Paul McCartney: Man on the Run Director Morgan Neville on Sean Ono Lennon and Wings’ Legacy
When examining Paul McCartney’s career, it’s easy to lump everything he did post-Beatles together. As such, many younger fans may not be aware of the band he formed after The Beatles, Wings, which was widely popular throughout the 1970s. Mainly composed of Paul on vocals and bass, Linda McCartney on keyboards, and Denny Laine on guitar and backing vocals (he also occasionally sang lead), the band had massive success on the Billboard Hot 100 throughout the decade, with songs like “Live and Let Die,” “Silly Love Songs,” “With a Little Luck,” “Goodnight Tonight,” and many more ranking near the top of the charts. The album Band on the Run went 3x Platinum in the US, and in fact, every Wings album that followed went Platinum too.
Yet, the legacy of the band has been wildly underrated. Amazon Prime’s new documentary, Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, aims to change that. The documentary, which dropped on Prime Video yesterday, chronicles McCartney’s post-Beatles career, the formation of Wings, and its eventual dissolution in 1981. It’s the first time McCartney has really taken a deep dive into his feelings about the band in quite some time, with director Morgan Neville interviewing the legend at length for the documentary, which eschews talking heads in favor of voiceovers.
So why had McCartney been reluctant to take a deep dive into Wings until now? “The reception to Wings kind of soured Paul on it,” Neville told us in an interview earlier this week. “I mean, he kind of says as much in the film that the critics didn’t like it because it wasn’t The Beatles, and it wasn’t cool, and it wasn’t, you know, whatever was expected.”
However, Neville notes that McCartney’s attitude toward the band seems to have shifted in recent years. “I also feel like Paul’s coming to terms with what Wings did. And it’s interesting that Paul’s been adding more and more Wings songs to his concerts,” says Neville. “And when you hear some of those songs, they stand up against the Beatles’ songs too.”
One unexpected addition to the documentary is Sean Ono Lennon. In the doc, Neville reveals that McCartney’s early solo album, Ram, was a critical flop, only to now be considered a masterpiece by many of McCartney’s fans — chief among them John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, a famed musician in his own right. “Sean is such a fan of Paul’s, too. He sees Paul as his dad’s best friend. Sure. And, you know, I think a lot of people tried to always pit ‘John people’ against ‘Paul people’… It sold magazines, and it, you know, became kind of a parlour game for any Beatles fan.”
“But as he says, they were actually way more similar than they were different. And I think what you see through the film, too, is even when they’re fighting, even when they’re saying not nice things about each other, they’re also referring to each other as, you know, my best friend or my brother.”
Man on the Run is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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