Paul McCartney: 'I tell you about Band on the Run, my Africa in a concept album'

It was the night before the flight and a couple of guys phoned me. Our drummer, Denny Seiwell, and Henry McCullough, the guitarist, told me, 'We're not coming'. I never quite understood why. Maybe they thought Africa was a long way to go.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't say, 'Oh my God, maybe I should reconsider!' If I have to go somewhere, I like to stick to the plan. So I thought I'd make the best record I've made so far, since I left the Beatles. I thought, "Well, we've got Denny's guitar, Linda's voice, Denny's voice, my voice, and I'll do the drums, because I play it a lot anyway."

It was crazy. The circumstances were just crazy. I think anyone else would have given up, because when we arrived the studio was only half built. We just had to find a solution. But it was Denny, Linda and me. And Geoff Emerick who was one of the Beatles' sound engineers.

Another funny thing: when we returned home after that experience, there was a letter from Emi waiting for us saying: 'Dear Paul, under no circumstances go to Lagos. There has been a cholera epidemic in Nigeria'. We were letting everything pass us by! We only got that letter on our return, otherwise I don't think we would have gone. But those were wild times.

Was the study only half built?

In Africa they make great music and at the time they were not as technological as we were used to. We expected it to be a proper Emi studio, but they didn't have vocal booths. I think in a way the somewhat homely atmosphere of the studio transferred to our attitude. We adapted our recording techniques and we did it!

This is how you get to Africa. The Wings fell apart. The studio is not exactly what you thought it would be. And then, to make matters worse, you get robbed....

We were visiting some members of our crew at their house and someone said, 'Do you want a ride home?' We replied: 'It's such a nice night, let's walk'. When we got to the end of the street we realised... that that was a warning, but we hadn't heeded it because we were desperados! We were walking where we had been told not to walk and I had cameras, tape recorders, all my tapes in a bag and then Linda had camera equipment. A car arrives, a guy rolls down his window and automatically I think he is offering us a lift. I just say, 'No, listen man, great! That's very kind of you, but we don't need a lift'. We were walking and they walked away, five or six local guys, they looked a bit puzzled. They continued down the road and I waved at them, saying, 'Everything OK?' Then suddenly the car stopped again. This time everyone got out. One of the guys grabbed a knife. I said, 'Holy cow. Wait a minute, they're not offering us a ride." I had an epiphany as the guy pointed the knife at me.

We gave them all our things and they got back into the car. They drive away. They take a wrong turn, come back and we say, "Oh no, they're coming back. They'll finish us off!" Eventually they left. And so Linda and I walked home. At our house there was an old security guard with a very old rifle from the Civil War, but he didn't seem to be able to do much to help us. We put ourselves to bed and said, "Forget it. And so it went. The next day we got to the studio and the studio manager said, 'Man, you're lucky you're white. If you had been black they would have killed you because they would have been afraid you would recognise them'.

Did they take the home audition tapes of Bands on the Run?

Yes, they took the cassettes with all the home demos. And, of course, they didn't realise that the stuff had value or could be useful to someone. I'm sure they recorded over them or threw them away or sold them as empty cassettes. So I had to get the whole album back in my head. And it wasn't that big of a deal, because it was kind of a rule that John and I always had: in the beginning we didn't have cassettes or equipment to record on and we always had to remember things. We used to say, "If you don't remember the songs, you who wrote them, how will the people who listen to them remember them?"

And yet you have made one of your most beautiful records ever. People say that to make great art you need friction and difficulty. Does all this history make that statement credible?

Well, I think so. I never liked that thought, because everything happens to me easily. I'm not sure that factor really affects things. Well, it did with Bands on the Run. I think you can argue the opposite as well. I mean, Live And Let Die was made without any effort; it came out easily and was a big hit. In a lot of Beatles stuff there wasn't a lot of tension. When there was tension, I'm not sure they came out better songs. They came out tense. Maybe if you're trying to make a tense track, that's a good idea.

Many think that Band on the Run is a concept album. Could it be because there are musical themes that are repeated throughout the album? 

Yeah, I think so. You know, more or less at that time it was an idea that was going around. When we started, everything was three chords: Buddy Holly, Elvis, very simple songs. And the Beatles would record them. As time went on, the songs became a bit more complex and some of them started to have layers and episodes. A bit of this and then a bit of another. We started using this trick: we used to end our songs by going somewhere else. So you get to She's got a ticket to ride, and, I don't care, my baby don't care... as if it was another song coming out of nowhere as we fade out. And I think that led to the concept album stuff. I think mostly we liked the lp format.

Usually there were 14 songs, 7 on each side, which was kind of a nice formula because you had 7 songs, then you had a forced break while you were spinning the record. So sometimes you'd wait for a moment and then, oh, now the second side: like Part 1 and Part 2. That would lead you to think in those terms and as you got more imaginative, you'd think, "Well, at the end of the day this is like an ending for this 40-minute piece... we should do something with it." So, yeah, on Sgt. Pepper we started thinking more like an ensemble and I followed that idea all the way through and I liked it. I didn't feel like I had fully explored it, so with Band on the Run I did a bit of that to give it that completeness that led it to be called a concept album.

Linda co-composed almost all the songs on Band on the Run. How was your collaboration in composition? .

The issue was more Linda's presence while I was writing. If I got stuck, I would ask her for a suggestion and so we ended up co-writing the songs. We didn't actually sit down pen to paper and write piece by piece. Probably the truth is that most of the composition was mine, but if I needed a collaborator, Linda was there. I could say, 'What do you think of this? What about this one? What's another word for this?" and then that way she would share the credits. It was fun to have someone to take a cue from. But she wasn't an author like John, so there wasn't that kind of collaboration. It was just good to have a good sounding board. We had fun writing those things together.

What about his synthesiser parts?

Linda's synthesiser part on Band on the Run and her vocals on Jet are integral parts of those songs. They are arrangements still played today by Paul 'Wix' Wickens on stage. She had grown a lot as a musician by that time, but she really played by instinct.

The fact is that Linda knew practically nothing when we started. It was like college band. We told her, 'Do you want to come on tour? Yeah, sure." And we didn't think too much about it. We just thought, "Hey, it's a small group of friends going out and making music." When we started the Beatles, that was pretty much it. We just made it up as we went along and got better together. In Linda's case, she had never played the keyboard much, the first pieces were very simple. But I would show her and she was a quick learner. I would give her a vocal part and she would take it, maybe rub it a little bit. She particularly liked the Moog. Now it's back in vogue! She liked all that funky stuff.

We always said she would be a good punk rocker: she had the right attitude. In fact, at that time we gave each other punk rock names. She was Vile Lynn, violin, and I was Noxious Fumes. Then we never did anything with it. So as we went along, she learned a lot and eventually became a very good musician and an integral part of the band. In Band on the Run she sang beautifully and in a very special way. I remember years later, when I worked with Michael Jackson, he asked me, 'Who sang those harmonies?' I said, 'Well, it's basically me and Linda. And Denny in part'. He said, 'Oh, they're great'. As he went on, he got more and more confident.

Where does the title, Band on the Run come from? .

I just thought that because of the song. At that time there were a lot of songs like Desperados and Renegades... I think a lot of people were on the run. In the early seventies a lot of people had withdrawn from society in different ways. It was in the air and the idea of a band on the run, I said to myself, is great. You could be a band of brothers, a kind of prison escape, but a band, a band. I put it together and Band on the Run was born.

Is it true that Picasso's Last Words (Drink To Me) was written after Dustin Hoffman challenged you to create a song on the spot?

Picasso's Last Words was a challenge. Dustin Hoffman said to me, "Can you write a song about anything?" I replied: 'I don't know, maybe'. He said, 'Give me a minute' and ran upstairs. He came back downstairs with a newspaper article about Picasso's death. And he says, 'Do you see what Picasso's last words were?' His last words to his friends were, 'Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more'. So Dustin asked me, "Can you write a song about this?" I happened to have my guitar with me. So I started to sing a tune about those words. He was blown away. He said to Annie, I think it was his wife at the time, with whom he is no longer together: 'Annie, come here, listen to this! Look at this! I just gave him the paper and he already has the song!".

Dave Grohl performed Band on the Run with you at Glastonbury 2022. After so long, what do you think of the album's legacy and influence? .

Well, for me it's really great. My big goal after the Beatles, once I had decided to put a band together, was to do something different. It was difficult, because for all those years I was practising Beatles-style and I didn't want to keep doing the same thing. So I had to avoid anything that sounded too Beatles and create a new style, which would become the Wings style. When we did Band on the Run, I felt we had succeeded. We had created something that sounded nothing like The Beatles. It had echoes, perhaps inevitably, because I was there, but it had a style of its own. Years and years later I was doing an interview with someone, I think it was from Rolling Stone. We were talking about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and I hear myself say, "My Sgt. Pepper was Band on the Run".

For the generation that came after that record it was just as important and that made me feel good, because that's what I tried to do: create something that was as important as the Beatles were. Dave Grohl did a great version of Band on the Run with me at Glastonbury. He sang it beautifully and he did it with my band. It's great for me to see that song grow, it's the ultimate confirmation of what we were trying to do at the time.

During the 'Got Back Tour' you played several songs from Band on the Run and they all have a contemporary sound. Do you think there are younger fans who, listening to the new 50th anniversary release, will think it's a great new McCartney album?

I don't know, I wouldn't mind. It's a bit strange because music has entered one of its cycles: like fashion, like anything. And whereas in the eighties it moved towards disco, techno, now people are going back to basics. You play a lot of different instruments, you get more raw sounds. I think Band on the Run fits very well into that context. So yeah, maybe someone will think: it's his new record, man, and it's contemporary!

The 50th anniversary edition of Band on the Run contains an unreleased 'Underdubbed' version of the entire album. Underdubbed in what way?

It's Band on the Run like you've never heard it before. When you overdub a song and overdub additional instrument parts, like an extra guitar, it's called an overdub. Here it is the opposite: an underdub.