Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. Before we get to
Speaker 1: this episode, I wanted to let you know that you
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Speaker 1: Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber.
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Speaker 2: I mean, Wings was just the result of me asking
Speaker 2: my spot, am I going to stop now that the
Speaker 2: Beatles stopped? I mean, it's so wonderful, so successful. Do
Speaker 2: I now stop and kind of look for something else
Speaker 2: to do? But I thought, no, I like music too much,
Speaker 2: so the whatever the something else is will be music.
Speaker 2: So I was witting inter Us, did you find starting
Speaker 2: a band?
Speaker 3: And she said yeah, Well, she paused.
Speaker 2: She wasn't that quick, So yeah, I just thought, well,
Speaker 2: we'll just start something that feels good and we'll build
Speaker 2: it up like the Beatles did on the trouble being,
Speaker 2: we'd have to make our mistakes in public this time around.
Speaker 1: And Paul will done for a while.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the
Speaker 1: greatest songwriters of the era and will.
Speaker 3: You look at me? I'm going up to it. I'm
Speaker 3: actually a performer.
Speaker 1: That is Sir Paul McCartney. We work together on a
Speaker 1: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 1: of our conversations.
Speaker 2: It was like going back to an old snapshot album
Speaker 2: looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 1: This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 1: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 1: figures in popular music. In this episode, Band on the Run,
Speaker 1: a single from Wing's third studio album, Band on the Run,
Speaker 1: is McCartney's quintessential narrative songwriting in action. Split into two parts.
Speaker 1: The first section of the song follows a band of
Speaker 1: outlaws languishing in prison, stuck Insidey's.
Speaker 4: Fa siends inside Forever.
Speaker 2: Again, right a boy.
Speaker 5: That time, there were a lot of people who were
Speaker 5: pretending to be desperados, pretending to be gangsters.
Speaker 2: Outlaws was a word that came up a lot. Desperados
Speaker 2: came up a lot. The thing is, you know, with
Speaker 2: the plot situation, we were outside the law in a
Speaker 2: very mild way. Right, So then we knew we were
Speaker 2: doing this, So it spawned a lot of people talking
Speaker 2: about themselves as desperados.
Speaker 6: Despera, why don't you come to you know, sands.
Speaker 4: You've been out bad fances for so long now.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, the same year as Band on
Speaker 1: the Run, the Eagles released Desperado.
Speaker 7: Yeaprod.
Speaker 2: Ah, you may get you.
Speaker 1: You're paining your.
Speaker 5: Dear grading.
Speaker 1: So outlaws were certainly in fashion at the time. HARKing
Speaker 1: back to the long standing tradition of the American Western.
Speaker 2: Reminds me of like Portch Castody and The Sundance Kid.
Speaker 6: Yess's harder Now you gotta plan more, You gotta prepare.
Speaker 5: More guns and knives either bick.
Speaker 2: And I'm imagining it because of this, the sparadery thing.
Speaker 2: I'm imagining this in America. No, no, not yet, not
Speaker 2: to me and hard get the rules straightened down.
Speaker 5: Rules and a knife fight no rules.
Speaker 1: As in many scenes from popular westerns like Butch Cassidy
Speaker 1: and The Sundance Kid, the song sets up a band
Speaker 1: of outlaws in a scene of captivity, dreaming about what
Speaker 1: they would do were they to escape.
Speaker 7: Give I ever get out?
Speaker 2: Not giving it all.
Speaker 3: The way to rest charity.
Speaker 2: Bind today.
Speaker 3: If I ever.
Speaker 4: Get out of it, if we ever get out.
Speaker 8: On the run, what does that mean?
Speaker 2: What does that mean? A bound of people who escaped
Speaker 2: from a person or you could take it. That's abound
Speaker 2: on a tour. So you know we are abound on
Speaker 2: the run. And if you're playing singing it, you're getting
Speaker 2: a double meaning. So everyone's looking for us, but we're
Speaker 2: on the run and they're never gonna catch us. Will
Speaker 2: the rain exploded with a mighty crash.
Speaker 7: As we really to the sun.
Speaker 4: There the first one set to the second one thereaving.
Speaker 7: On the run, Bad Run.
Speaker 2: The rain exploded with a mighty cross. We followed to
Speaker 2: the song and the first one said to the second one. There,
Speaker 2: I hope you're having fun. So you know that's the
Speaker 2: prison break and.
Speaker 4: A jailer man and sailor Sam searching everyone all the
Speaker 4: bad on the run.
Speaker 7: Band on the run.
Speaker 1: The song is focused on a band of fighting laws,
Speaker 1: breaking out of jail and gallivanting through the desert. However,
Speaker 1: it was the other type of band that was more
Speaker 1: familiar to McCartney.
Speaker 2: It's not a.
Speaker 8: Band on the run from Beetball down, is it? I
Speaker 8: mean wings was the next step after the readers. If
Speaker 8: I was going to continue, then.
Speaker 2: How was I going to do it?
Speaker 9: Well?
Speaker 2: How did the Beatles do it? Well? They were just
Speaker 2: four little guys from Liverpool to No Ship and then
Speaker 2: they figured it out and they worked out of it.
Speaker 2: They did ten thousand hours and then suddenly they were
Speaker 2: big and famous. So I thought, well, you're either try
Speaker 2: and get yourself a super group, which what happened is
Speaker 2: a group of blind faith sure, which was ginger and
Speaker 2: certain people are that Zeppelin. It was kind of a
Speaker 2: little bit that, you know, it was the hand sect,
Speaker 2: hand picked famous table, or you just started getting a
Speaker 2: bus and ask a couple of nights to come along,
Speaker 2: you know, and you don't fuss about it too much.
Speaker 2: That's what we decided to do.
Speaker 4: WILLI underdakeod you heavy side, you know.
Speaker 7: Joba bell A dreaming in a village square, ring down around,
Speaker 7: long run.
Speaker 1: Around Like any good desperado. McCartney had to enlist his accomplices,
Speaker 1: seeking out the best people for the job rather than
Speaker 1: those with the most notoriety. With Linda by his side
Speaker 1: on this adventure, he began to put together the new.
Speaker 8: Band Everybody Wants to Be in a band.
Speaker 2: That part of it, I don't mean to know it's true.
Speaker 2: It's a nice idea of nothing else.
Speaker 1: McCartney knew he wanted Denny Lane on guitar and backup vocals.
Speaker 1: Denny Layne had been a core member of the Moody
Speaker 1: Blues in the mid sixties. They had made it big
Speaker 1: with their hit single Go Now Since She.
Speaker 6: Gotta Go.
Speaker 3: You, So I knew Danny.
Speaker 2: We toured with the Moodies, so anyway, I got on
Speaker 2: with him. So he's the first person I asked. Not
Speaker 2: Linda was the first question, then Jenny, and then I
Speaker 2: came to New York autitioned people for Ram and Jenny
Speaker 2: Sargle showed up out of that. So that was it
Speaker 2: kind of thing, you know. Henry McCollough was just somebody
Speaker 2: our roadies knew quite less. I'ven't come along see, And
Speaker 2: it was the next move after the Beatles. The only
Speaker 2: philosophy behind it was to not do Beatles songs, just
Speaker 2: to create something completely new. So there hadn't been a
Speaker 2: girl in the Beatles. The Beatles had known each other
Speaker 2: all their lives, so it was all the opposite. This
Speaker 2: is just a different way of doing it.
Speaker 4: Really was falling as the desert world began to set
Speaker 4: in the town of searchin for us everywhere because we
Speaker 4: were not wild.
Speaker 7: Run.
Speaker 1: Once the members of Wings fail into place, the group
Speaker 1: became a literal band on the run. Throughout the early
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, they traveled all over England on an impromptu
Speaker 1: concert tour, learning the ropes of performance as the Beatles
Speaker 1: once did in Hamburg.
Speaker 2: And you know, because the theory was to just plan
Speaker 2: as you went along, I was quite chaostic in the beginning.
Speaker 2: We would shove up at student juniors and say can
Speaker 2: we do a gig? You knew they had a hole
Speaker 2: and they had people, so we were doing that. We
Speaker 2: charged fifty p on the door and the guy would
Speaker 2: come out with a big bag of fifty ps. Showed
Speaker 2: up the night before, talked to a very amused students
Speaker 2: union leader who didn't believe me until they came out
Speaker 2: of the vamp. Well you got a whold can we
Speaker 2: play a lunch time? Yeah? And then it was just
Speaker 2: advertised to show we'll comment or music in the whole
Speaker 2: wild and then people showed up. I paid fifty P.
Speaker 2: Well there's a big bag of coins, which I just
Speaker 2: always wanted to be a Peter Sellers movie. One for You,
Speaker 2: Two for Me, and everyone just took a handful of
Speaker 2: coins and we went around Britain. We had eleven songs,
Speaker 2: so we had to repeat some of them, and some
Speaker 2: of the gigs must have been quite bad, you know,
Speaker 2: because we didn't really know what we're doing.
Speaker 1: It's an amusing image, this former Beatle showing up to
Speaker 1: play in a college cafeteria trying to hone the sound
Speaker 1: of his new musical group. Despite McCartney being a seasoned professional,
Speaker 1: the band still needed practice time, a.
Speaker 2: Lot of limbering. Yeah, I mean well. And I had
Speaker 2: a song called Wildlife rough earliest album when Linda had
Speaker 2: the intro on keyboard, don't doom, Doom, Doom, Jim Jing,
Speaker 2: don't sequence the chords. I mean, I said, there you Newcastle,
Speaker 2: it's Newcastle City Hall. I s a song now, this
Speaker 2: song called called Wildlife. Wildlife, want to want to through nothing.
Speaker 2: I look over and Lender's just frozen. I want to
Speaker 2: see things. She has heart of the country. So I
Speaker 2: go over. Now the crowd kind of wondering whether this
Speaker 2: is just a bit of theater. When I go over
Speaker 2: and call the cords, Oh, sh you know, so, I mean, actually,
Speaker 2: if this happeared a sketch, it would be quite funny.
Speaker 2: So I go over, well, I can't remember the Bloody Cords,
Speaker 2: don't you what? Luckily seeing either, and she suddenly remembered,
Speaker 2: so she pushed me to one side and we started.
Speaker 2: But those are the kind of chaotic moments were you know,
Speaker 2: we nearly just didn't remember songs, or we'd played quite badly,
Speaker 2: or we play stuff the audience didn't want to hear.
Speaker 2: We kind of got away with it, but well, what
Speaker 2: did you?
Speaker 1: There was a great deal of pressure on McCartney's new
Speaker 1: band as the media made comparisons to the group that
Speaker 1: had dissolved a few years earlier. McCartney himself wondered whether
Speaker 1: Wings would be able to measure up.
Speaker 2: A lot of this is just happening in my own mind.
Speaker 2: It's not what anyone's telling me. I'm automatically thinking, well,
Speaker 2: the Beatles were great, so Wings is not going to
Speaker 2: be as great. Mike from all along was after the Beatles,
Speaker 2: who's going to be as good as them? You know?
Speaker 3: Of course, and I.
Speaker 2: Kind of knew it couldn't happen, but I thought, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: but we can be not as good as the Beatles,
Speaker 2: but we can be something else.
Speaker 9: That must have been hard in some way to feel
Speaker 9: that from the outset.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was, but as I said, you know, I
Speaker 3: was to continue. I had to tough it out.
Speaker 2: But I mean I had reserves of courage from the
Speaker 2: Beatles having pennies thrown at them. Sure at Stroud Village Hall,
Speaker 2: you know, so we'd had that, we'd had that bullshit.
Speaker 2: So here it was again. The hardest thing I think
Speaker 2: was with Linda in the group, who was a complete amateur.
Speaker 2: And I said, well, so was George when he joined
Speaker 2: the group. So was I, so was John, so was Rinko.
Speaker 2: You taught her keyboards, and so I showed her a
Speaker 2: few things on keyboard, and then she learned herself, and
Speaker 2: she had a couple of lessons and stuff, and it
Speaker 2: turned out that her strength wasn't necessarily the keyboard thing,
Speaker 2: although she handled the job. It was more as a spirit.
Speaker 3: She was a great sort of cheerleader. She would get
Speaker 3: crowds going.
Speaker 2: She did a lot of that, you know, so clap
Speaker 2: your hands kind of thing, and in those days there
Speaker 2: weren't many women in groups, so she was sort of
Speaker 2: a pioneer in that aspect and listening back to the record,
Speaker 2: she was damn good singer, even though she was amateur,
Speaker 2: and people were looking for anything to damn her.
Speaker 3: But we got through it.
Speaker 9: But it's going to think, well, of course, I mean,
Speaker 9: the terrible fact is that human beings have a tendency,
Speaker 9: you know, to whine about something, to find something.
Speaker 2: I think we're very insecure as a race. As an animal,
Speaker 2: I've often sort of seen so, like rabbits and things
Speaker 2: in the garden or in the field.
Speaker 3: I think they live a life of terror. Total they're
Speaker 3: looking over the shoulders all the time, and I think
Speaker 3: so are we. I'm not sure we're that different in
Speaker 3: our way. We're looking over our shoulders, and that engenders
Speaker 3: a not so generous spirit, dream a really square.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's always good to slack someone off, or
Speaker 2: to see someone get slagged off. I think it's it's
Speaker 2: another instinct that makes us feel not so bad. I
Speaker 2: think it's a big instinct in us, and I think
Speaker 2: that it's because we're insecure. So the more secure you get,
Speaker 2: the more generous you can become, and.
Speaker 4: Say said everyone on the.
Speaker 2: Run.
Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy three, Wings was finding its groove, but
Speaker 1: McCartney had yet to win back music critics since the
Speaker 1: breakup of the Beatles. This third studio album, Band on
Speaker 1: the Run, would be wings chance to establish themselves and
Speaker 1: McCartney's chance to prove he still a long career in
Speaker 1: front of him. When it came time to record, McCartney
Speaker 1: was hoping to be inspired by a change of scenery.
Speaker 9: This was recorded in Legos.
Speaker 2: M h doesn't rule. I knew EMI had studios all
Speaker 2: over the world, but I didn't know where they were,
Speaker 2: so I asked for a list and they were in China, Rio, France.
Speaker 2: You know Legos.
Speaker 3: Well, that sounds interesting.
Speaker 2: I love African music, speaking African music being there, but
Speaker 2: we're not doing African music, but still being in the
Speaker 2: land the African music come from. It will have some
Speaker 2: sort of nice and lunch.
Speaker 1: As much as McCartney imagined Legos would be a good
Speaker 1: backdrop for the life of musical Desperados, not all members
Speaker 1: of the band felt the same. The night before they
Speaker 1: were set to start recording, drummer Denny Sywell and guitarist
Speaker 1: Henry McCulloch rang up McCartney to tell him they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be coming.
Speaker 2: I was like furious at first. It's like, what, you're
Speaker 2: not coming to make next album? Well, that's not that's
Speaker 2: not very bad luck. And I'm that kind of person.
Speaker 2: I won't go, Okay, God, I'm going to rethink this.
Speaker 2: If I'm going somewhere, then I'm going I've noticed that
Speaker 2: about me. I'd like to stick to the planet. So
Speaker 2: then I actually deal with this in my mind. So
Speaker 2: I just thought, well, screw you under to make this
Speaker 2: the best Ruffle I've made to date since leaving the
Speaker 2: Beatles before Welcome, and got Denny guitar, got Linda both us,
Speaker 2: Denny vocals, me vocals. I'll drun right. I've drawn a
Speaker 2: lot anywhere. It was crazy. The circumstances were just wild.
Speaker 2: I didn't get anybody else might have given up because
Speaker 2: the studio was only half built and we had to
Speaker 2: figure it all out. But I had Danny Lyndon myself.
Speaker 2: I had Jeff Emeric, who who's the Peatle's engineer.
Speaker 1: Late one night, as Paul and Linda were walking in
Speaker 1: an area of time they had been told to avoid,
Speaker 1: some men hopped out of a car and mugged them
Speaker 1: at knife point. They stole a couple of Linda's cameras,
Speaker 1: some unfinished lyrics and the demo tips for the upcoming album.
Speaker 2: We've been walked what we did to listen because we
Speaker 2: were just for others, so we just were walking later
Speaker 2: now where we've been told not to walk.
Speaker 9: So in terms of reconstructing and you have to go
Speaker 9: back to if not Square won something akin to it.
Speaker 2: We remember them well enough. I'm sure I had the
Speaker 2: lyrics somewhat. We always think because your native was like
Speaker 2: five Legos calls were so they will have re recorded
Speaker 2: over them some decent music African or just chucked them
Speaker 2: away as robbish.
Speaker 1: The band's trip to Legos, what with the half inished
Speaker 1: studio and the unexpected mugging, wasn't quite what McCartney had imagined.
Speaker 1: When Paul and Linda returned to England, they found a
Speaker 1: letter at their home from the e m I chairman
Speaker 1: warning them not to go to Legos because of a
Speaker 1: cholera outbreak. The letter had arrived after they had left.
Speaker 2: Yeah, looking back on extends like that, you block out
Speaker 2: all the worst stuff and you remember all the cooso.
Speaker 1: Despite the recording conditions, Band on the Run was a
Speaker 1: runaway success upon the release of the album, Wings became
Speaker 1: more secure not just as a follow up band to
Speaker 1: the Beatles, but as a significant musical group in their
Speaker 1: own right. The song band on the Run was one
Speaker 1: of Wings's first hits, topping the charts at numbber one
Speaker 1: in America and number three in the UK.
Speaker 2: I was talking to a journalist once about Sergeant Pepper
Speaker 2: going on about it as if he must admire it,
Speaker 2: and he said, we'll tell you the truth. He said,
Speaker 2: it was a band on the run for me. It's
Speaker 2: more my generation on the run was his Sergeant Pepper, right,
Speaker 2: So I certainly realized, oh yeah. And that has proved
Speaker 2: to be a very interesting fact over the years that
Speaker 2: there are some people who actually like what I did
Speaker 2: with Wings better than the Beatles. There are some people
Speaker 2: whose first thing they ever heard was you know, a
Speaker 2: band on the run or jet or something that we did.
Speaker 3: With Wings, and I think for them that means a lot.
Speaker 2: They have a special affection for that.
Speaker 1: His success of Wings was a testament to McCartney's entrepreneurial spirit,
Speaker 1: as well as his willingness to deviate from rules and expectations.
Speaker 2: You better run, you're worrying.
Speaker 3: It sounds a lot of argue, I think that you're
Speaker 3: willating to.
Speaker 9: Well to borrow a phrase from yet sort of more naked.
Speaker 2: You know you didn't have to do that, right, you
Speaker 2: really did know. It also says I'm mad, but that
Speaker 2: just right. I could think of other ways to do it,
Speaker 2: but I didn't like them, and so the only other
Speaker 2: rules not do it. Okay, I'll do this way because
Speaker 2: I like it. It's probably a good way because we
Speaker 2: will learn, we will develop. By the time we're ready,
Speaker 2: will be pretty good, and we'll have had some success
Speaker 2: with the records here there and ever. So it was
Speaker 2: only seventy sixth when we finally had Band on Us,
Speaker 2: a big record. We then toured properly as Wings.
Speaker 7: That time.
Speaker 1: Band on the Run the title track from Wings nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three album in the next episode.
Speaker 6: Thanks sALS Salt Word, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, a cheerful song
Speaker 6: about a serial killer inspired by an obscure French avant
Speaker 6: garde play.
Speaker 1: McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: NPL and Pushkin Industries.