1973 Interview with Paul McCartney - Forming Wings

July 6, 1973, Birmingham England

Steven: Has it been difficult for you putting together a new band? There would seem to be an extraordinary amount of pressure on you to come up with a group of musicians that could compete with the Beatles.

Paul: It was a bit touch and go at the beginning because it was a bit difficult for me to just suddenly develop a new band. Because let's face it, the Beatles played Hamburg for like a year solid, playing eight hours a day before we ever were anything. Then we still came back to Liverpool and played for years at these little places, Litherland Town Hall and the Aintree Institute. So it took a long time but that was the idea. We felt, 'Well, we can't take quite as long with this band but we're gonna kinda duck out of the press thing and do little anonymous gigs.' We did our university tour and we did a Europe tour which was a bit more kind of press but we thought we've got to swallow our pride and go right ahead.

Steven: Were those considered breaking-in tours?

Paul: Definitely, for us. It was to get the band used to playing. Because if you get any five people, it's pretty hard to get a band out of it unless you've been going a year or so. It takes that long for five people to begin to understand each other.

Steven: After playing with the same three musicians for such a long time, was it difficult to find new players? When you chose the people in Wings, were they your first choices?

Paul: Yeah, they were all first choices. I didn't do it like thinking, 'OK, who are the best musicians in the world?' and get it together like that. It was all done very kind of random, really; there was like a great element of randomness in it. I went to New York and we auditioned drummers which everyone said later was about the uncoolest thing you can do because these drummers are like the world's top. And there's me, I just got them all down in a basement and said, 'Alright, lads