(Credits: Far Out / Apple Corps LTD / Paul McCartney)
Thu 9 April 2026 17:45, UK
Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles discography has been critically reviled, revived, reconsidered, renowned, and then reviled again, on repeat, as each new generation takes its turn deciding whether Macca completely lost the plot in the ‘70s or merely snuck his genius into a deceptively easy-listening package.
In the case of Wings, in particular, it would be completely reasonable to assume that McCartney was dead set on creating a band with no discernible connective tissue to The Beatles; a clean break to prevent restrictive comparisons to the Fabs and to signify his own independence from the John Lennon songwriting partnership. If Paul was thinking that, it was way subconsciously, though, because he certainly wasn’t acting like it. In fact, after releasing his second solo album, RAM, in 1971, he approached the idea of starting a new band not with the goal of creating a more controllable sort of ‘anti-Beatles’ but by essentially following the same methods he had as a teenager in Liverpool.
“The thing with Wings was, I thought, well, how did we do it in the Beatles?” McCartney told Guitar World in 2010, “How do you do a band? Well, you start with nothing, and you just learn, and you improve. I just wanted it to be, like, organic. I wasn’t interested in putting it together professionally. So that’s exactly what we were. We were just a bunch of strolling musicians struggling.”
If you’ve just spent more than a decade as a member of a hit-making factory with three other all-time great pop musicians, it’s very hard to have the patience to let something new evolve organically. As such, McCartney admittedly rushed Wings into their first record, 1971’s Wild Life, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle by loosely chugging along through the band’s sessions at Abbey Road, laying down nearly half the songs in one take.
John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had been replaced by Paul’s wife Linda McCartney, Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, and drummer Denny Seiwell, and the material was relatively fresh, with only some leftovers from Ram; none from The Beatles’ days. The response, even from fans who’d loyally stuck with McCartney through the polarising Ram, was fairly flat, with many people turned off by Paul’s ongoing fascination with silly throw-away nonsense songs like ‘Bip Bop’.
(Credits: Far Out / Paul McCartney / Wings)
At the time, McCartney was a tad defensive, saying, “I think what has happened is rock and roll has become so esteemed. I mean, people study the shit in university! Well, when we started, nobody did, and a record like Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ didn’t have to have any significance other than it was just a red-hot record.”
It wasn’t so much that people had no room for cute nonsense in general, though; it was that they had an expectation of what Paul McCartney was capable of, and they were only getting occasional hints that he was still willing or able to plumb the depths in the way he had with Lennon breathing down his neck.
To make matters worse, Lennon had turned from a friend to a full-on foe by this point, having famously eviscerated McCartney on the diss track ‘How Do You Sleep’, in which he suggests that Paul had lucked out by writing ‘Yesterday’ and hadn’t managed anything else of much merit.
Under these circumstances, it’s not so surprising that Wings’ material continued to move further and further away from any sort of recognisable Beatle DNA as the ‘70s continued. There were still the occasional moments, however, where one couldn’t help but hear a certain guitar lick or bit of harmony in a Beatley context, imagining what John might have added to the energy of the song or how George might have given it a different tone, and sometimes, there were Wings songs that sounded like they could have fit nicely onto the White Album or Abbey Road. In other cases, a song felt like it might have served as the perfect excuse for a mid ‘70s reunion, capturing the changing sensibilities of the ex-Beatles in their mid 30s.
Here is a selection of five such Wings tracks that could have, or should have, been on Beatles records, or which already are on Beatles records in various parallel dimensions.
Five Wings songs that could have been on Beatles records: ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
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