(Credits: Far Out / Paul McCartney / Wings)
What chance did Wings have in the shadow of such a colossal force in popular music?
To be fair to Paul McCartney, he never tried to match his former Beatles. After a string of underwhelming solo records – still able to whip out a stunner like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, however – his Wings venture with the core trio of wife Linda and former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine was an almost reset of his career, skirting past whatever lauded legacy that towered over McCartney to reel off slapdash one-take cuts on much of debut Wild Life, and embarking on a low-key university tour around the UK, far away from the stadiums The Beatles had sold only several years earlier.
Results were mixed. 1973’s Band on the Run was an admirable effort, and their ‘Live and Let Die’ stands as one of the finest Bond themes ever, but many longtime fans would have wondered quite what happened to McCartney’s former songwriting magic. Still, one thing that McCartney could never be accused of is being inauthentic. Whatever the quality of his Wings output and beyond, the songsmith is always pursuing a ground that’s sometimes sentimental, old school music hall, or unashamedly mawkish with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm as he explored John Cage and musique concrète back when he was Fab.
Since Wings’ founding, all albums featured McCartney in the producer’s chair. Yet, soaking up the new wave pop stylings at the end of the decade, McCartney shared studio duties with Chris Thomas for 1979’s Back to the Egg, and attempted to modernise Wings’ sound with a contemporary smattering of electronic sheens to their latest LP offering.
The two had already worked together. While hired for his punk pedigree, producing various Sex Pistols singles, Thomas had filled George Martin’s role for 1968’s The Beatles double album as an assistant for AIR, overseeing the recording of ‘Birthday’ and ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’.
It’s during the Back to the Egg sessions that Wings likely wrote the last ever song as a band before McCartney restarted his solo career.
So, what was the last song Wings ever wrote together?
The Back to the Egg sessions began wrapping up in early 1979 in London’s Replica Studio, a recording facility McCartney had rearranged to function exactly like Abbey Road’s Studio Two after his old EMI set-up was unavailable.
While it can’t be gleaned for certain what the last song Wings actually wrote was, session schedules show that the final original material tackled across January-February that year was the disco-tinted ‘Goodnight Tonight’ and its ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’ B-side. Initially intended for inclusion on Back to the Egg, McCartney decided to release ‘Goodnight Tonight’ as a stand-alone single to coincide with the delayed CBS/BBC Wings Over the World TV special.
Back to the Egg would follow in June to critical derision, but McCartney’s new wave flirtations would bear greater fruit for 1980’s McCartney II, led by the maddeningly hooky ‘Coming Up’. Wings had come to a close four months earlier, when an arrest for marijuana possession in Japan scuppered their world tour, leading to Laine’s departure the next year and McCartney’s official acknowledgement of Wings’ dissolution during the promotion of 1982’s Tug of War.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
