The McCartney Legacy

The follow-up to The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1, the most complete work on the life and work of Paul McCartney ever published. Volume 2 continues to paint the portrait of one of the world’s greatest musicians, his work post-Beatles, and his life from 1974 to 1980.

This second instalment of the groundbreaking multivolume set, The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2: 1974-80, finds Paul McCartney in the afterglow of Band on the Run, an album that topped the Billboard 200 three times in 1974, and won him his best reviews since his time in the Beatles. But he also faced rebuilding his band Wings, and getting it into shape not only for the studio work that would follow his most successful album to date, but also to tour Britain, Europe, and Australia before conquering the USA with the groundbreaking Wings Over America tour.

This intensely creative time in McCartney’s life saw him writing and recording four studio albums with Wings (Venus and Mars, Wings at the Speed of Sound, London Town, and Back to the Egg), the biggest selling British single of the 1970s, ‘Mull of Kintyre,’ and a solo album packed with electronic experimentalism, McCartney II. During a period of diverse musical evolution, McCartney melded his own melody-driven approach with in-vogue styles like disco, punk, and new wave.

Away from Wings, McCartney dabbled in music publishing, science fiction writing, semi-autobiographical filmmaking, animation, viral marketing, journalist boycotting, and smuggling cannabis past authority figures with mixed success. McGear, an album Paul co-wrote with his brother, Mike, tops a long list of lesser-known projects and collaborations—some of which never saw the light of day—that kept McCartney busy between hit records.

For the second half of this decade, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr remained ever-present in McCartney’s life. Collaborations were mooted, and multi-million dollar offers for one-off reunion concerts were plentiful, but the scars of the Beatles’ bitter separation, and their complex, hard-to-untangle business ties complicated their private and public relationships.

The McCartney Legacy series is the first truly comprehensive biography, and the most finely detailed exploration of McCartney’s creative life beyond the Beatles, ever undertaken. As well as thousands of never-before-seen documents, this volume is informed by hundreds of interviews, including exclusive collaborations with all four surviving members of Wings—Geoff Britton, Joe English, Steve Holley, and Laurence Juber—plus countless others including producers, musicians, recording engineers, designers, and architects who worked with McCartney between 1974-80.