Recorded in August 1974 at Abbey Street, One Hand Clapping is the sound of a rejuvenated Paul McCartney & Wings on the peak of their success. In an echo of his former band’s Let It Be classes, McCartney had determined to movie the rehearsals for an supposed TV particular. The footage was by no means absolutely launched and the exhibits have been postponed, however 50 years later, the soundtrack to One Hand Clapping is lastly out there to listen to, full with the unique supposed paintings.
It’s unimaginable that it was recorded within the first place. In August 1973, on the eve of Wings departing to Lagos, Nigeria, to report their third album, Band On The Run, each drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough left the group. Then, over the course of the classes, McCartney was robbed at knifepoint of a bag containing lyrics and demo tapes of his new songs.
Quick-forward a yr and, regardless of the difficult circumstances round its recording, Band On The Run had returned McCartney to the top of pop stardom. Eight months after its launch, the album reached No 1 within the UK in July 1974 and stayed there for seven weeks over the summer season, whereas hitting the highest spot within the US and promoting over six million copies internationally.
Whereas Band On The Run was climbing the charts everywhere in the world, McCartney was placing feelers out for brand spanking new bandmates. Again in November 1973, he requested Glaswegian guitar prodigy Jimmy McCulloch – who’d performed on Thunderclap Newton’s 1969 worldwide hit “Something In The Air” aged 16 – to hitch the classes that might result in the Suzy & The Purple Stripes single “Seaside Woman.” McCulloch bought the decision once more in January 1974 when McCartney was producing his brother Mike’s album McGear at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, and formally joined Wings in early June, a number of weeks after drummer and karate fanatic Geoff Britton bought the nod.
New recruits in tow, Wings headed to Nashville, Tennessee, in June for rehearsals, jam classes with native musicians, and group bonding. Impressed by his environment, McCartney wrote future Wings single “Junior’s Farm” and its B-side, “Sally G.” Periods have been booked at Soundshop Recording Studios and the brand new materials was laid down, together with varied curiosities, together with “Walking In The Park With Eloise,” a tune written by McCartney’s father Jim which was recorded with a number of Nashville’s best gamers (together with the guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer), and launched as a single in October 1974, credited to The Nation Hams.
Eager to maintain up the momentum of the Nashville journey and using the wave of Band On The Run’s success, McCartney booked Abbey Street in late August for what grew to become One Hand Clapping. Talking in regards to the venture in 2014, McCartney mirrored, “It’s nice to see that one re-surfacing. It was made by a friend of mine, David Litchfield; he produced a little magazine that was funky (Ritz, co-edited with David Bailey). We decided that he would shoot a very simple piece, on video. We would just go into Abbey Road and play basically what we had rehearsed. So we went in there and it was very simply filmed, absolute basic stuff, and I think its charm now is that there’s no pretense. It is what it is. We just called it One Hand Clapping, for absolutely no reason.”
McCartney is being sometimes modest. One Hand Clapping has an power, musicality and spontaneity that raises it far above a no-frills rehearsal recording. There’s a motive it grew to become one of the bootlegged reside albums of its time. Powerfully crunchy takes on a few of McCartney’s finest 70s up-tempo songs (“Jet,” “Soily,” “Hi,Hi,Hi”) nestle up towards all-guns-blazing blasts by the hits (“Band On The Run,” “Live And Let Die,” “Let Me Roll It”), and playful variations of some underrated gems that shine a lightweight on their high quality (“Power Cut,” “Tomorrow,” “C Moon”).
Simply as in Peter Jackson’s Get Again, there’s an abiding sense of music flowing freely by McCartney. Who else had the vary to confidently flit between a “cabaret” part, together with the cheeky future B-side “I’ll Give You A Ring” and a tackle the Tin Pan Alley normal “Baby Face,” the tense and foreboding uncooked blues of “Wild Life,” and a bravura solo piano efficiency of Band On The Street nearer “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five”? One other parallel with Get Again is McCartney’s tendency to veer off observe and tinker with new materials, equivalent to “Let’s Love,” a cute piano ballad written for Peggy Lee and the Ray Charles-like “Love My Baby.” And as if we wanted reminding of his previous, McCartney tries a number of Beatles songs for measurement – an organ-driven “Let It Be” and a piano medley of “The Long And Winding Road” and “Lady Madonna.”
On the final day of the classes, McCartney recorded a bunch of solo tracks in Abbey Street’s yard, together with a unfastened and charming assortment of ’50s rockers (“Twenty Flight Rock,” “Peggy Sue,” “I’m Gonna Love You Too”), a touching model of his Beatles traditional “Blackbird” and a raunchy blues devoted to the UK seaside city “Blackpool.” The solo al fresco tracks make for a candy postscript to the classes and are collected on a bonus 7” with the vinyl launch of One Hand Clapping.
At all times one to behave on momentum, McCartney booked extra classes in Abbey Street for November that yr to start work on their subsequent album, 1975’s Venus And Mars, adopted by the huge Wings Over The World tour. However One Hand Clapping offers us a snapshot of McCartney and Wings earlier than all that, at an thrilling time, filled with self-belief and able to tackle the world. And eventually, we’re capable of hear all of it because it went down that summer season in Abbey Street.
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