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Kevin Mathews:
PoPinions: July, 2001
Winging
It!
The
recently aired documentary special on Paul McCartney ; Wings left me in
a very nostalgic mood. You see, on my first ever stage performance - sometime
in 1976 - with my first ever band - The Hornets (ala The Beatles geddit?)
-we played two Wings songs -"Junior's Farm" and "Band on
the Run."
The Hornets were all huge Beatles fans and Wings were an extension ofthat
love for the Fab Four. My favourite album in 1976 was the triple album
set, Wings Over America and I recall that my bedroom walls were
adorned with the posters which came with that album. Our bass player in
fact, was left-handed, played the Rickenbacker bass that Paul had and
even moved on stage the way Paul did.
Strangely enough, people always used to say that I even looked like Paul!
Even stranger still when you consider that John has always been my favourite
Beatle.
My teenage years were filled with the sounds of McCartney and Wings. The
8-track in my Dad's car had been saturated with a steady diet of WildLife
and Red Rose Speedway, many of the first songs that I learned to
play in a band were Wings songs - My Love to Mrs. Vanderbilt. My maiden
effort at song-writing was greatly influenced by My Love.
Elvis Costello, who collaborated with McCartney on several songs that
ended up on Costello's Spike and McCartney's Flowers in the
Dirt albums, once remarked that after the break-up of the Beatles,
McCartney had utilised a totally different musical vocabulary and had
established himself as a songwriter of note, the second time around.
I would agree with this analysis, only to say that if Abbey Road
with its masterful and ornate production was the final Beatlesque testimony
to the brilliance of Paul's pop craftsmanship, then he spent the next
couple of years trying to dismantle that achievement. The first four solo
albums viz. McCartney, Ram, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway
are characterised by a desperate need to shakeoff the Beatles legacy with
rather shocking lapses in judgment and quality control.
And Paul was (rightly or wrongly) vilified for this material by criticsof
the day. However, you just cannot ignore the sheer pop magic of "Maybe
I'm Amazed" and others. To be honest, an unmistakable charm resonates
even from the throwaway moments of those early solo albums. Well, let's
say I never complained sitting in the back seat of my dad's Ford Escort!
The success of Band on the Run and Venus & Mars certainly
helped Paul to put his Beatles past behind him, although surely he was
tempting fate with "Silly Love Songs" and "With A Little
Luck."
Which brings me to a major gripe with the song selection of the recent
Wingspan compilation. Only one song (the trivial "Rockestra Theme")
from one of my favourite albums, Back to the Egg.
I can still remember the word that was going around amongst my clutch
of Beatles-addicted friends in 1979 - Paul was back with a cracking new
album! And it didn't disappoint. Yet, since it was a commercial failure
and marked the end of Wings, Paul has somewhat done it an injustice.
I have to say that I gave up on Paul after he split up Wings and I have
never been able to fully get into his albums in the '80s and the '90s
(although a close friend and McCartney fan often berated me for liking
Billy Joel instead, whom he considered an inferior McCartney copycat).
But the music of Paul McCartney and Wings will always have a special place
in my heart.
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