Three years after the demise of The Beatles, Paul McCartney was winding up Wings’ 1973 UK tour at Newcastle City Hall.
The success of The Beatles’ recent number one single, Now And Then, reminds us of the tremendously enduring popularity of the Fab Four more than five decades after the all-conquering band broke up.
The song, based on a John Lennon demo from the late 1970s, was completed earlier this year by the two surviving members of the group, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with the help of AI technology to restore the vocals of Lennon who was murdered in 1980. These days, The Beatles, rather than being remembered as a mere pop group, are celebrated more as a musical institution and the lasting embodiment and main exponent of the groundbreaking popular culture that exploded in the 1960s. It’s perhaps sobering to acknowledge McCartney is now 81, and Starr two years older.
Our photographs from 50 years ago recall Paul McCartney and his wife and bandmate Linda backstage at Newcastle City Hall. It was 1973 and three years after the dissolution of the Beatles, McCartney was touring the UK with his new band Wings. Things were quieter.
Indeed, a year earlier he had turned up out of the blue in the back of a van at Newcastle University asking if he and his musician companions could possibly play a gig there.
Matching the achievements of the world’s biggest band would of course be an impossible task, but Wings would go on to have plenty of success in their own right on both sides of the Atlantic. Songs such as Band On The Run, Silly Love Songs and Mull Of Kintyre would be worldwide hits.
The Wings show at Newcastle City Hall on July 10, 1973 came at the very end of a 21-date tour that took in the English provinces, London, Scotland and Wales. Interviewed by the BBC before the performance, a relaxed-sounding Paul spoke of his enjoyment at simply being in a band and playing music – “it’s a certain lifestyle and way of doing things”. Keyboardist Linda meanwhile addressed criticism she had received of her limited musical ability. “It was justified at first,” she admitted. “I didn’t have any training and I was learning piano when we first started.”
The sell-out audience heard McCartney-penned numbers such as Maybe I’m Amazed and a new song called Live And Let Die, as well as a rip-roaring cover of the Little Richard rock’n’roll classic Long Tall Sally. But there was no Beatles music and, as 30-year-old McCartney emphatically pointed out at the start of the tour: “There is not going to be a reunion. We might do things for each other, but there will be no comeback.”
The Evening Chronicle’s review of proceedings was positive. “Wings gave a very good concert in Newcastle,” we reported. “The audience contained a lot of ‘second time rounders’, girls who swooned and screamed when Paul sang All My Loving all that time ago, and who were now young married ladies with different things on their minds.”
It was a far cry from Beatlemania. In November 1963, in a memorable Chronicle review of an early Fab Four show at Newcastle City Hall, our shocked reporter had written of “a vortex of mass hysteria”, “a tide of exuberance which was frightening in its intensity”, and how “solid phalanxes of gyrating bodies and imploring, outstretched arms blotted out the view of the stage and the sweating shouting performers”. It was colourful stuff.
Things had calmed down by the time Wings rolled into town a decade later.
