Wings : The Story of a Band on the Run

This fascinating, supersonic volume from the legendary Paul McCartney is an intimate celebration of the songs, collaborations and performances of the iconic 1970s band with whom he launched his post-Beatles career.

A landmark account of Paul McCartney’s triumphant musical reinvention in the 1970s and the rise of one of the decade’s most iconic bands

This is the story, in their own words, of a band that came to define a generation. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap history of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, with a cast of characters including John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jagger and more, Wings recounts the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. Soon joined by his wife – American photographer Linda McCartney – on keyboard and vocals, drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Denny Laine, McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would provide the soundtrack to the decade.

Organised chronologically around McCartney, RAM and nine Wings albums, the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar, rumoured to be dead, fled with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows. Being there gave McCartney time to create and was where this new band emerged. Wings then follows the group as they play unannounced shows at university halls, tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children, survive a robbery on the streets of Nigeria, and eventually perform blockbuster stadium shows on their world tour, all while producing some of the most enduring music of the time.

With extraordinary recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer, Wings transports the reader to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Introduced with a heartfelt foreword by McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run contains 150 black-and-white and colour photographs, many previously unseen, as well as timelines, a gigography and a full discography, in an art form all its own.

MEDIA REVIEWS

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is the astonishing, unruly story of how [Paul McCartney found] a way to exist alongside his inescapable past. Structured as an oral history .... interleaved with rich archive material [and] elegantly annotated with timelines and discographies ... this book skilfully patchworks together testimony from all the Beatles, McCartney’s family, friends and bandmates, and external sources ... demanding re-evaluation, fostering revelation. [It] is ... the story of a man who climbed every mountain, then set out to do it all over again. - Victoria Segal, Sunday Times

Compelling ... a portal into a more eccentric age of pop, a fable about the tension between celebrity and creativity, and a story with elements of Spinal Tap and Wacky Races... it tells the story of one of the most successful bands of the 1970s – and one of the strangest. - Ian Leslie, Guardian

An exhaustive, forensic and fascinating inside story of the band who achieved the impossible - John Aizlewood, i Paper

A weighty new oral history … crammed with fascinating details and amusing observations - Neil McCormick, Telegraph