July 6, 1973 Birmingham England
Steven:
Has it been difficult for you putting together a new band? There would seem to be an extraordinary amount of pressure on you to come up with a group of musicians that could compete with the Beatles.
Paul:
It was a bit touch and go at the beginning because it was a bit difficult for me to just suddenly develop a new band. Because let's face it, the Beatles played Hamburg for like a year solid, playing eight hours a day before we ever were anything. Then we still came back to Liverpool and played for years at these little places, Litherland Town Hall and the Aintree Institute. So it took a long time but that was the idea. We felt, 'Well, we can't take quite as long with this band but we're gonna kinda duck out of the press thing and do little anonymous gigs.' We did our university tour and we did a Europe tour which was a bit more kind of press but we thought we've got to swallow our pride and go right ahead.
Steven:
Were those considered breaking-in tours?
Paul:
Definitely, for us. It was to get the band used to playing. Because if you get any five people, it's pretty hard to get a band out of it unless you've been going a year or so. It takes that long for five people to begin to understand each other.
Steven:
After playing with the same three musicians for such a long time, was it difficult to find new players? When you chose the people in Wings, were they your first choices?
Paul:
Yeah, they were all first choices. I didn't do it like thinking, 'OK, who are the best musicians in the world?' and get it together like that. It was all done very kind of random, really; there was like a great element of randomness in it. I went to New York and we auditioned drummers which everyone said later was about the uncoolest thing you can do because these drummers are like the world's top. And there's me, I just got them all down in a basement and said, 'Alright, lads ?' And they're sitting there and there's no band, each drummer is just sitting there. But Denny (Seiwell) was the one who kind of appealed to me; I thought he looks good, he sings, and he can drum great. And he's picking up a lot of compliments now from musicians who think he's a red hot drummer. Brinsley really digs him, Brinsley's drummer goes crazy over Denny. That's Billy (Rankin).
Steven:
Was that your idea to bring Brinsley Schwarz on the tour?
Paul:
We did that special, that TV special, and that was kind of the end of our breaking-in period. We really hadn't played very well, I don't think any of us thought we played very well as a band up until the end of that special. And the last night, we did a concert for the special which we didn't dig too much, it just didn't get enough on for us. It was a bit of a dead audience.
Linda McCartney:
And the audience was just sitting there all hot.
Paul:
And they were all lit (with lights) and it was very. But we did a gig at the Hard Rock Caf in London which is a real tiny, little thing for kind of charity. And Brinsley Schwarz were on before us and they kind of warmed it all up and they got a standup. Once you've heard a band rock a bit you can't go on and not rock, you've got to play better. So we thought,'Great,' and we went on after Brinsley and that was the first night we thought we played at all well. We were all double made up with that night. We rocked a bit that night.
Steven:
What are you going to do for a second encore? You'll have to have one now.
Paul:
There are a lot of features with the act that are still a bit raw. Our opening is still possibly a bit raw, and the end we could go on a bit longer, but this is all fine tuning. The thing for us, the way we've done it is the idea of having places to go still. This is only our third thing really - university tour, European tour and this.
The aim was just to have a band, pure and simple. Have a good band. As to where we play, we're easy. We'll play down a pub if it's cool, if we feel like it and they like it. But that's the thing for us, we won't naturally just play 50,000-seaters. That's' the interesting thing, we got Denny from New York, we auditioned some drummers there, and I knew Denny (Laine) was a good guitarist and good singer and stuff. So I just rang Denny up. And Henry was a kind of friend of Denny's and Ian's and he turned up one day at a rehearsal we were doing.
Henry McCullough:
Drunk!
Paul:
Drunk again. We didn't really know, we were just thi
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