50 Years Ago Today: Paul McCartney Wraps Up the Greatest Tour of His Post-Beatles Career

"It was a show so well executed, so well performed, that one came out with all the old enthusiasms for McCartney as one of rock music's true geniuses rekindled," read a review from The Guardian

Four years before Paul McCartney wrapped up their 1976 “Wings Over the World” tour with a three-night stand at Wembley Arena (then known as Empire Pool), the band played a much smaller show at a hillside venue in Ollioules, France. They’d only been gigging for a few months, and these were under-the-radar shows designed to road-test new material and get McCartney in front of live audiences for the first time since the final Beatles tour in 1966.

Guardian writer Robin Denselow was not impressed by what he saw in Ollioules. “[It was] one of the most depressing, almost embarrassing concerts I can remember,” he wrote. “[Linda McCartney’s] nervousness and her obvious lack of talent seem contagious, for the band were out of tune, awkward, and generally dreadful.”

This is pretty harsh, and doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny when you listen to tapes from that tour, but it did reflect much of the disappointment fans felt after seeing those early Wings shows in 1972. The band was indeed pretty green, they were largely playing material from 1971’s underwhelming Wild Life, and McCartney was unwilling to throw even a single Beatles song into the set.

Quite a bit changed by the time the band returned to the road in late 1975. The success of 1973’s Band on the Run and 1975’s Venus and Mars gave them hits like “Jet,” “Let Me Roll It,” “Mrs. Vanderbilt,” “Band on the Run,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” and “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” to add to the set, along with their theme song to the 1973 James Bond movie Live and Let Die, which was basically designed to be an explosive arena/stadium anthem for decades to come. Midway through the tour, they dropped Wings at the Speed of Sound, and the hits “Silly Love Songs” and “Let ‘Em In.”

Things had gone so well for Wings in those few years that McCartney no longer felt the need to pretend that the other band from his past didn’t exist, and he agreed to perform a handful of their songs on the “Wings Over the World” tour, which took them to arenas across Europe, Australia, and North America between September 1975 and October 1976.

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And so when Denselow walked out of Empire Pool on Oct. 19, 1976, he felt like he’d essentially seen a different band from the one he’d found so dreadfully disappointing four years earlier. “They played non-stop for more than two hours and gave one of the happier, most exhilarating, and most brilliant rock concerts London has seen in recent years,” he wrote in The Guardian. “It was a show so well executed, so well performed, so well lit, and with such excellent sound, that one came out with all the old enthusiasms for McCartney as one of rock music’s true geniuses rekindled.”

He couldn’t have picked a better point in the entire history of Wings to see them live. After 62 concerts across 13 months, they had finally gelled into the band McCartney always knew they could become. There had been very few chances to see any Beatle in concert since 1966, and George Harrison’s 1974 tour, which only hit North America, was such an underwhelming fiasco that it did little but increase public demand for a fan-friendly experience that didn’t feature an extended Ravi Shankar set and nightly renditions of “In My Life” so bizarre and off-key they bordered on the sacrilegious.

The Wings show opened with several of their recent hits (“Venus and Mars/Rock Show,” “Jet,” “Let Me Roll It”), along with “Maybe I’m Amazed” and the Venus and Mars deep cut “Call Me Back Again.” When that one ended, McCartney addressed the crowd. “This one goes back a bit,” he said. “This is for the over-fourteens in the audience.”

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He then led the band into “Lady Madonna” as the crowd erupted with joy. Like many of the best Beatles songs, they never had the chance to be played in a concert setting. And for much of the crowd, both the over-fourteens and the under-fourteens, this was their first opportunity to see any member of the Beatles play an actual Beatles song live.

Before the applause could die down, McCartney kicked into “The Long and Winding Road.” This is another Beatles song written long after they stopped touring, and it’s a particularly sensitive one since Phil Spector added strings, horns, and a choir to the original recording without McCartney’s consent. The version played here is the stripped-down one he originally hoped to release, which eventually saw the light of day on 2003’s Let It Be…Naked.

The energy at Empire Pool stayed high after the Beatles double shot, since it was followed by “a song about a British agent named 007,” in the words of Linda McCartney.

The mic was handed over to Denny Laine for a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory,” back to McCartney for “Bluebird,” and then it was Beatles time again for an unplugged trio of “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Blackbird,” and “Yesterday.” That latter song was hardly a surprise, since he’d been doing it all tour, but the place still went insane. It’s the equivalent of Bob Dylan playing “Blowin’ in the Wind” on the 1974 reunion tour with the Band or CSNY breaking out “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” later that same year: a potent dose of 1960s nostalgia for an audience desperate to go back to that time.

But five Beatles songs was McCartney’s limit. The back half of the show focused on the Wings catalog, with a brief diversion into Laine’s tenure as the original Moody Blues frontman for “Go Now.” It wrapped up strongly with “Band on the Run,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” and “Soily.”

“The band’s control of their material was staggering,” read a review in the Evening Standard under the headline “Wings Conquer Wembley.” “Every number was meticulously constructed, with the four-piece brass section adding a new dimension to some of the earlier numbers. Yet each song still managed to sound fresh and spontaneous…No one can underestimate the impact of Wings on today’s scene. They are a band who knows exactly where it’s at—without forgetting where it’s been.”

This is the exact kind of review McCartney dreamed of reading when Wings formed, and it took quite a lot of hard work to get there. But the next few years didn’t go quite as he planned. The band started sessions for a new album in 1977, but the process was interrupted by Linda’s pregnancy and the departure of guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English. They replaced them with guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer Steve Holley, and eventually finished 1978’s underwhelming London Town. Instead of touring it, they opted to rush out a greatest-hits record and begin work on 1979’s Back to the Egg.

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Back to the Egg was another flop, charting even lower than London Town. They still toured it, since they’d been off the road for three years by then. A global odyssey similar to the 1975–76 one was envisioned, but McCartney was busted with marijuana at the Tokyo airport after a series of U.K. shows and tossed into prison for 10 days. This was the end of not just the Back to the Egg tour, but also Wings. When the Eighties began, McCartney decided to focus full-time on his solo career and leave Wings forever a relic of the prior decade.

Before that decision became public, footage from the North American leg of the “Wings Over the World” tour was released in the 1980 concert film Rockshow. It hit theaters just four years after the tour ended, but it seemed like a dispatch from another era of rock history. McCartney was already writing innovative new songs like “Temporary Secretary,” and an entirely new phase of his career was on the horizon.