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 Financial Times Book of the Year**
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.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241758571
Number of pages: 576
Dimensions: 237 x 162 x 48 mm
Weight: 842 g
Language: English
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. Under McCartney’s contrarian, impulsive, endlessly generative leadership, it blended imperial rock grandeur with a homemade ethos and a certain stoned nonchalance - Ian Leslie, Guardian
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
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
What is there left to know about Paul McCartney in 2025? Actually, quite a bit. . . .There is still much to be excavated from what is the most examined life in pop music history, especially when it comes from the horse’s mouth. . . . Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is a smooth, frictionless ride across the arc of McCartney’s ’70s career, when he continued to mint more hits, and secured a lock on a massive career that is presently in its 55th year - Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
A must-read for fans of The Beatles in general and their solo careers in specific. And the story of Wings is a doozy, to put it mildly. . . . Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run takes readers on an inspiring journey from the rudimentary efforts behind Wings' Wild Life in 1971 through the apex of arena rock in the mid-1970s and beyond ... A powerful rejoinder to the band’s critics - Kenneth Womack, Salon
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run details the group's adventures, from unannounced guerrilla gigs at UK universities (admission 50p) to a knifepoint mugging in Nigeria ... [it] reiterates their excellence. The Fab Four were an impossibly hard act to follow, but McCartney’s second act began an artistic rebirth that still resonates today - Adrian Thrills, Daily Mail
There’s more Macca in this oral history of Wings ... [an] engrossing testimony about his post-Beatles renaissance - Financial Times, Books of the Year
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Dylan Goes Electric!
What Art Does
George Harrison
The Book of ABBA
The Lyrics
Love and Let Die
John Lennon Volume 52
Mind Games
Hope I Get Old Before I Die
I’ve always loved the joyous rock sound of Wings and this oral history was the perfect celebration of the band.
As editor, Ted Widmer has pulled together so much information to make this book incredibly engaging....
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Paul McCartney has been busy rushing into print these last few years, and this third book details what he did after the Beatles break-up. He started again from scratch, forming a new group with wife Linda. The book... More
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