Flashback: McCartney disbands Wings

It was on announced on this date 25 years ago (April 26th, 1981), that Paul McCartney's solo band Wings had disbanded. McCartney and his first wife Linda had formed the group in the summer of 1971 with drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist and Moody Blues co-founder Denny Laine. The McCartneys and Laine remained the nucleus of the band's ever changing line up throughout their 10-year run.

Macca had first broken the band in by playing small unannounced university gigs throughout Britain in early 1972. Gradually, he began booking the group into theaters and arenas, as the group started racking up Top Ten hits such as "Live And Let Die," "Jet," and "Let 'Em In," along with the Number Ones "My Love," "Band On The Run," "Listen To What The Man Said," and "Silly Love Songs."

The Beatles' longtime engineer Geoff Emerick, who went on to work on several Wings projects, including the Band On The Run album, told us that above all the members, it was Linda that was really the unsung hero of the group: "Wings was Wings, and Linda was such an integral part of that -- if you took Linda's vocals out of those harmony voices -- it wasn't Wings anymore."

In September 1975 the group, which had only ever played in Europe, embarked on the Wings Over The World tour which traveled to Australia and the U.S., where McCartney hadn't played in nearly a decade. Although the hits kept coming later on in the decade, including "With A Little Luck," "Goodnight Tonight," and a live version of "Coming Up" from their final tour, the constant personnel changes became a strain on McCartney.

After his January 1980 marijuana bust in Japan, McCartney cancelled the all the group's upcoming dates and released McCartney II, his first solo album in a decade.

The band recorded sporadically in 1980, putting finishing touches on a still-unreleased album of outtakes titled Cold Cuts, as well as holding two sets of rehearsals in July and October for an album which was to be produced by the Beatles' producer George Martin. To the group's dismay, when McCartney and Martin began the sessions that fall, McCartney was recording as a solo act.

Macca recalled the group's final days in his 2001 video biography Wingspan, saying that, "One of the jokes I'd been waiting to use for the minute Wings split was to say 'Wings fold!' But, as it turned out, Wings didn't actually fold, they just sort of dissolved, like sugar in tea."

The day after the announcement was leaked to the press (April 27th), Macca, along with Linda and their four children, joined his bandmates from his other band, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, at Starr's wedding to actress Barbara Bach in London.