" I ask whether it had been important to try to measure up to the Beatles.
"Yes, it was. Otherwise there was kind of no point, though it was virtually impossible to do. Immediately after the Beatles, though, I was just trying to form a group. OK, I thought: I can ring up a lot of famous people and get a supergroup together, or I can go with my instinct which is that groups don't happen like that. There has to be a certain amount of building up, shared experience, shared music. That's how it was when I started out with John neither of us really knew how to do much. And it's the kiss of death if someone says they're the next Beatles. I was in that position with Wings, taking on this impossible task in which my lovely wife wasn't even a musician. I had Mick Jagger saying [bad Mick Jagger impersonation], 'What's he doing getting his old lady in the band?'
"But we kept plugging on. By the time of Band on the Run, it suddenly came together. What we had been trying to do worked. And also, what I'd seen in Linda what I thought was there finally came out."
It wasn't just Mick Jagger who had wondered what Linda was doing in the band. Music journalists routinely denounced her rudimentary musical skills. But her vocal harmonies did come to be central to the Wings sound. McCartney remembers that Elton John and Michael Jackson praised her harmonies on Band on the Run. "But her first outing as a vocalist beside her high-school glee club was the chorus on 'Let It Be'. There was a very high note in there. She and I were at Abbey Road late one night and I was fussing around putting on a harmony, but I heard one higher and I couldn't get it. And I said to her, could you get that note? And she did it. So that was a pretty cool start."
Hang on, isn't McCartney famously on record (in the wake of the legal row about producer Phil Spector drowning "The Long and Winding Road" with strings and choirs) as saying he'd never have female voices on a Beatles record?
"Oh" he says. "You've got a scoop!"
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: Here's another scoop! Lizzie Bravo from Brazil was one of the 'female' high voices on "Across The Universe." (The World Wildlife version) She was hanging out with the fans at Abbey Road when Paul came out and asked which fans could sing, because they needed high voices on the chorus.
What it boiled down to, though, he says, was that he simply wanted Linda around for love and companionship in the studio, on tour. "Everyone had every reason to slag her off. In fact, there was no reason for anyone to support her. But I knew what I was doing as did John, having Yoko on his records. He didn't think she was Aretha Franklin. He was in love and he wanted to make something new something of his own making. It was to do with intensity of feeling. And looking back on it, he was absolutely right. Everything they did, I think, was good. John had proved himself a master in conventional terms and in joining up with Yoko he was about to prove himself in unconventional terms. In a way, that was in both our thinking."
By the time the Beatles broke up, it had been a long time since he and Lennon had sat knee to knee finishing each other's songs. I ask whether he still misses that editing process.
"Are you kidding? Of course I bloody miss it. I'm sitting in the room with John, him with me. Believe me, we're both pretty good editors. We were young turks. We were smartasses. And we did some amazing things. I would love him to be here now, saying, 'Don't bloody do that!' or, more wonderfully, 'That's great!' So yeah, I really had the greatest writing partner."
Perhaps he would have said the same thing
"Well, you know, I went through a revisionist period led by Yoko at one time you know, 'All Paul did was book the studio.' I believe that was a quote from her once. We're good friends now, but there was a period when I was, like, 'Jesus, did I ever do anything?' But then I thought, 'Wait a minute, John wouldn't have put up with me.' So, you know, we were pretty cool."
It rankles not being able to control his own story, not having the last word on what did or didn't happen. Take Nowhere Boy, he says, Sam Taylor-Wood's film about Lennon's early years in Liverpool. "I know Sam, she's a lovely girl, but I saw some stuff beforehand and I said, 'This isn't at all what happened. John punching me to the ground, as he does in the film? He never bloody punched me! And the scene where John and Pete Best are shown riding on the roof of the bus? Nobody ever rode on the top of buses.' Sam said, 'No, but it's great for a film.' And in the end, we had to agree it's not life, it's a film. It's like the Magritte picture of the pipe 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe.' It's a complete fiction, though I suspect some of it's going down as fact."
He laughs and moves on. He's doing a lot of promotional stuff for Band on the Run, which is being rereleased in multiple formats. Is he hoping to attract a new generation of fans for Wings?
"I'm not consciously trying to whip up the next generation, but the concerts I'm doing now, there's a huge influx of younger people, almost embarrassingly so. And we do a lot of Wings songs in the set. A couple of years ago, when we were doing the Live 8 thing, Bono, who I think keeps his finger on the pulse he said [bad Bono impersonation], 'Man, you know all the kids are listening to Wings now.' I'm a family man and there's a temptation not to talk about it in case it's not cool but to see my generation, their kids, and sometimes their kids' kids at my shows? I love that."
The reissue of Wings' Band on the Run, in various formats, including a four-CD boxset, is out now. "
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