Most artists have to do a lot of woodshedding before even considering making a record. Anyone can have an idea for a song that they will one day translate when they sit behind the glass, but that usually means an endless amount of rewrites that sit on demos before they’re ready to be taken out of the vaults. Although Paul McCartney was more than willing to go the extra mile when working with Wings, Band on the Run was almost scrapped before it properly got started when all of the demos were stolen.
Before the group started recording, McCartney wasn’t in the best spot in his career. Despite being a member of one of the biggest bands in the world, albums like Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway tended to sound closer to lightweight fluff to most people’s ears. McCartney really needed to deliver a stunner with the next album, but he was also not playing the odds that well when two of his musicians up and quit before work got started.
With guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell quitting just before they got on the plane to leave for Nigeria, Band on the Run saw Wings relegated to a three-piece comprised of Macca, Linda, and Denny Laine. After building the studio from the ground up when they touched down, all of the demos that McCartney was all for nought when he and Linda walked back to their house.
McCartney had already been advised not to walk the streets at night, but after being offered a lift only feet away from his house, he and Linda were mugged at knifepoint by locals, saying, “There’s, like, about four or five of them and then there’s a little one, and he’s got a knife. So we go, ‘Oh, you’re not offering us a lift at all! You’re robbing us.’ So I had all my demo cassettes for the album, and they took them all… I had to remember the songs.”
Then again, having to remember everything on the demos is practically a death wish for musicians. It’s one thing to find that magic moment where inspiration strikes, but the idea of having to recreate that same moment all over again is the equivalent of trying to make lightning strike twice in the same location within the span of an hour.
Considering how the record sounded afterwards, it’s practically a miracle that the tunes sounded so breezy. Sure, they managed to capture the feel of playing in a new locale, but since these were the same sessions where Macca suffered a bronchial spasm halfway through recording, it’s a wonder why this doesn’t sound closer to what John Lennon’s experimental records with Yoko Ono from the same time.
As it turns out, though, that hardship inadvertently turned into rocket fuel once the record hit the charts. The title track is by far one of McCartney’s finest hours during Wings’s tenure, and cuts like ‘Jet’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Five’ are still live staples whenever McCartney decides to dust them off when he’s not going through his Beatles catalogue live.
Band on the Run might be praised to high heaven these days, but next time you listen to it, just remember that this isn’t just Macca trying to make another pop album. This is someone who was at the end of his rope in every single aspect of recording and still managed to deliver the best tunes of his career.