The other day, my wife and I went to see “One Hand Clapping.” It’s a film of Paul McCartney and Wings at Abbey Road in late August, 1974. At the time, Wings consisted of Paul, Linda, Denny Laine, Jimmy McCulloch, and Geoff Britton.
Since many of the tunes were on the album “Band On The Run,” I thought this was a session in which they recorded that LP, but the vinyl version had been released the previous November. It was still hugely popular the following summer, spending two months at the top of the UK charts. So Paul and his team decided to try to squeeze more out of it.
According to Wikipedia:
The film features the band performing live in the studio and recording a potential live album, as well as voice-over interviews with the band members. Songs featured include numerous McCartney, Wings and Beatles hits, as well as some covers. Although a TV sales brochure was made, the film and album went unreleased at the time. In the decades since, they have been frequently bootlegged, and various tracks have been released on special editions of other McCartney and Wings albums. The film was finally released on 2 November 2010 as part of the box set reissue of Band on the Run, the first release in the Paul McCartney Archive Collection.
The whole thing ran just over an hour, with the now 82-year-old Paul appearing at the beginning to introduce what’s to come. It was a lot of fun to see Wings performing such familiar songs as “Jet,” “My Love,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Bluebird,” “Live and Let Die,” “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five,” “Let Me Roll It,” and “Band On The Run.” Throughout, Paul sounded fantastic, though it was odd to see him smoking a cigarette in the middle of a song before returning nonchalantly to a raspy vocal.
After the credits from the original production rolled, Paul re-appeared to say we shouldn’t leave our seats because he had something special to share with us. It was film shot behind Abbey Road Studios in a spot he called “The Yard,” where Paul sat and played an acoustic guitar while singing classics by the seminal rockers who inspired him. They included Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” which was the tune Paul played when he first met John (strumming a right-handed guitar upside-down because he was a lefty). Impressed by Paul’s playing and the fact he knew all the words, Lennon asked McCartney to join his group, The Quarrymen. The rest is history.
Martha commented on how funny it was to see the members of Wings sporting mullets, but remember this was the 1970s. My only complaints about the film were that it was a bit grainy (since it was shot indoors without enough light) and it was difficult to understand some of the voiceovers by the band members because of their accents.
I laughed out loud during the scene in which the band performed “Live and Let Die” with an orchestra, and director David Litchfield intercut shots of the bored musicians sitting there between takes reading a newspaper or having a snack.
I picture Paul showing up at the office of his production company every once in a while and asking an intern to go to the racks in the back room where his archives are to find something else from his past he can release (not that he needs any more money). In the case of “One Hand Clapping,” he authorized it to be exhibited in theaters last weekend, but there’s no wide release scheduled. I hope he makes a deal with one of the streaming services (preferably with subtitles to make those voiceovers more understandable) so you can enjoy it as much as we did.