(Credits: Far Out / Kurt Schollenberger / ETH Library)
Tue 28 April 2026 2:00, UK
There was no clear agenda for what Paul McCartney was supposed to do after leaving The Beatles.
Anyone would have wanted to quit music altogether if they broke up their band and the rest of their bandmates ended up hating them, but the least that Macca could do was try his hand at recapturing the same magic with his wife, Linda, by his side. He hadn’t burned out by any stretch, but he did have more than a few moments where he had to learn how to become a rock and roller all over again.
McCartney wasn’t exactly everyone’s first choice when looking at the greatest records ever made by an ex-Beatle, and while RAM was outstanding in most regards, it was going to take a little while before everyone truly caught on to what he was doing there. So if the public couldn’t handle him as a solo artist, Wings was the next best thing when he formed his own band with Linda as his backing vocalist and keyboardist.
Wild Life was a little more than a typical demo recording when they first made it, but Macca felt he didn’t need to be defined by The Beatles anymore. There was no possible way for anyone to follow that kind of model that they had set, so he may as well have done anything that he wanted. And, folks, there were more than a few times where the McCartney family went a bit bonkers behind the scenes.
Aside from their massive singles like ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Hi Hi Hi’, McCartney wanted the chance to work on tunes that he wouldn’t have had the chance to do with his old mates. John Lennon would have never approved of the more sentimental side of McCartney’s music, but if most people were already having a problem with tunes like ‘You Gave Me the Answer’ from Venus and Mars, bringing children’s nursery rhymes into the fold on ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ wasn’t going to do him any favours.
To be fair, his version of the tune is a rearrangement of the version that everyone is taught in preschool, but McCartney felt that there wasn’t anybody at the time that talked him out of it, saying, “People said, ‘Oh, he only put that record out because [‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’] was banned.’ It wasn’t like that. I had a baby. We used to sing the song around the house and I thought it sounded catchy. I probably should have thought, ‘Yes, but is this the record that you want in your portfolio right now? Is it ‘the move’?’ But I don’t think in terms of ‘moves’.”
But playing a children’s song was already starting to wear on some members of the band when Red Rose Speedway wrapped up. It was going to feel like the Paul McCartney show, no matter who else was in the group, but by the time that Henry McCullough finished with the record, he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his days trying to make music for children when he could be making rock and roll classics.
If there’s one thing that Macca was able to do perfectly, though, it was balance both sides of his music. There were more than a few times where people were going to have to sit through some more lighthearted tunes, but the fact that someone could make a song like ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ on one record and only a few years later come out with tunes like ‘Junior’s Farm’ or ‘Beware My Love’ was all that you could have asked for.
Because while The Beatles weren’t ever going to get back together properly, George Harrison wasn’t joking when he said that seeing Wings was the next best thing. McCartney wanted to put on the kind of show that all Beatles fans could appreciate, and with ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, he felt like you were getting invited into what life was like for the McCartneys when they weren’t on the road all the time.
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