Waterstones Liverpool Celebrates WINGS: The Story of a Band on the Run

To celebrate the hotly anticipated release of Paul McCartney’s stunning new book, we are delighted to be joined by a brilliant line-up of guests to discuss the band that came to define a generation, WINGS.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap history of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, Wings recounts the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. Soon joined by his wife – American photographer Linda McCartney – on keyboard and vocals, drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Denny Laine, McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would provide the soundtrack to the decade.

Organised chronologically around McCartney, RAM and nine Wings albums, the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar, rumoured to be dead, fled with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows. Being there gave McCartney time to create and was where this new band emerged. Wings then follows the group as they play unannounced shows at university halls, tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children, survive a robbery on the streets of Nigeria, and eventually perform blockbuster stadium shows on their world tour, all while producing some of the most enduring music of the time.

With extraordinary recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer, Wings transports the reader to the grit and glamour of the 1970s.

Introduced with a heartfelt foreword by McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run contains 150 black-and-white and colour photographs, many previously unseen, as well as timelines, a gigography and a full discography, in an art form all its own.

Peter Hooton was born in Liverpool and has lived in the city all his life. Heavily involved in local community politics, he co-founded The End magazine. During the 1980’s he was also the co-founder of Liverpool group The Farm who set up their own independent record label and went on to score a string of top 40 hits and a No 1 album Spartacus in the early 1990’s. He has written articles for publications including The Face, The Guardian, The Observer, NME on music, football, fashion and politics. Peter is also the Chair of the ‘Beatles Legacy Group’ for Liverpool City Council and is also a member of the Liverpool City Region Music Board and has recently started his own highly acclaimed ‘alternative’ music tours of Liverpool.

Pete Paphides is a music journalist, record collector, broadcaster and author of the award-winning music memoir Broken Greek. Over the past 30 years, Pete’s work has frequently appeared in The Times, Radio Times, The Guardian, Uncut, Q and Mojo. He has created and hosted several music documentaries for BBC Radio 4. He also hosts a regular show on Soho Radio and runs a record label Needle Mythology, feted for its lovingly curated reissues of under-the-radar classic albums.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the current UK Children's Laureate and is a multi award-winning children’s book author and screenwriter. Millions, his debut children's novel, won the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal. Among others, he has written scripts for Dr Who and Michael Morpurgo’s award-winning Kensuke’s Kingdom. Born in Liverpool, he’s a lifelong Paul McCartney fan!

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