One Hand Clapping

It took 52 years and an eight-hour docuseries to confirm that the recording sessions for the Beatles’ Let It Be weren’t exactly the miserable, band-killing ordeals that the namesake 1970 documentary had made them out to be. But long before Peter Jackson put a feel-good spin on the Beatles’ dying days in Get Back, Paul McCartney had already made it clear he was totally cool with having a documentary crew hovering over his shoulder during his most vulnerable moments of creation—because a mere five years after the Let It Be experience, he eagerly subjected his post-Beatles band Wings to the same cinematic scrutiny.

Riding high on the runaway success of 1973’s Band on the Run, McCartney and Wings set up shop in Abbey Road Studios for four days in August 1974 and let filmmaker David Litchfield document their every move as they whipped through a sprawling setlist of recent hits, upcoming singles, B-sides, neglected album cuts, off-the-cuff medleys, instrumental jams, songs that wouldn’t be officially released until the following decade, ’50s rockabilly covers, and even a few Fab Four favorites. The result was a documentary called One Hand Clapping, whose overriding concept wasn’t so much “get back” as “get born”—an opportunity to show skeptics that Wings weren’t merely McCartney’s appendages, but a blossoming group fueled by the same sort of collaborative camaraderie and derring-do that his previous band possessed a decade prior. Alas, like the 1969 project, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and it’s taken five decades for a definitive document of the moment to see the light.

From day one, Wings were burdened by a seemingly insurmountable contradiction. “For me, I like working with a gang of people, I like a little team,” McCartney told Litchfield. “I’ve never been a solo performer, so it’s natural for me to find myself a group.” Despite his stated desire to be part of a community, the fact is, no one but John Lennon could hope to be on equal creative footing with Paul McCartney in a band. In former Moody Blues member Denny Laine, McCartney found not so much a new partner as a trusted accomplice who could both fill the harmonic holes left by Lennon’s absence and flex the extra guitar muscle required in the hard-rockin’ ’70s. But even with the core of McCartney, keyboardist wife Linda, and Laine in place, Wings were always a band in flux, with different personnel appearing on each record; the triumphs of Band on the Run ultimately owed more to the trio’s crafty approach to their low-tech setup in EMI’s Lagos studio than to a proper band coming into its own.

But the version of Wings that McCartney corralled for the One Hand Clapping sessions exhibited the laser focus and playful spontaneity of a tight-knit rock’n’roll band that seemed to have put in their 10,000 hours in just a few weeks. The preternaturally talented guitarist Jimmy McCulloch would be the closest thing McCartney ever had to a swaggering, Mick Ronson-like guitar phenom at his side, and drummer Geoff Britton consistently hit the sweet spot between Ringo Starr steadiness and Keith Moon power (while effortlessly adjusting his sunglasses without missing a beat). Sadly, this iteration of the band barely outlasted these sessions: Britton left the group six months later, reportedly because the drummer—and judo enthusiast—had the opportunity to work on a karate flick in Japan.

With American session drummer Joe English stepping in, Wings continued their skyward trajectory with two more chart-topping albums—1975’s Venus and Mars and 1976’s Wings at the Speed of Sound—and an epic world tour. In the midst of this hot streak, the One Hand Clapping project shifted to the back burner before being shelved outright. Cherry-picked selections from the ’74 sessions eventually surfaced as bonus tracks on the 2010 Band on the Run box set, which also included an official DVD release of Litchfield’s One Hand Clapping film. This new release compiles Wings’ Abbey Road repertoire into a joyful 2xLP document of Paul in peak mullet ’n’ cigarettes form, as he was transitioning Wings from a low-stakes Beatles antidote into a formidable rock institution in their own right.

Though it was recorded without an audience, One Hand Clapping unfolds like a proper concert, charging out of the gate with the band rocking at full strength, before calling in an orchestra to launch the symphonic fireworks of “Live and Let Die,” detouring into a mini solo piano set, throwing a few old nuggets to the Beatlemaniacs, and ending on a “Hi, Hi, Hi” note. (A bonus six-song 7" of acoustic recordings captured in Abbey Road’s backyard serves as the comedown encore.) McCartney has spent his entire onstage career contending with arenas full of shrieking fans, so it’s a real treat to hear him perform without being drowned out by screams. Compared to the bombastic, cavernous sound of the 1976 live set Wings Over America, the recordings on One Hand Clapping are appealingly raw and in-your-face intimate, making the listener feel like the sole ticket-winner to a private Macca soundstage performance.

In essence, One Hand Clapping is the photo-negative counterpart to Get Back: Instead of capturing the casual genius of pulling future classics out of thin air, it showcases McCartney’s willingness to rough up and rearrange his songbook. With Linda’s fuzzy keyboards jacked up in the mix, this version of “Jet” makes a case for Wings as the first synth-pop band, while Britton’s hard-charging backbeat injects the song with a punky thrust. And while this performance of the rarity “Soily” is more taut and less manic than the runaway-train version that brings Wings Over America to a fiery finale, it retains its status as McCartney’s toughest rocker this side of “Helter Skelter.” Even when he revisits weighty Beatles ballads like “Let It Be,” he approaches them with the carefree confidence of someone who’s discovered a vacant piano stool in a hotel lobby; after singing a verse of his melancholic magnum opus “The Long and Winding Road,” he clears his throat and barrels into a brief run through the jaunty “Lady Madonna.”

Get Back’s greatest virtue was allowing us to see rock’s most omnipotent group as mere mortals, wracked by the same dysfunction and insecurities that afflict any band running low on time and inspiration. But for McCartney, Wings represented its own kind of demystification process: In contrast to the Beatles’ rarefied status and trailblazing track record, Wings responded to the music of their contemporaries. One Hand Clapping serves as a time capsule of a moment when rock was splintering off into infinite subgenres, with McCartney’s effortless melodicism serving as the connective tissue between the glammy strut of “Hi, Hi, Hi,” the country serenade “Sally G,” and a divine reworking of “Bluebird” that transforms the Band on the Run cut from a low-key “Blackbird” sequel into a proto-yacht-rock groover. And while critics weren’t kind to early Wings albums like Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, representative tracks from that oft-overlooked era—like “C Moon” and “Power Cut”—reflect a longstanding fascination with Jamaican music that abetted reggae’s mainstream entrée.

For all the charming moments contained within, you can understand why McCartney opted to scrap One Hand Clapping back in the day: It showcased an already outdated iteration of the group, and its loose, anything-goes spirit must’ve felt at odds with Wings’ growing reputation as an arena-rock powerhouse in the mid ’70s. But its reappearance in 2024 aligns perfectly with the current Macca moment, when younger generations of fans have reclaimed him as the patron saint of oddball indie auteurism. The McCartney we hear on One Hand Clapping isn’t so much the pop perfectionist of classic-rock legend as the merry prankster less concerned with pleasing the masses than amusing himself.

Paul McCartney & Wings: One Hand Clapping

$40 at Rough Trade

$38 at Amazon