Firstly, I have no idea why this video for Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band On The Run” seems to be all about the Beatles, but I kind of love it.
Secondly, and more importantly: I’ve never really got into a lot of McCartney’s post-Beatles career (I’ve really only started investigating it in the last couple of years, to be honest), but “Band On The Run” is pretty much a return to the kind of track that McCartney was playing with on Abbey Road, isn’t it? The song-as-song-cycle that, to my ears, Pete Townsend was doing far earlier with The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away.” It’s not as catchy as something like the “You Never Give Me Your Money/Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” sequence from Abbey Road, sure, but it’s still an enjoyable spread of a song, weirdly luxurious and amorphous in construction.
Oddly enough, I’m not sure I’d ever heard the entirety of this song in its original version before I’d heard the Foo Fighters’ cover from just a few years ago; I was still in my “If It’s Not ‘Jet’ Then I Don’t Want To Know About It” phase of my reactions to McCartney’s post-Beatles work, and so when the Foos’ version started I was very “I don’t want this oh no” until the 1:18 mark, when a sense of “What is this?” came over me and took me through the end. By the time I was thinking “You know, this is a great chorus,” I knew I was in trouble. Damn you Macca!