Parky At the Pictures (20/2/2026)

(Review of Man on the Run)

MAN ON THE RUN.

`Stuck inside these four walls,' are the key words to understanding the Paul McCartney profiled in Morgan Neville's documentary, Man on the Run. He had first felt confined in Rishikesh in the spring of 1968 and then again during the recording of `The White Album', when he had annoyed John Lennon and George Harrison by recording certain tracks on his own. To avoid the walls closing in at Twickenham Studios and Apple's Savile Row offices during the shooting of Let It Be in January 1969, Macca had coaxed his disaffected bandmates on to the roof for the lunchtime concert that restored sufficient faith for the combo to reunite one last time for Abbey Road (1969).

But, despite producing a masterpiece, The Beatles knew their time was up. Ringo Starr has been the first to quit during the White Album sessions and George had walked a few days into the Let It Be shoot. But it was Lennon who broke up the band by announcing that he wanted to leave and, as McCartney explains in off-camera asides over the film's glorious archive footage, the quartet had agreed to delay the announcement until their business affairs had been put in order. However, Allen Klein was no Brian Epstein and, in trying to warn his closest friends about his sharkishness, McCartney succeeded only in coming across as the band leader that he never was. Indeed, his decision to hire relations of his new wife, Linda Eastman, to handle his affairs did more than anything else to drive the decisive wedge between the Fab Four. He compounded matters by refusing to move the release date of his solo album, McCartney, to avoid a clash with Let It Be and used a press handout to declare himself an ex-Beatle on 10 April 1970.

Audio clips abound of Lennon fulminating about McCartney stealing his exit thunder, but Neville opts not to use any quotes by Harrison or Starr about the split that turned them over night into solo artists. Lennon and Harrison had already released albums under their own name and Ringo rushed out Sentimental Journey to stake his claim to independence. More telling, however, was `Early 1970', the B-side to `It Don't Come Easy', in which the drummer speculated about his prospects of playing with his former bandmates again.

According to the lyrics (`lives on a farm, got plenty of charm'), McCartney seemed the least likely to come out to play. He admits that he became a bit too fond of a consoling dram, while coming to terms with his new situation by keeping far from the madding crowd on the remote High Park Farm outside Campelltown on the Mull of Kintyre. Indeed, rumours that McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike resurfaced until some intrepid journalists spotted him galumping around the property he shared with Linda, daughters Heather and Mary, sheepdog Martha, and `some cows and a whole lot of sheep' (to quote Ringo, who forgot to mention the horses).

Frustrated that his debut album had been drowned out by the furore of the Beatle break-up (in spite of the brilliance of `Maybe I'm Amazed'), McCartney persuaded Linda into joining him on Ram (1971), whose cover drew a snide photographic response from Lennon, who dismissed the homemade collection as rubbish (how nice it is to hear Sean Ono Lennon admitting how much he likes it!). Neville doesn't refer to the fact that McCartney would revisit the material under the name Percy Thrillington in April 1977. Nor does he mention the contributions of guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken. But drummer Denny Seiwell (who would co-produce Ram On: The 50th Anniversary Tribute to Paul and Linda McCartney's Ram in 2021) pops up to recall the experience of life on the farm and recording at Rude Studio. He also describes how he remained on the team when McCartney recruited ex-Moody Blue Denny Laine to form Wings for the Wild Life sessions later in the year.

Although brother Mike `McGear' McCartney, producer Chris Thomas, and journalist Pete Doggett chip in occasionally, along with such celebs as Mick Jagger, Chrissie Hynde, and Nick Lowe, there is little outside analysis of the music produced during the ensuing decade. It's known, for example, that Laine and guitarist Henry McCullough were unhappy with singles like `Mary Had a Little Lamb' (although `Give Ireland Back to the Irish' is conveniently forgotten) and some of the tracks selected for the unmentioned Red Rose Speedway (1973). McCullough also challenged McCartney's claim to have formed a band of equals, when everyone knew he was in charge in the studio. But he was also who everyone came to see when Wings embarked upon the 1972 college campus tour (a welcome getaway from a charge for growing an illegal crop in the farm greenhouse) that saw them pop up at student unions (the first being Nottingham University) and offering to play for buttons. Neville dutifully raises the media reaction to McCartney including Linda in the band on the strength of her limited keyboard skills. But, as Mary and Stella McCartney point out, she created some wonderful harmonies with her husband and put herself in the reluctant spotlight in order to help him through the post-Beatle crisis of confidence that would catch up with Lennon during `the Lost Weekend' that would see him reconnect with his erstwhile bandmate in a way that he would never quite do with George Harrison (having started playing regularly with Ringo) before their Threetle reunion during the Anthology sessions in the mid-1990s.

Neville unearths some excellent footage for this part of the story, although The ICA Rehearsals have been released as an album extra, while the `One Hand Clapping' session has now been given its own film. A bit more might have been made of the 1973 James Paul McCartney TV special, the Bruce McMouse animated project, and the reasons why Seiwell and McCullough were replaced by Geoff Britton and Jimmy McCulloch and why they opted out of the trip to Lagos to record Band on the Run (1973). The difficulties of working on EMI's outpost studio and the late-night mugging that might have had a calamitous outcome are ticked off, as McCartney allows himself a little pat on the back for having weathered the post-Fabs storm and produced an album to stand alongside All Things Must Pass (1970), Imagine (1971), and Ringo (1973).

He would never hit such heights again, even though there are fine tracks on Venus and Mars (1975), Wings At the Speed of Sound (1976), London Town (1978), and Back to the Egg (1979). But Neville seems less interested in the studio work than in the tours that took Wings (now with Joe English on drums) to Australia in 1975 and America in 1976. The Wings Over the World era has been capably covered in feature detail in Rockshow (1980), which was released during one of the most traumatic years of McCartney's life. It began with him being arrested for the possession of marijuana at Tokyo Airport in January 1980 and Prisoner No.22 reflects on the folly of his actions and the seven-year sentence he was spared in the only openly soul-baring part of the film. Of course, the year ended with the senseless murder of John Lennon in New York and one wonders how many times over the last 46 years must McCartney have regretted using the phrase, `It's a drag, isn't it?', after being doorstepped by journalists outside an Oxford Street recording studio. Yet the profound sense of shock and loss that this utterance revealed lingered and McCartney retreated into solitude again after parting company with new guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer, Steve Holley, as well as Laine, with whom he had composed the runaway hit, `Mull of Kintyre', which had done little to rescue McCartney from the punk-era backlash that made him the uncoolest man in British rock.

Neville rather skirts the fallout with Laine (you don't record an album entitled Japanese Tears if you're still bosom buddies) and fails to offer any summatory remarks about what McCartney might have learned during the post-Beatle decade and where he might have been heading before closing with the `Coming Up' video, which had supposedly reignited Lennon's competitive streak and sent him back into the studio to work on Double Fantasy. It's a mildly frustrating way to end, but it was obvious from the outset that this was always going to be an approved overview (Macca is an executive producer) rather than a objectively analytical and revelatory exposé. It's not even mentioned that McCartney found himself back inside the four walls in December 1980, as he didn't record again until Tug of War (1982) and didn't embark upon The Paul McCartney World Tour until September 1989, for which he chose to hire backing musicians Hamish Stuart, Robbie McIntosh (guitars), Paul `Wix' Wickens (keyboards), and Chris Whitten (drums) rather than reconvene Wings.

All of which begs the question, what purpose did Wings serve and why is McCartney so eager at this juncture to revisit their heyday with a documentary, another compilation album, and a 576-page book (Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run)? For all the access Neville seems to have had to McCartney himself, he doesn't really attempt to explore the group dynamic. Admittedly, he is restricted by the fact that Laine, McCullough, McCulloch, and Linda McCartney have all passed away. But he seems content to chronicle events without digging too deeply, which, one suspects, would have suited McCartney down to the ground.

Having already done justice to the likes of Brian Wilson, Sam Phillips, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, and Pharrell Williams, Neville is very much a safe pair of hands when it comes to telling tales without giving much away. The winner of an Oscar and a Grammy for his superb study of backing singers, 20 Feet From Stardom (2014), he is adept at using archive montages to sweep the viewer into a time and place, as he did most recently with the admirable Breakdown: 1975. But McCartney in legacy mode is a tough nut to crack and he's cannily opted to be a vocal presence only here to avoid distracting from the cherubic, but reinvigorated thirtysomething on screen. He's been in the public eye for over 60 years and knows how to spin stories to his own advantage. Indeed, no one has done more to reshape our understanding of The Beatles than the band's bassist, by dint of the fact that he has outlived John and George and can present his side of events so persuasively that they have become an `official' version that Ringo is happy to go along with.

The same now seems true with Wings, which was always perceived as being a glorified backing band rather than a close-knit combo, no matter what Alan Partridge might have thought about the situation (`Wings. They're only the band The Beatles could've been.'). Perhaps McCartney wanted to redress the balance of all the Lennon documentaries that have been released since Martin Scorsese's epic Harrison tribute (when is someone going to focus on Ringo, who more than merits a cine-study)? Whatever the motive - perhaps it was simply to ensure that everyone else can see why he was so amazed by the Lovely Linda - this insider recap will delight Fab fans, as it's full of choice clips and relishable samples (some of which have made the accompanying soundtrack album), as well as the odd vindicatory snippet. It's also good for non-addicts to remember the consistently high standard of Macca's songwriting. But, despite the excellence of Alan Lowe's editing, 115 minutes isn't really enough to cover McCartney's 70s and a three-part mini-series might have been a better option, covering the self-doubt phase, the peak period, and the post-Wings Over America slide. As was the case with John and George, however, the definitive documentary on Paul McCartney will be posthumous. So, let's hope that this will be a good few years in the making yet and that there is still some history for him (and Ringo) to make.