**A Financial Times Book of the Year** A landmark account of Paul McCartney's triumphant
musical reinvention in the 1970s and the rise of one of the decade's most iconic bands This
is the story in their own words of a band that came to define a generation. Wings: The Story
of a Band on the Run tells the madcap history 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 with a cast of characters including John Lennon Ringo Starr George Harrison
Chrissie Hynde Mick Jagger and more Wings recounts 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 provide the
soundtrack to the decade. Organised chronologically around McCartney RAM and nine Wings
albums the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar rumoured to be dead fled
with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows.
Being there gave McCartney time to create and was 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 to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Introduced with a
heartfelt foreword by McCartney Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run contains 150
black-and-white and colour photographs many previously unseen as well as timelines a
gigography and a full discography in an art form all its own.
