Paul McCartney's Wings Close Greatest Tour at Wembley: 50 Years Ago — SkimNews
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- Wings closed the Wings Over the World Tour on October 19, 1976, with a three-night stand at Empire Pool (then Wembley Arena), wrapping 62 concerts across Europe, Australia, and North America over 13 months.
- Robin Denselow of The Guardian, who had panned Wings' 1972 Ollioules, France show as "one of the most depressing, almost embarrassing concerts," reversed course and called the Empire Pool finale "one of the happier, most exhilarating, and most brilliant rock concerts London has seen in recent years."
- McCartney played five Beatles songs live for the first time since the Beatles' final 1966 tour, opening the segment with "Lady Madonna" — introduced as "for the over-fourteens in the audience" — followed by "The Long and Winding Road," then an unplugged trio of "I've Just Seen a Face," "Blackbird," and "Yesterday."
- The Evening Standard's "Wings Conquer Wembley" review praised the band's "staggering" control and "meticulously constructed" numbers, singling out a four-piece brass section for adding "a new dimension to some of the earlier numbers."
- After the tour, Wings never matched that peak: guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English departed during interrupted sessions, 1978's London Town and 1979's Back to the Egg charted progressively lower, and McCartney's 1980 marijuana arrest at a Tokyo airport killed the Back to the Egg tour and effectively ended the band.
- Footage from the North American leg was released in 1980 as the concert film Rockshow, which arrived in theaters feeling "like a dispatch from another era of rock history" as McCartney was already writing songs like "Temporary Secretary" for his next phase.
Why it matters: This Wembley stand was the high-water mark of Wings as a live band — just four years later, lineup turnover, two commercially declining albums, and McCartney's Japanese drug arrest would dissolve the group and end his run as a touring rock frontman before his 1980s pivot to solo and electronic work. For fans, it was also the first time in a decade they could hear Beatles songs played live by a Beatle.
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