Kingsway Studios, London
Producer: Paul McCartney
Engineer: Geoff Emerick
The last of two mixing sessions for Wings’ Band On The Run album at Kingsway Studios in London took place on 26 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.
Paul was confident and in a very up mood at the Kingsway sessions, as were Denny and Linda: we all felt as if we’d been through a storm together and that the silver lining was beginning to appear. The tracks were sounding great, too: the instruments had been recorded with a lot of their effects to start with, so there wasn’t a lot of tweaking to do. There was just a great energy to the whole album: the guitars were well played, the drums were upfront, and the bass was solid. All the sounds on Band On The Run, in fact, were purposefully built around the interplay between the bass and the drums.
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.
With the mixes complete, Emerick also edited together the two sections of ‘Band On The Run’, and cut the running time of ‘No Words’ from 4:29 to 2:35. The edit in ‘Band On The Run’ came after the lines “If we ever get out of here”.