I’m amazed, and there’s no maybe about it. Paul McCartney and Wings star in this engrossing hour-long documentary (or, if you will, rockumentary) shot on analogue video in 1974 (while Band on the Run was riding high in the charts) by cameraman and VFX veteran David Litchfield, as the band worked in Abbey Road on a potential live-in-studio album featuring Wings standards, early McCartney compositions and covers. It was to be called One Hand Clapping but both album and film fell appropriately silent, release plans were stalled, though the material surfaced in the form of various bonus extras over the years.
Now the film is restored and re-released and it’s a complete joy, quite as entertaining for me as Peter Jackson’s account of the Beatles’ Let It Be. McCartney’s extraordinary, unforced gusto and the delight he takes in every creative moment, his natural extrovert musicianship and casual virtuosity are such a tonic. Perhaps it’s an absurd thing to notice, but McCartney is of course still a very young man at this stage and yet he seems to have such a complete historical grasp of pop idiom; not surprising, perhaps, as he co-invented or co-reinvented pop idiom in its entirety. He shows an almost eerie, savant awareness of popular music history.
