Kingsway Studios, London
Producer: Paul McCartney
Engineer: Geoff Emerick
The first of two mixing sessions for Wings’ Band On The Run album at Kingsway Studios in London took place on 25 October 1973.
The band’s normal studio, AIR Studios, was fully booked, as were several of the band’s other choices, so they decamped temporarily to Kingsway. Paul McCartney had worked on the McGough And McGear album in 1968, but The Beatles had recorded ‘It’s All Too Much’ there the year before.
The mixing sessions for Band On The Run were fun, but hurried. AIR, unfortunately, was completely booked up, so we had to move to another London studio called Kingsway. They had reasonable equipment, but we had a few problems trying to replicate the effects we had available at Abbey Road and AIR, especially the automatic double tracking, so we had to rent in a couple of extra tape machines. It was all sorted out pretty quickly, which was a good thing because we had literally only three days to mix the entire album from start to finish.
Over the two days the songs ‘Band On The Run’, ‘Bluebird’, ‘Mamunia’, ‘No Words’, and ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me)’, and ‘Mrs Vandebilt’ were all mixed in stereo.
Studio engineer Geoff Emerick also added elements from an effects tape, prepared at his request by Theatre Projects Sound Limited, to ‘Band On The Run’. The tape included the sound of jail noises and cannon explosions, which were mostly left out of the final mix.