse). Of all the tracks on ‘Band On The Run’,
‘Mamunia’ is the only one that sounds like it could have been recorded in
Africa rather than London or New York (in fact it was the first of the album
songs to be started there) and even then its a kind of generic
African-music-seen-through-white-eyes kind of a style. In fact, it uses the
only genuine African musician on the whole album alongside Cream’s Ginger
Baker, who reportedly spends the song inaudibly shaking a bucket full of
gravel! (Sadly his name isn’t printed on the album sleeve and nobody is quite
sure who he was – maybe Fela Kuti had a
point after all?) In many ways this track buried away at the ‘heart’ of the LP
is the conscience of the record, the little story that makes sense of the other
songs here and as a result works rather better when herd as part of the LP than
as a song in its own right. Once considered as the third album single (before
Macca was persuaded to go with the title track), it would have been a daft
choice I think – like ‘Ob-la-Di, Ob-La-Da’ before it this song works best when
giving a dash of colour to its near neighbours rather than being considered a
track in its own right.
[60] ‘No Words’ is oddly the only Laine/McCartney song on the album, which
is significant not because it’s a great song but because it’s the first time a
future record breaking partnership wrote together (see [102] ‘Mull Of Kintyre’)
but also because it’s the first time Denny got his name on the credits of a
Wings album (barring the studio jam [52] ‘Loup’). He’ll go on to write many
more with and without McCartney – better ones than this, too, I have to say –
and it’s odd that he wasn’t writing sooner, given McCartney’s desperate
attempts to convince the music press that Wings were a democracy and Denny’s
fine songs for the Moody Blues back in 1965-1966. While much of this album and
indeed Wings’ early albums in general reach back to 1950s rock and roll, this
song stretches back to 1950s pop and is sung like The Everly Brothers (and
sister) with a trio of Wings gathered round the microphone all singing together.
Like many a Laine song, the melody is gorgeous and comes with a real
understanding of how to add strings to a song without making its chmaltzy or
losing the ‘real’ness of the song, while adding lots of room for lovely
harmonies and a stinging guitar break. Once again on this album and as will
happen on many a Laine song it’s the lyrics that aren’t quite up to the words and
read on the lyric sheet they seem very weird to say the least (‘I’m not
surprised that your black eyes are gazing’). Macca, never the greatest lyricist
either, doesn’t seem to have known what to do with this song and presumably
wrote the weakest element, the middle element of a ‘burning love’ which he
sings solo and sounds much like his usual style too). There’s a sense that the
couple in the song have stopped communicating (something not all that unlikely
given Denny and wife Jo Jo’s always fiery relatioinship) but in a move that’s
perhaps a bit too clever the idea gets lost in the song because of some
mis-communication. Why does the narrator have no words for his love? Has she
wounded him that badly? Or is he lost for words in a good way? The verses seem
to contradict each other as to whether this relationship is a good thing or
not, though both end with the lines that ‘I love you’ trying to put it all right.As
ever on this album the recording manages to get round that problem though,
suggesting an intimacy and warmth that this album badly needs on the second
side whatever the ice between the couple. The guitar lick which underpins the
song, swinging round the keys and reaching higher and higher, is another strong
one mimicking both the desperation that lies at the heart of this song and the
gentlemanly way with which he’s trying to resolve things with reason. Paul
famously didn’t get on with JoJo (or so we’re told) which can’t have been easy
cooped up in a tour-bus all the time. This song could perhaps even be about the
tug-of-war Denny felt between his then-very lucrative musical career and the
love of his life who wanted him to quit Wings from pretty much the day he
signed up to join. Feelings will get frostier between here and Wings’ final
flight in 1979, but this song sounds in retrospect like the start of Denny’s
doubts about his life with the band, even with McCartney himself helping out
with the music. A word too about the string arrangements – many of the added
parts on this record are quite cloying I find, but this one is spot on,
doubling the rock and pop without getting in the way. The best sound, though is
the magical twin Paul and Denny guitar solo at the end, similar in feel to
Paul’s brief solo on the Abbey Road medley and its a shame the song ends on
such an early fade just as its gone from ok to really really good.
[61] ‘Helen Wheels’ is present at this point in the running order if
you happen to own either the original American version of the album or the 1999
or 2010 CD re-issues and frankly, it’s welcome. I don’t buy Paul’s comments in
the booklet that this song never seemed to ‘fit’ the album – its jaunty, rocky,
fun with confidence vibe and it’s talk about escape and driving down the
motorway is exactly right for ‘Band On the Run’ (although personally I’d have
put it at the start of side two and run it out of the end of ‘Mamunia’ to wake
the album up a bit). ‘Helen Wheels’ is hardly one of Macca’s deepest songs, but
it’s a greatly enjoyable bit of fun that somehow manages to pull off spoofing
all the American ‘road’ songs like ‘Route 66’ by substituting place names with
rather less exotic British destinations while being played brilliantly straight
(all in order too with the major British cities from North to South: Glasgow,
Carlisle, Liverpool, Birmingham and London). Wings did indeed play all these
places as all are university towns, but sadly chicken out of fitting
‘Loughborough’ and ‘Adhby-De-La-Zouche’ into the lyric! Even the title is a pun
on words – McCartney surely means the phrase ‘Hell on Wheels’ but realises that
this will get him another radio ban just when he doesn’t need it (on the back
of [39] ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ and [42] ‘Hi Hi Hi’) so rechristens it
‘Helen Wheels’, the name the McCartney clan mischievously give to their jeep. Once
again what would have fallen a bit flat on albums past really springs to life
here thanks to one of Wings’ all time great performances, with new member Jimmy
McCullough’s first recording for the band on his amazing guitar solo at the end
(overdubbed onto the guitarist’s own counting of 1-2-3-4) one of the best solos
on any recording by anybody, the very epitome of escapism. But other parts of
this song are great too – Macca’s bass is genuinely inventive, dropping out of
the song a fraction earlier each verse, as if nagging the narrator on to his
destination, Paul’s lead vocal is nicely raw and anguished and the distorted
keyboard effects add a nicely exotic edge to a simple song. There’s even a
chorus line that, arguably, is the key phrase of the whole of ‘Band On the Run’
– ‘they’re never going to take us away’, linking back to almost every song on
this album, from ‘Band’s escape to the forthcoming 1985’s solid belief in
romance. A classic song that could only have been written by McCartney and
played by Wings’ greatest line-up on top form – why Paul never agreed to
including it on ‘Band On The Run’ proper I’ll never know (perhaps because it
was the only album song started from scratch back in London; in that context
this song of British place names does feel like a ‘welcome home’ message).
[62] ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ is the one song on this album that I
truly cannot bear. Infamously, Paul wrote it during a night at the actor Dustin
Hoffman’s house where Paul was challenged to write a song on the spot based on
an article about the painter that was lying on the living room table. Many
fans, Dustin included, have claimed to have been amazed at how Paul came up
with a song for it straight away – and yet that’s exactly what this badly
thought out, pointless song sounds like. McCartney did no research about
Picasso and merely recycled the painter’s last words from the article without
actually explaining to us what they mean. Is this song meant to be a rumination
on the futility of life? The absurdity of death? The painter’s life? Foreknowledge of how he’s
going to die? A coincidence? Is he toasting a life that once was, a death that
will be or the whole great mismatch of life that even geniuses can’t escape
from the inevitably of death? Chances are its none of these things, with the
song reading more like a descriptive newspaper paragraph than an actual bona
fide song. It also has nothing to do with the rest of the album (unless death
is an ‘escape’ – and that’s not how the song seems here) and the decision to
suddenly stick bits of past songs from the record on the end as an ‘overture’
isn’t fooling anybody. On the one hand the bizarre ending to this song is
vaguely clever – this is a song about an abstract painter after all and its
suitably twisted and surreal, with the chance to add some repeats of past songs
from the album (‘Band On The Run’, ‘Jet!’ and ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’) while also
adding to this song’s tale of looking back over past achievements (the Beatles
did this all the time, including the reprise on ‘Sgt Peppers’ and ‘All You Need
Is Love’). On the other hand, what is with all the cod French and accordions? Picasso
was Spanish! And what connection do Wings have to him anyway? Picasso was one
of the few people on the planet to live through the 1960-s and never be
inspired by The Beatles (maybe that’s what the appeal was, to get inside the
head of someone else). The ending is also far too long, turning into a hideous
lounge cocktail version of the song via a repeat of ‘Jet!’ that sounds
laughably awful without the riff to tie the song together. Fair enough, for a
song made up on the spot this track has some nice ideas, especially handing the
beginning of the song over to Denny where it suits his bleary-eyed folky stare
much more than McCartney’s more straight ahead rock and roll self. But why
release a song that you’ve made up on the spot to please a millionaire guest at
all? Save it for the vaults, or a B-side, or a cassette included in a letter
saying thankyou for a nice lunch, that’s all you need to do. Uninspired by
Mccartney standards, when heard as a song out of context of the album Wings
seem to have lost the plot and in context this piece only fits because enough
people have said it does over the years. It really doesn’t. You know I can’t
drink anymore…
[63] ‘1985’ is, thank goodness, a good strong end to the album –
although it sounds somewhat out of place here too, having all of the dramatics
Macca has done well to suppress throughout the record and a return to being a
simple love song in the lyrics. When Macca wrote this, of course, it was 1973
and 1985 seemed a million miles in the future, not in the past as it is now and
its vision of a happier world for the narrator just one year after the horrors
invented by George Orwell for the year before is very Macca – putting an optimistic
spin on what everyone else assumes is some dystopian future (as 1985 was the
height of the cold war, arguably he was wrong too). Yet even that isn’t as
straightforward as it sounds – the narrator isn’t the passionate
must-have-you-or-I’ll-die narrator of ‘Let Me Roll It’ but a cool, casual
bright eyed boy whose only just beginning to return the affections of a girl
whose been eyeing him for some time, imagining a longterm future together and
vowing to be there for it (it might not be a coincidence that the big love song
Paul does write in 1985 will be [199] ‘Only Love Remains’, another song about
how his feelings for Linda will stand the test of time). Curiously, ‘1985’ –
along with ‘Mamunia’ – used to be the only song McCartney had never performed
live in concert, until a shock revival
on the Jools Holland show promoting the re-issue in October 2010. Let’s hope it
stays in the great man’s live catalogue because it’s one of his best live
tracks, playing cat and mouse with the audience right up until the blistering
final chord. Like [11] ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, this song all but giggles in delight
as the narrator comes to realise how lucky he is at having found a love that’s
there for the rest of their lives, with their fourth wedding anniversary
clearly giving him hope and faith that he’s made the righrt decision, whatever
the occasional niggling doubts heard on parts of ‘Red Rose Speedway’. The neat
little piano lick is close to a giggle anyway here, as the narrator promises to
keep his promises and love his girl forever more. Then though something weird
happens – the song drops away, in come a rather mournful sounding Wings choir
and the song drifts away on a wordless requiem before starting up again. The
song gets even more emotional by the song’s end, as if the stakes are higher, with
Wings building up the tension to an unbearable point as the horn part comes in time
after time again. This is accompanied by some hoarse McCartney yells that are a
million miles away from most of his love songs before he finally breaks loose
with a ferocious guitar solo which when taken together is one of the loudest
and most chilling sounds of McCartney’s entire catalogue. In short, this ending
sounds more like a horror movie than a simple love song and suggests, what with
the return to ‘Band On The Run’ at the song’s final close, that the narrator can
only escape his problems through love, so rather than casual dating it really
matters to him if he’s found the right woman, a literal case of life or death.
Somehow, though, despite the scares the album ends on a triumphant note with a
big explosion and what would surely be fireworks if this song was ever revived
live nowadays, cleverly matching back to the opening chord of the ‘Band On The
Run’ chorus. That’s this album in a nutshell: simple song, slightly dodgy
lyric, memorable melody and a production that goes that extra mile to make a
good song sound fantastic. Overall, one of McCartney’s better ideas on the
record.
Let’s get something straight before I end this
article. I do genuinely love ‘Band On The Run’ It’s a clever, well produced,
brilliantly engineered piece of work that possesses some of Wings’ best
performances and it makes you wish Paul and co had recorded all their albums in
Africa up against it and battling problems. Together Wings are inspired,
drawing on their strengths to make the very most of what they’ve got – but what
they had before setting off on the plane arguably wasn’t up to their previous
standards, full of some dodgy words and oddball ideas that only work as well as
they do because of the confidence with which they’re played. I love the
half-theme of escape and overcoming odds which inspires some of McCartney’s
greatest guitar riffs and melodies and inspires Wings into some of their best
performances and I can see why this strong LP was a strong seller. But then I
also love every other McCartney release – up to and including ‘London Town’,
anyway, and quite often after that too. This run of Wings albums are also often
well produced, well arranged pieces of work with some terrifically clever songs
and are far more consistent than record critics would have you believe. Had
‘Band On the Run’ been less than well received, perhaps coming out at a
different period and without such a strong back story for the papers to latch
on to, then I’d be praising it on these pages for being right up there with
Paul’s best work. But that’s the problem – this album is right up there, but
it’s not way ahead of the pack as McCartney’s crowning glory and the only one
of his post-Beatle albums worth listening to as other fans would have you
believe. Undoubtedly, ‘Band On the Run’ a good, solid, dependable record with
only one real howler and lots of McCartney’s finest work. But should it really
be acclaimed as Wings’ best ever release? Not so – ‘Ram’ is a stronger album
all round, ‘London Town’ covers more ground more successfully on many similar
themes, ‘Press To Play’ breaks far more boundaries, ‘Venus and Mars’ is an even
better mix of inspiration and autobiography and even buying a Wings compilation
CD or two will give you more to think about and sing-along to. ‘Band On The
Run’ is a great place to start your McCartney journey and I quite understand
why it’s the album that’s been released first in the ‘deluxe’ series – but
please, if you like McCartney’s music then don’t let it be the last stop on
your journey because you’d be missing out on a classic collection of records.
This is one of many many strong albums where the biggest difference on what
came before and after it is ‘confidence’ – but other Wings albums have much
stronger material that’s actually lower on the gibberish quotient and deserve
your time every bit as much as this record.
'Driving Rain' (2001) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/paul-mccartney-driving-rain-2001.html
'Chaos and Creation In The
Back Yard' (2005) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.nl/2016/08/paul-mccartney-chaos-and-creation-in.html
'Memory Almost Full'
(2006) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/paul-mccartney-memory-almost-full-2006.html
'New' (2013) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2013/11/paul-mccartney-new-2013-album-review.html
The Best Unreleased McCartney/Wings Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-best-unreleased-mccartney.html
Surviving TV and Film Footage http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/paul-mccartney-surviving-tv-appearances.html
Live/Wings Solo/Compilations/Classical
Albums Part One: 1967-1987
http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/paul-mccartney-and-bands.html
Live/Wings/Solo/Compilations/Classical/Unreleased
Albums Part Two: 1987-1997
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/paul-mccartney-and-bands_21.html
Live/Wings
Solo/Compilations/Classical Albums Part Three: 1997-2015
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/paul-mccartney-and-bands_28.html
Non-Album Recordings Part
One 1970-1984 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/paul-mccartneywings-non-album-songs.html
