Following two poorly received albums, Paul McCartney - buoyed by his vindication re Allen Klein’s mismanagement of The Beatles’ finances and his new life in Scotland - set about recording arguably his greatest post-Fabs album. Here, David Bowie/T. Rex producer Tony Visconti speaks to MOJO’s Will Hodgkinson about being invited on board to help create Band On The Run…
Did McCartney say why he asked you to arrange Band On The Run? Presumably he was a fan of T. Rex?
That’s exactly why he contacted me. His first questions were, “Did you write those string arrangements for T.Rex? Can you read and write music?” I said yes, of course. Then we started discussing what he wanted immediately afterwards. This was at his house near Abbey Road.
What was your impression on hearing the Lagos tapes? A lot of work to do or was it mostly there?
Paul and Denny Laine played really well, but Geoff Emerick told me that the climate in Lagos made the oxide shed, and some of the tapes were so bad you could hold them up to a light and see through them. The first thing Paul did when he got back to London was to transfer each song to 16-track tape – they’d recorded on an 8-track – with a compressor on every channel to cover up the wavering audio, so the tapes he gave to me were impeccable.
How were the sessions at AIR?
They were a marathon. I met up with Paul on Sunday afternoon, and towards the end he dropped the bomb that it had to be done by Wednesday. In those days you would do anything for a Beatle, so I agreed, and with around four or five hours’ sleep I faced the huge orchestra at 10am on Monday. The idea was to start with the big groups and end on the smaller groups, like adding the two saxophones on Jet. I made it to the end on pure adrenaline. I hardly slept.
What was your feeling about the material? The first two Wings albums had been poorly received, so there was a lot riding on Band On The Run.
On the Sunday, Paul would only play me the parts of the songs where the orchestral instruments would come in, and he would record those bits on a separate cassette recorder. I never heard the entire songs until Wednesday because he was afraid that if I did, I would make copies and send them to friends. I would never have done that, but fair enough – he didn’t know me well. My impression of what I did hear was that this was going to be an incredible album.
Did you have Beatles references in your mind when doing the arrangements?
Wings was all about McCartney doing something new, but he had Geoff Emerick engineering at Lagos, so there was that connection, and how could he do something entirely new? He always sounds like himself and his writing style is very evident. Band On The Run was a new concept, and using me instead of George Martin for the arrangements was a serious departure. I’m sure George Martin, who is one of my idols, was a little upset about that.
How do you feel about Band On The Run, and your part in it, today?
I’m very proud of my participation and I was honoured that Paul trusted me with a big chunk of the music. He played a few top lines that would become first violin parts and I filled in everything else, the orchestration, all of it. Oh yeah, it’s a real feather in my cap.
“Linda thought I’d died…” Read the full extraordinary story of the making of Paul McCartney and Wings’ future-facing magnum opus Band On The Run only in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy HERE!
Photo: Linda McCartney © Paul McCartney/MPL Communications Ltd