The Impossible Second Act
By the end of 1973, Paul McCartney had pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in rock history. 🎸 Band on the Run—recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, with a depleted lineup after two members quit—had silenced the critics, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and reminded the world that the most melodically gifted Beatle still had plenty of gas in the tank. But that kind of success created its own kind of kind of pressure.
How do you follow up an album that saved your career? For most artists, the answer is to play it safe—make Band on the Run again, slightly louder, hope nobody notices. Paul, characteristically, had other ideas. He didn’t want to survive again. He wanted to conquer.
A Real Band at Last
The Wings that showed up to make Venus and Mars was different from the group that had slogged through Lagos. 🎶 Drummer Joe English and guitarist Jimmy McCulloch had joined, and their arrival transformed “Paul-and-friends” into a bona fide five-piece rock band with real chemistry and firepower.
McCulloch was crucial. A Scottish guitar prodigy who’d already played with Thunderclap Newman and Stone the Crows before his twentieth birthday, he gave Wings something they’d always been missing—an edge. You can hear it in the muscular crunch beneath “Rock Show,” in the loose, confident interplay that runs throughout the album. This wasn’t the tentative band of Wild Life. This was a group that knew exactly what it could do and was ready to show it.
Joe English brought a drumming style that was both technically sharp and deeply groovy—and that groove was going to matter enormously for what Paul had planned next. 🥁
New Orleans and the Sound of a Party
Paul decided to take the band to Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans. 🎷 Allen Toussaint had built Sea-Saint as a home for the funk and soul sounds that were reshaping American music in the mid-seventies, and the city’s DNA—second-line brass bands, Bourbon Street jazz, the whole glorious mess of it—seeped directly into Wings’ sessions.
Celebrity visitors wandered through constantly. Lee Dorsey. The Meters. Dave Mason. Paul and Linda even attended Mardi Gras dressed as clowns, jamming with The Meters on a river cruise. The whole thing had the feel of an extended party, and Paul absorbed every bit of it. Where Band on the Run was forged under pressure in a foreign city with a skeleton crew, Venus and Mars was built with something approaching pure joy—and you can hear the difference from the first note.
Paul himself described writing the title track with characteristic breezy charm, telling Melody Maker in 1975:
“It’s really a total fluke. I was just sitting down and started singing ANYTHING and some words came out... I got this idea about a fellow sitting in a cathedral waiting for this transport from space that was going to pick him up and take him on a trip.” 🌙
That kind of loose, inspired spontaneity runs through the whole record.
“Listen to What the Man Said” is the purest expression of that spirit. Built on a melody so naturally effervescent it seems like it’s always existed, the track features a saxophone solo from Tom Scott that remains one of the most instantly recognizable horn moments in McCartney’s entire catalog. It hit number one on both sides of the Atlantic without breaking a sweat—the most Paul McCartney thing imaginable. 😎
The Suite, the Singles, and the Deep Cuts
The album opens with one of the great arena-rock sequences of the decade. 🔥 The title track begins as something almost dreamlike—a gentle, slightly trippy reverie that lulls you into a false sense of calm before “Rock Show” absolutely detonates beneath it with enough force to fill the largest stadium on earth. That transition is seamless, deliberate, and devastating. Paul understood instinctively what the opening of a stadium concert needed to feel like, and he literally built it into the album’s DNA.
“Rock Show” itself deserves way more credit than it gets. Running over five minutes, name-checking Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, it celebrates the communal ritual of the live concert with the genuine enthusiasm of someone who still finds the whole thing thrilling. This wasn’t a rock star going through the motions. This was a fan who happened to be the headliner. 🎤
And then there’s Linda. Her contributions to Venus and Mars are woven so naturally into the vocal architecture that it’s easy to take them for granted—which is exactly what the critics did, to their lasting embarrassment. 🎵 Listen carefully to “Spirits of Ancient Egypt,” Denny Laine’s gorgeous deep cut, and pay attention to what Linda’s voice does to the harmony blend. The warmth, the centering quality, the way she softens and grounds Paul’s melodies—dismissing her was always the wrong call, and Venus and Mars is evidence.
Critics Gotta Hate
Not everyone was swept up in the good vibes. Rolling Stone’s review was one of the most savage notices of McCartney’s career, dismissing the album as “a press-release concept, generally uninspired melodies and some of the dumbest lyrics on record”—a take so hostile it almost feels personal. You can read the full review here. 😤
More measured—and ultimately more accurate—was the retrospective assessment from Super Deluxe Edition, which noted that the album was “full of strong commercial pop songs that sounded great on the radio and worked well in arenas” while acknowledging that “its only fault was that it wasn’t Band on the Run.” You can read that full piece here. The gap between those two critical responses tells you everything about how Venus and Mars was received—and how wrong the hostile camp turned out to be. History, commercial success, and fifty years of devoted fans have rendered their verdict. 🎯
The Launchpad for a World Tour
Venus and Mars hit number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and at that point the conversation was officially over. 🌍 Paul McCartney wasn’t trading on Beatles nostalgia. He wasn’t in rehabilitation mode. He was operating at the peak of his powers with a band capable of delivering the goods anywhere on earth.
And the venues were about to get very large indeed. The Wings Over the World tour of 1975 and 1976—arguably the greatest sustained live achievement of McCartney’s entire solo career—grew directly from the foundation Venus and Mars had built. The setlist, the sonic confidence, the cultural momentum that allowed Wings to play to audiences rivaling anything the Beatles had faced a decade earlier—all of it started in New Orleans, in those loose, joyful sessions at Sea-Saint. The Wembley shows, the Australian dates, the triumphant American run—none of it happens without this album. 🏟️
Better Than Band on the Run?
Here’s the honest answer: they’re playing completely different games. 🤔 Band on the Run is a survival story—an album that carries its circumstances inside it, that sounds like something forged under pressure because it genuinely was. You can’t separate the drama of Lagos from the drama of the music. That tension is the whole point.
Venus and Mars is what comes after survival. It’s the sound of a band with nothing left to prove, choosing to enjoy itself anyway—polished, expansive, generous in its pleasures and completely unashamed of its ambitions. Whether that makes it better depends entirely on what you’re listening for.
Which kind of greatness matters more, the kind that gets forged in a crisis, or the kind that arrives when the crisis is finally over? 🎸
