{"id":399626,"date":"2010-03-07T09:01:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T14:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/papundits.wordpress.com\/?p=32007"},"modified":"2010-03-07T09:01:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T14:01:16","slug":"sunday-music-%e2%80%93-live-and-let-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/399626","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Music \u2013 Live And Let Die"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s music video is \u2018Live And Let Die\u2019 from Wings.<\/p>\n

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This video was posted to You Tube by citycity49<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1973, during the sessions for the band’s ‘Red Rose Speedway’ album, Wings recorded this theme for the new James Bond movie, ‘Live And Let Die’. This was the first Bond movie with Roger Moore playing Bond. Again, as with most of the clips I select for Sunday Music, this song also has some history, so I had to search for that original theme from the Movie, as most live versions of the band performing the song, even though the same, are different from this original clip, which does have some interesting history attached to it. The intro is a little cheesy I know but the story concerns what happened at the end of the video.<\/p>\n

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Wings formed in 1971 following the break up of The Beatles. Paul was working on his first eponymous solo album at the time, with his wife Linda, and he played every instrument on every track on that first album. For his second album, ‘Ram’, he used a session guitarist, and this album produced the wonderful song, ‘Uncle Albert\/Admiral Halsey’, his first Number One song following his time with The Beatles. The third album was ‘Wild Life’, the first actually to use the band name Wings. He was joined on this album by ex Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, and these three then formed the core of a band that went though numerous line up changes during its following history. Also around this time he released two singles which sold well, and these were included on the remixed version of this album released in 1993. Those two songs were ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’, and the quirky redo of the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’. Both singles did quite well on the charts despite the Irish song being banned outright by all radio stations in the UK because of the situation in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

In 1972, the band released its fourth album, ‘Red Rose Speedway’ which is one of my favourite albums. The arrangements for most of the songs seem to be so simple in structure, but in the main are quite complicated as songs blend in together. His big song from this album was the romantic ballad ‘My Love’ which was a major smash hit for the band.<\/p>\n

Paul was approached by George Martin to see if he would do the theme for the new Bond movie, and this is the song they came up with. a song that also performed well for the band, and one that never made it onto a studio album.<\/p>\n

The story with respect to this video happens right at the end of the clip. In keeping with the Bond theme, and also in reference to Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy series, the band included an image of a spy dressed in the requisite trench coat skulking about in the upper reaches of the studio where the clip was being performed live by the band. This ’spy’ approaches a plunger to set off an explosion. The explosion was actually on the set. Armorers had wired up a small charge in Paul’s Grand Piano that he was playing for the song. At the end, and timed to coincide with the ‘Spy’ depressing the plunger, Paul would hit a key on the piano that was wired up to detonate the small charge, designed to produce a small flashbang with a lot of smoke and blow off the side of the piano for effect. However, the charge was grossly over calculated and the resultant explosion actually blew Paul right off his seat, and almost blew the piano apart. There is some slow motion footage of the actual explosion, and as harmless as it might actually appear, it was in fact quite a substantial explosion. In fact, Paul had problems for some time after this with his hearing, and it was thought that the damage might be permanent, luckily not proving so.<\/p>\n

The song was nominated for the Academy Award for Movie themes, but the award that year went to ‘The Way We Were’.<\/p>\n

The use of pyrotechnics for this clip was a new thing, and one that the band included for all their later live performance concerts, where this song was always a huge hit, with the fireworks display as part of the song, albeit without the exploding piano. Even though this song never appeared on any studio album, it has appeared on nearly every live album the band has recorded.<\/p>\n

The band’s next album was ‘Band On The Run’, recorded wholly in Lagos Nigeria, an unheard of thing for a major band to do, because recording facilities here were positively backwards, primitive when compared to the direction that bands were going, moving into as much state of the art equipment as possible. Despite that, this album was probably received better than any Wings album, and produced three Number One songs.<\/p>\n

The next major album from the band was ‘Venus And Mars’.<\/p>\n

Why I included some of that history following up from today’s clip was as a lead in to this wonderful song taken from that ‘Venus And Mars’ album. As is mostly the case, the album is the vehicle for one and sometimes more than one song to be released as singles for regular airplay, and more often than not, there are other really good songs on the album that are rarely heard, if at all. Such is the case with this wonderful song, again, as was sometimes the way of McCartney to blend songs together, and in this case it is the clever mixing of two titles, ‘Treat Her Gently\/Lonely Old People’. There is no clip of this song being performed live, and I seriously doubt it would have ever made it to a concert playlist for the band. This clip here is a compilation of images set over the song, and is very nicely treated.<\/p>\n

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This video was posted to You Tube by Patsyzimmermann<\/a><\/p>\n

As is nearly always the case, some songs that may seem obscure are the ones that stay with you.<\/p>\n

Filed under: Music<\/a>, Video<\/a> Tagged: James Bond<\/a>, Music<\/a>, Music Video<\/a>, Paul McCartney<\/a>, Video<\/a>, Wings<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s music video is \u2018Live And Let Die\u2019 from Wings. This video was posted to You Tube by citycity49 In 1973, during the sessions for the band’s ‘Red Rose Speedway’ album, Wings recorded this theme for the new James Bond movie, ‘Live And Let Die’. This was the first Bond movie with Roger Moore playing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}