Recording: Band On The Run, Jet, Mrs Vandebilt, Mamunia, No Words, Bluebird, Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five, Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me) by Wings

Studio One, AIR Studios, London
Producer: Paul McCartney
Engineer: Geoff Emerick

The orchestral overdub session for the Band On The Run album took place on 17 October 1973.

The album was nearing completion, and the following day an orchestral session took place for seven songs. Ahead of the recordings, 16-track tape reels were compiled with the master versions recorded so far, to enable the necessary overdubs.

Paul McCartney had enlisted producer Tony Visconti to arrange the orchestration. The songs were ‘Band On The Run’, ‘Jet’, ‘Bluebird’, ‘Mrs Vandebilt’, ‘No Words’, ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me)’, and ‘Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five’.

When I arrived at Air Studios I’m sure I looked bedraggled, I definitely felt it. I was greeted by Paul, Linda and Denny along with their great engineer Geoff Emerick. The sixty musicians are already there and I braced myself to begin the tedious arm waving (my bad style of conducting) and note correcting. The very first thing we did was the interlude between the first and second parts of ‘Band On The Run’; it proved to be very difficult because the first section is in an entirely different tempo from the next. We just kept doing take after take until we got the transition to work smoothly. Only some of the sixty musicians were wearing headphones, so it was a genuine job of conducting to bring them in and to keep them together. The rest of the day went a lot smoother. For the most part Paul acted the jovial perfectionist, which made it all seem like fun.

The afternoon reunited Paul with Howie Casey; they knew each other from Liverpool. He was one of the sax players that we used on ‘Jet’. It all went very smoothly until Paul wanted to add a sax solo at the very last minute. He sang it to Howie, but the melody started higher than the upper limit on the tenor sax, added to which it was in concert B major, a very difficult key for saxes. I solved the problem by writing out the phrase and gave the first half to the alto sax player. The first half was easy on alto sax but ended lower than the alto’s range. Paul would not accept alternative notes once he had this part in his head, but he liked the idea of Howie playing the final handful of notes on the tenor sax. After several tries, the two sax players made the transition perfectly and helped make the song’s end so much better.