About the Book
An engrossing oral history of a band that came to define a generation, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap story of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, Wings recounts—now with a half-century’s wisdom—the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. Soon joined by his wife - American photographer Linda McCartney - on keyboard and vocals; drummer Denny Seiwell; and guitarist Denny Laine, McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would later provide the soundtrack of the decade.
Organized chronologically around McCartney, RAM, and nine Wings albums, the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar, rumored to be dead, fled with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows. Despite the harsh conditions, the Scottish setting gave McCartney time to create, and it was here where this new band emerged. Wings then follows the group as they play unannounced shows at university halls, tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children, survive a robbery on the streets of Nigeria, and eventually perform blockbuster stadium shows on their world tour, all while producing some of the most enduring music of the time.
With extraordinary recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer, Wings transports the reader, as if on a magic carpet, to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Pushing creative forms to produce a new history, even a Wings bible, the book refracts a bygone era in a totally new light. Introduced with a personal, heartfelt foreword by McCartney, the volume contains 150 black-and-white and color photographs, many previously unseen, as well as timelines, a gigography, and a full discography. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run emerges as a work of soaring originality that presents a new art form all its own.
About the Author :
Born in Liverpool in 1942, Paul McCartney was raised in the city and educated at the Liverpool Institute. Since writing his first song at fourteen, McCartney has dreamed and dared to be different. He lives in England. Ted Widmer is a historian, writer, librarian, and musician who writes about American history in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other venues. He has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Washington College. In 2022 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
Review :
"Widmer does an expert job of stitching this into a compelling narrative that includes cultural context – like what else was in the charts at the time – and plenty of photographs, many previously unseen. The result is a portal into a more eccentric age of pop, a fable about the tension between celebrity and creativity, and a story with elements of Spinal Tap and Wacky Races. . . .Under McCartney’s contrarian, impulsive, endlessly generative leadership, it blended imperial rock grandeur with a homemade ethos and a certain stoned nonchalance. Wings was always bound to be a spin-off from the Beatles universe – but what a spin-off it was."
"What is there left to know about Paul McCartney in 2025? Actually, quite a bit. . . .There is still much to be excavated from what is the most examined life in pop music history, especially when it comes from the horse’s mouth. . . . Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is a smooth, frictionless ride across the arc of McCartney’s ’70s career, when he continued to mint more hits, and secured a lock on a massive career that is presently in its 55th year."
"The first decade of Paul McCartney’s second act is fully illuminated in ‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run,’ an oral history drawn from interviews with band and family members, as well as other interested parties, and edited by Ted Widmer. . . The story is augmented by timelines that add a contextual charm all their own. . . . The book brims with often captivating details."
"It’s an impressive undertaking that follows the band from their founding in the 1970s to their dissolution in 1981, featuring extensive commentary from McCartney as well as co-founding members, the late Linda McCartney and Denny Laine, and many more. For the Beatles fan in your life and then some."
"A comprehensive oral history of the outfit, ‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run’ (out now, Liveright/ W.W. Norton & Company) unfurls 42 hours of new interviews, historical records, and previously unheard interviews from McCartney’s archives. . . . Some stories, such as Wings losing the master tapes to ‘Band on the Run’ after being robbed and mugged while recording the album in Lagos, Nigeria, might be familiar to Wings aficionados. But most other tales are newly shared and offer fascinating insight even for casual fans."
"A must-read for fans of The Beatles in general and their solo careers in specific. And the story of Wings is a doozy, to put it mildly. . . . Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run takes readers on an inspiring journey from the rudimentary efforts behind Wings' Wild Life in 1971 through the apex of arena rock in the mid-1970s and beyond. The book includes a vast assemblage of band member recollections as collected by Academy Award-winning director Morgan Neville. And they don’t disappoint. . . . A powerful rejoinder to the band’s critics—and there were many in the 1970s who queued up in hopes of seeing McCartney’s post-Beatles experiment fail."
"Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is the astonishing, unruly story of how [Paul McCartney found] a way to exist alongside his inescapable past. Structured as an oral history ... interleaved with rich archive material [and] elegantly annotated with timelines and discographies ... this book skillfully patchworks together testimony from all the Beatles, McCartney’s family, friends and bandmates, and external sources ... demanding re-evaluation, fostering revelation. [It] is ... the story of a man who climbed every mountain, then set out to do it all over again."
"An exhaustive, forensic and fascinating inside story of the band who achieved the impossible."
"A weighty new oral history .... crammed with fascinating details and amusing observations."
