It took 52 years and an eight-hour documentary to confirm that the Beatles recordings Let it be they weren't quite the bleak, group trials that the 1970 documentary of the same name made them out to be. But long before Peter Jackson put an enjoyable spin on the Beatles' dying days Come backPaul McCartney had already made it clear that he was perfectly cool with a documentary crew hovering over his shoulder during the most vulnerable moments of his creation—because just five years after Let it be experience, he eagerly subjected the post-Beatles band Wings to the same cinematic scrutiny.
Riding high on the smash hit of 1973 Band on the Run, McCartney and Wings set up shop at Abbey Road Studios for four days in August 1974 and let director David Litchfield capture their every move as they unrolled a huge catalog of recent hits, upcoming singles, B-sides, neglected album cuts, off-the-cuff medleys, instrumental jams, songs that wouldn't be officially released until the next decade, 50s rockabilly covers, and even some Fab Four favorites. The result was a documentary called One handed strikes, whose central idea wasn't so much “back” as “born”—a chance to show skeptics that Wings weren't just McCartney's accessories, but a blossoming group fueled by the same kind of collaborative camaraderie and banter that did The previous band owned a decade ago. Alas, like the 1969 project, things didn't quite go as planned, and it took five decades for a definitive document of the moment to see the light of day.
From day one the Wings were burdened by a seemingly insurmountable contradiction. “For me, I like working with a gang of people, I like a small group,” McCartney told Litchfield. “I've never been a solo performer, so it's only natural that I find myself in a group.” Despite his stated desire to be part of a community, the fact is that no one but John Lennon could hope to be on equal creative footing with Paul McCartney in a band. In former Moody Blues member Denny Laine, McCartney found not so much a new partner as a trusted accomplice who could fill the harmonic holes left by Lennon's absence and flex the extra guitar muscle required in the decade. 70. But even with the core of McCartney, keyboardist wife Linda and Laine, Wings was always a band in flux, with different personnel appearing on each record. his triumphs Band on the Run ultimately owed more to the trio's crafty approach to their low-tech set-up at EMI's Lagos studio than to a proper band creating its own.
