A new biography of Paul McCartney has revealed that work was started on a collaboration between Macca and the sci fi writer Isaac Asimov that could have ended up as a musical in which Wings battled an alien invasion.
The treatments for the proposed movie have been unearthed by writers Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair whose book The McCartney Legacy Volume 2 is published this week. The second of a series of five books covering the ex-Beatle’s solo career, it covers the years 1974 to 1980, the peak years of success for Wings.
After the success of the Beatles films, McCartney was keen for his new band to try their hand at a movie. The musical was to have titled Five and Five and One and the documents show the basic plot outline. It begins: “A ‘flying saucer’ lands. Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ (Wings). They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile – back in the sticks of Britain – lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens…”
And the cringe doesn’t end there – there’s also a fist in mouth reference to Laurel and Hardy: “Onboard the boat they are feeling depressed – huddling leather-jacketed in the corner alcove of the dining room. ‘Another fine mess you got us into Stanley,’ says one of the group.”
It appears that Asimov did at least try and improve on Macca’s original ideas. He turned the aliens into ‘energy beings’ from a dying planet who want to occupy, rather than clone, Wings. He suggested that they communicate through “thought-waves”. When they hear music being played, they are “strangely affected” and “decide that they must use the musical key to unlock human emotion”.
In the end, McCartney didn’t like Asimov’s version and by early 1975 project was quietly dropped.
Sinclair said of the treatments that “they’ve just been sitting there...Paul’s treatment reads like something Paul and Linda cooked up while they were smoking something particularly potent … the Laurel and Hardy reference is really bizarre. You can’t really comprehend what Asimov would have made of that.”
As we know, the failure of the Asimov collaboration didn’t mark the end of McCartney’s cinematic ambitions. In the late '70s he asked Willy Russell to prepare a script that would use the songs on Wings’ Band On The Run album. When that didn’t work out, he asked Tom Stoppard if he could come up with something. Again, the ex-Beatle was unsatisfied.
So he wrote the script himself and the result was Give My Regards To Broad Street, an out-and-out turkey that did lasting damage to his reputation - he’d only reach the UK Top Ten one more time after its 1984 release – and which you’ll notice is always politely ignored whenever McCartney is interviewed about his illustrious career.
