How Paul McCartney launched Wings on the UK’s university circuit
In this exclusive extract from new book ‘Rock Goes to College’, Paul Sexton explains how a circuit of University venues became the testing ground for the Beatle's new adventure
By Paul Sexton
After Paul McCartney stepped down from the roof of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row on 30 January 1969, having taken part in a truly epochal final live performance by the Beatles, it would be three years and a week before he strode onto a stage again. So where did one of the most famous people in the world choose to end this exile of just over 1,100 days from gigging and six years from touring? It was not at Wembley Stadium, Madison Square Garden or the Budokan. It was in the dinner hall of Nottingham University.
McCartney had long dreamed of a back-to-basics, every one-in-the-van tour of pubs and clubs as a way for the Beatles to rediscover their creative core. “‘I’d said, ‘I think we should go back to little gigs – I really think we’re a great little band’,” he explained for the Anthology project. “‘We should find our basic roots, and then who knows what will happen? We may want to fold after that, or we may really think we’ve still got it’.” It never came to pass, but the idea wouldn’t go away, so after making Wild Life, the first album with the newly minted Wings, in the summer of 1971, the ‘who knows?’ became ‘why not?’.
Paul and Linda’s playmates on the LP, former Moody Blue Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell, a holdover from the superb Ram LP of a few months earlier, were to be augmented by a player with years of the road experience that would be invaluable for the new wheeze. In January 1972 Northern Irish guitarist Henry McCullough, late of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band and Spooky Tooth, became Paul’s choice from extensive auditions for the adventures ahead.
The plan, as far as it went, was for the newly expanded five-piece to hit the road and play wherever they landed. As Paul told Melody Maker later that year: “We’ll start just by turning up at a place we fancy visiting, and just play a straightforward gig. We might use another name to keep it quiet. We’ve rehearsed and we can play live together. In fact it sounds quite good.
“I don’t want Wings to become a media group, with our signatures on knickers which are sold for promotion,” he added. “I don’t like that now. I was happy with that situation in the Beatles, but it died in the end. We are starting off as a new band, but if we ever get to be huge like the Beatles it will be very different.”
Rehearsals took place at the ICA in London from 2 to 7 February; on the 8th, the travelling troupe of band and families posed outside the McCartneys’ house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood for a team group photo. Paul and Linda stand in the chilly air with their daughters Heather, Mary and four-and-a-half-month-old Stella, held by Seiwell’s wife Monique (whose presence Paul insisted on, after Denny said she was at home in bed), alongside McCullough, Laine, and roadies Ian Horne and Trevor Jones.
Three pet dogs are along for the ride but just out of view (a Dalmatian, the celebrated sheepdog Martha of ‘Martha My Dear’ and a ‘secretly pregnant lady dog of indeterminate pedigree’, as McCartney’s assistant Shelley Turner wrote). The cast stand in front of an Avis rental truck and a Transit van that was dying to take them away, as it did at 2 pm
The sense of a tour that was both magical and mysterious was heightened by the fact that the concept only crystallised into a university itinerary once they accidentally found their first venue. “It was very ballsy to do, really,” said Paul. “I couldn’t think of anything else. It didn’t feel ballsy at the time, it just felt like ‘Well, what else do I do?’”