“I’M starting all over again and working upwards,” beamed Paul McCartney optimistically, midway through a ramshackle 1972 European tour which saw his new band Wings stagger from gig to gig aboard a converted double-decker bus. “It’s like boxing, you don’t fight Cassius Clay your first time out.”
Getting back into fighting shape was something of a struggle for McCartney in the years following The Beatles’ split, with Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair’s impossibly deep dive relaying his attempts at self-rediscovery in unprecedented detail. Desperately unhappy at the turn of the and , received a lukewarm reception. In a notorious 1971 hit job, John Lennon likened his old songwriting partner to crooner Engelbert Humperdinck; contemporary critics didn’t see much value in his solo work either, ’s Charles Shaar Murray summing up the mood of the time when he said 1973’s “My Love” was “as wimpy as anything you’d expect from Des O’Connor”.
