Sunday Music – With A Little Luck – The Paul McCartney Series (Part 13)

Posted on Sun 03/06/2011 by TonyfromOz

Today’s featured music video is ‘With A Little Luck’ from Wings.

This video was posted to You Tube by sheerfolly2

Following the huge hit ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, and some time off for Linda to have her baby, the core of the band Wings, Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine resumed sessions and recording for the album ‘London Town’. The sessions had started earlier, following the huge U.S. last leg of the very successful World tour, and some of the material had already been recorded.

However, now the band was virtually just a three person unit. The album was finished and released. Still riding high on the back of now four huge studio albums and a monstrously huge World Tour, the album again sold well. Unlike those four earlier albums and the ‘Live’ album, all of which made it to Number One in the U.S. this album, ‘London Town’ only made it to Number Two, even though it was still certified as a Platinum album.

This album was a marked departure from earlier Wings albums. It moved into a soft rock sound. Denny was a big contributor on this album, writing or co writing five of the fourteen songs, and singing lead vocals on two of them.

At around this period of time in the music genre, Punk Rock started to gain an ascendancy, and sales of a lot of other music suffered because of this.

In the usual way, a Single was lifted from the album, and released first, if you like, a pre album teaser, that virtually everybody in the Music industry did.

In the case of this album, that single, today’s featured song, ‘With A Little Luck’ again sold off the charts, and drove all the way to Number One on the U.S. Singles Charts.

In the same manner that some other of McCartney’s songs were released for the Singles Charts, this song was also cropped from its full length. The album version of this song is actually a full two and a half minutes longer. McCartney was quite rightly miffed that he had to shorten the song. This was due solely for the American radio market, where they just would not play anything longer than four minutes, no matter what the song, or how high a profile the singer had. He was told that if he released the single as the full five minute 45 second version that was on the album, then there was virtually no radio station in the U.S. that would play it. Because of that, the single is only 3 minutes and 13 seconds long.

The longer album version is at this link, and it includes a musical section in the middle without vocals, and what is different about this is that usually that non vocal section includes a lead guitar break, while on this song, that break in the middle has no guitar, just two keyboards. Ever the music purist, my preference is always for the song in it’s original entirety, and this is also the case here as well.

Two other singles were lifted from the album, but neither performed very well at all.

Looking back with some 20/20 hindsight, this album marked a plateau in the life and the Album releases for the band Wings, and from here the band started a gradual decline. This is an easy thing to say, but you must keep in mind here that this is Paul McCartney, and anything he puts his ‘musical’ name to has that certain something to it, and there’s literally millions of people in the Music Industry who would have been positively overjoyed if they reached anywhere near the height that could even be termed as a decline for Paul McCartney.

This was to be Wings second last studio album, although they didn’t know that at the time.

So far, it had been a long and illustrious trip for someone considered to not amount to all that much after The Beatles folded.

WingsTFO