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Sun 31 August 2025 19:00, UK
You may think that in the 1970s, Paul McCartney would have been operating with bulletproof confidence. Having just dominated the previous decade with The Beatles, topping almost every chart simultaneously and creating new, innovative music in the process, it would be easy to assume that creative despair no longer threatened his sort of genius.
But the musical Frankenstein McCartney had built with his fellow bandmates had grown into something they couldn’t control in the 1970s. New and emerging bands took the innovative blueprint they laid and continued to build on it, taking music into new psychedelic realms.
So as McCartney geared up for his new musical project, Wings, he felt like the chaser, not the chased. He saw what Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac were doing in this new world of genre crossovers and experimental freedom, and suddenly felt as though he had to catch up.
Particularly in a live setting, which had famously been stripped away from his arsenal in the late stages of the 1960s. He said, “Instead of a band just standing on the stage and simply playing their instruments, we were moving into a period when shows were using theatrical lighting and various stage effects.”
The ’60s had been all about whipping up a frenzy and delivering your songs for them to drown out. But the new decade brought a new sense of purpose to a live performance, it was no longer good enough to just sing your songs, now you needed to give them an experience. McCartney knew this, and he knew who was doing it best: “Bands like Pink Floyd were putting on big, spectacular shows. So when we did this onstage, we had big illustrations of the comic book characters Magneto and Titanium Man on the screens behind us.”
But it was Pink Floyd in particular who tapped into something otherworldly. By 1967, when Pink Floyd were releasing their debut album, The Beatles were psychedelic masters in their own right. But by 1973, when Wings were gearing up to release Red Rose Speedway, Pink Floyd had cracked the nut, and what was inside was more than just experimental fun. It was a history changing idea that remains to this day, the finest example of psychedelic music.
“Pink Floyd made some great records in the 1970s,” McCartney conceded. “Dark Side of the Moon had come out in 1973, and it would have been natural for Wings to do something in their style. A lot of people did.”
But in reality, no one, not even Wings came close to outrightly replicating what Pink Floyd did on Dark Side Of The Moon. McCartney continued, “A few years back, Beck’s record Morning Phase was very like a Floyd record. It won ‘Album of the Year’ at the Grammys. I listened to it and I thought, ‘That owes a lot to Pink Floyd.’ Pink Floyd’s world was almost an extraterrestrial world, so it was a nice place to go.”
McCartney was actually treated to some private listening of parts of Dark Side Of The Moon before its release. Both Wings and Pink Floyd were recording in Abbey Road at the time, and in true collaborative spirit, Floyd would play McCartney excerpts of what was coming. Of course, he would have been suitably stunned, but as is the nature of the record, it wouldn’t have been until he heard the record in its complete entirety that the genius made sense.
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