Recording: Morse Moose And The Grey Goose by Wings

Studio Two, Abbey Road Studios, London
Producer: Paul McCartney
Engineer: Geoff Emerick

Wings continued recording the London Town closing song ‘Morse Moose And The Grey Goose’ on 29 October 1977.

Paul McCartney wrote new lyrics, which made up the ‘Grey Goose’ half of the song. They began by recording acoustic guitars, and Laine overdubbed bongos. They then added multiple lead and backing vocal tracks, and McCartney recorded an unused Mellotron string part.

This is like a crazy track, this. Most of the stuff we do, it’s a song and it’s worked out and to some degree it’s rehearsed before we come to do it. But this one, we were just on the boat and as you can imagine there are a few evenings there where we weren’t too serious, we were just having a loon. And the electric piano was set up through a couple of gadgets and stuff, and it had this weird sound on it. And I just started hitting it one evening, and I was doing a sort of Morse beat on it. And Denny was just leaping over to the piano and sort of hitting it occasionally with his head.

We had this five-minute thing that just went on; it sounded like Morse code for about five, six minutes. We quite liked it, it sounded like the germ of an idea, so we went the opposite way from how we normally do it, of having a song and then putting it down. This thing started just from an idea, the Morse code idea. And then we thought, ‘What shall we call it?’ We ended up with ‘Morse Moose’.

And then we wrote another little bit in the middle, where it all sort of changed in the middle. One night in the studio back in London we wrote another little bit, which is the ‘Grey Goose’ bit. So the title became ‘Morse Moose And The Grey Goose’. But it’s a departure for us because it’s much more experimental than the rest of the stuff on the album.