Paul McCartney

After the breakup of the Beatles, Paul McCartney found himself having to prove, first and foremost to himself, that he could start over. "McCartney", the homemade 1970 record, had the fragile, unadorned charm of an artist picking himself back up far from the perfect machine he had helped build; "Ram", recorded with Linda the following year, was instead more ambitious, eccentric and full of ideas and flashes of insight, sometimes even brilliant ones. Both albums, however, were met at the time with considerable skepticism by a critical establishment still accustomed to measuring his every move against the Beatles.

Wings arose from the need to build a genuine new project from the ground up. McCartney didn't want to be treated like an ex-Beatle touring with a backing band: he wanted a real band, imperfect and ever-changing, in which he could share the stage with Linda and work out a new balance. After the shaky beginnings of "Wild Life" and "Red Rose Speedway", the group found a more convincing shape with the excellent LP "Band On The Run", later consolidated by "Venus And Mars", "Wings At The Speed Of Sound" and "London Town". Throughout the Seventies, Wings became a machine for hit singles, tours and successful albums: for McCartney, the most natural way to step out from under the Beatles' looming shadow without giving up his popular appeal.

The LP "Back To The Egg", released in June 1979, was meant to open a new chapter. Instead, it would mark the end of the road. After "London Town", guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English had left the lineup; McCartney brought in Laurence Juber and Steve Holley and chose Chris Thomas as producer. Thomas had worked on the "White Album" and had just come off the experience of working with the Sex Pistols: his involvement signaled the intention to toughen up the Wings formula, ditching the soft-rock smoothness of the previous record in search of a tighter, more electric, more up-to-date sound.
The sessions took place first at McCartney's farm in Scotland, then at Lympne Castle in Kent. The album was recorded largely live in the studio, with further overdubs added at Abbey Road. "Love Awake" received a brass arrangement by Martyn Ford performed by the Black Dyke Mills Band; horns were also added to "Arrow Through Me" and "So Glad To See You Here". For the latter and for "Rockestra Theme", McCartney assembled a genuine all-star lineup, the Rockestra, featuring David Gilmour, Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, John Paul Jones and John Bonham among others. On "Arrow Through Me", one of the album's finest moments, McCartney's Fender Rhodes even won over Paul Simon, who happened to be in the studio during the recording.

The move, however, failed to convince either the public or its own creator. The bouncy single "Goodnight Tonight", released ahead of the album with "Daytime Nightime Suffering" on the B-side (and left off the tracklist of the LP that followed, save for later reissues), managed to crack the international top ten thanks to its funk-disco groove. But the album didn't follow suit: "Back To The Egg" peaked at number 6 in the UK and number 8 in the US, spending just fifteen weeks on the American chart. Numbers that would have been more than flattering for many artists, but which looked modest next to the string of results Wings had racked up over the decade.
Critics were even harsher. Many reviewers read "Back To The Egg" as a labored attempt to chase the mood of new wave without truly absorbing its spirit. Timothy White, in Rolling Stone, dismissed it as "more or less the most dispiriting assortment of dreck in recent memory".
Paul McCartney himself didn't do much to defend it. If anything... In a conversation with Reverb, he recalled: "The interesting thing is, looking back at some of the work, some of the stuff, it's better than you think it was, but because it got panned so badly... by me. The critics were tough on us, but I was particularly tough on us. I remember looking at a book: there was an album we'd done, I think it was 'Back To The Egg', that hadn't done well, and I remember thinking, 'God, a total disaster'".

Over time, McCartney has walked back that pre-emptive takedown. He recalled rediscovering the album's commercial performance together with David Bowie: "Years later, I remember looking at it with Bowie in an old book, one of those chart-ranking volumes that tell you who did what, and it showed up as number 8 in America. And I thought, 'Most people would give their right arm to get to number 8'. But it was eighth and I wasn't satisfied, because the Beatles had been number 1. That's fine though, it keeps you moving. But yeah, a lot of that stuff is underrated precisely for that reason".
"Back To The Egg" was therefore not the utter disaster McCartney had imagined, but it did confirm that the Wings story had run its course. The band would never record another studio album, and McCartney quickly went back to reinventing himself as a solo artist. "McCartney II", released in 1980, already revealed another side of his pop sensibility, more домestic and experimental, poised between electronics, synth-pop and lo-fi flashes of inspiration. Then, with "Tug Of War" in 1982, he found a much broader critical and commercial consensus once again, helped along by his collaboration with George Martin and songs like "Here Today", his moving farewell to John Lennon. After the perceived misstep of "Back To The Egg", McCartney thus proved that the end of Wings was in no way the end of his ability to reinvent himself.

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31/08/2026