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PaulMcCartney.com: Do you remember why the album was titled Venus and Mars?

Paul: Well, I wrote a song called ‘Venus and Mars’, and thought it was a good title. We only meant the planets, but then we had a great party on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and somebody said, ‘Oh, hi Venus! Hi Mars!’ to Linda and me. So, it was a great observation from them: Venus is the female; Mars is the male. It made a lot of sense, really.

So, I suppose people might have thought of that idea. But to us it was just the planets, and the song is just about a kind of space cadet. There were loads of people at the time who were very ‘spacey’.

PM.com: Was anyone in the band at that time ‘spacey’?

Paul: Not so much. It was more the people we’d meet who were sort of hippie-ish people. And Neil Young had done a song about spaceships and ‘Mother Nature’s silver seed’ [‘After the Gold Rush’], so this was my way of including us in that world. It’s very, ‘Venus, Mars, alright man? Hey, dude!’. If we’d had the word ‘dude’ then, it would have applied at the end of all the sentences!

PM.com: Do you remember why you chose to record much of the record in New Orleans? And do you think the city inspired the sound of the album?

Paul: Up until a certain point, everyone had just recorded in their home country. Basically, if you’re American, you record in America. If you’re British, you record in the UK and so on. So, with The Beatles and early days of Wings that meant London. But then there started to be a little bit of a fashion where people were recording elsewhere. I think The Rolling Stones went to the South of France, and we saw it as exotic and thought it was a good idea.

We knew there was a studio in New Orleans that Allen Toussaint had with his friend Marshall Sehorn, called Sea-Saint. It was a great little studio! I was choosing somewhere where I liked the local music: there was African music in Nigeria, for example, and although it didn’t really find its way onto Band on the Run, it was in the air while we were recording.

When we got down to New Orleans it was around carnival time, so we could get dressed up. We had the kids with us too, so that was nice for them! It’s a very musical city, so we were really trying to soak up an atmosphere. We did do one piece, ‘My Carnival’, because of the Creole feel in the city, but generally speaking we did songs I’d written anyway that could have been recorded anywhere. We were just enjoying the buzz of being in a great place. You would run into local people like The Meters, and Professor Longhair, and it was inspiring to go and see them play.

PM.com: One of the things we love about the 50th anniversary edition of Venus and Mars is that you’ve included all these wonderful extra elements that were in the original release, like the two stickers, two posters, the bookmark. Do you remember why you wanted the packaging to be quite extravagant?

Paul: The theory behind that comes from being a kid in Liverpool. If I bought a record back then it was really substantial buy. You’d spend a lot of pocket money on it and would have saved for it. In those days I would I’d take the bus into the city centre, and normally there were a couple of record shops and a big department store called Lewis’s, and an electrical store called Curry’s. These were the places you could buy records. So, you would get the record that you were after, and then you’d go home on the bus and you would just study it. Every little detail would be a great joy. It was a very interesting thing because this was an artist you liked and now you were seeing photos of them or reading something new about them. And you could see who else was on the record. It made the journey very interesting and built the anticipation of listening to it when you got home. I always remember that.

When we came to the point of putting out records ourselves as The Beatles – particularly once we had a bit more say in the matter – we wanted to put stuff in that people could pull out. We started with Sgt Pepper, putting little cut-outs and things in there. And the lyrics! Nobody put the words on albums up until then. So, the back cover of Sgt Pepper was a photo of us all and the lyrics.

It was about including interesting and fascinating things for the record-buyer. If you unwrapped it on the bus, then you would have found the little things: ‘Oh, there’s a poster! I’ll have a look at that later. There’s the little bookmark thing, little stickers…’ And we’d just ask the record company if we’d be able to do all of this, if it would still be affordable. Luckily for us they said yes, because record sales were very high in those days as well. It meant that we could give our audience more, and I always loved that.

We’d been record-buyers ourselves and I had bought a couple of records that were rip-offs. There was a Little Richard album I bought once because I loved him so much – it was Little Richard and Buck Ram with an orchestra. I thought, ‘Yeah, great. That should be good!’ I got it home and Little Richard was on one track… The rest was Buck Ram and his bloody orchestra! I thought, ‘That is such a rip-off!’ In The Beatles we were all very much anti that kind of marketing. Early on we’d hung out with Phil Spector, whose work we loved, but he was a little bit that way. He asked, ‘Why do you have two different songs on a single?’ We said, ‘Well, because it’s great if you’ve got the B-side as well as the A-side. We love turning it over and getting a new song, two for the price of one!’ And he said, ‘Oh no, no. All we do is just take the vocal off and leave the backing track on, and we call it “Sing along with…”’. That is such a rip-off, man! That is terrible!

George Martin always used to say: VFM – Value For Money. So, you could say Venus and Mars is VFM. V&M gives you VFM!

PaulMcCartney.com: Off the back of Venus and Mars, you went on your biggest tour up to that point, with Wings over the World. You went from smaller venues to sports stadiums for the first time since forming Wings – what was that like?

Paul: Yeah, that was the great thing about Wings. After The Beatles, we had this tiny little band that didn’t have any hits and didn’t even know each other, except for me and Linda obviously. And Denny Laine, who I knew a little. We were almost an amateur outfit, but we knew we would work at it and we did. We built it brick-by-brick. 

In 1976 we did the big American tour and it was like, ‘Wow, this is it!’ That was the payoff, after all that work. This crazy idea of just getting a few friends together and doing little clubs and building it and learning how to be a group – it worked. 

We’d also had a couple of hits like the Band on the Run album, so that was really good because we were kind of refusing to do Beatles stuff. It was the justification of the way we’d done it, with the world’s craziest idea – that after you’ve been a Beatle, you go down to little clubs or places you don’t even have bookings, like on the university tour. It was very daring.

PM.com: Speaking of live shows, you performed ‘Letting Go’ from Venus and Mars on your most recent tour. Is there a reason why that song is still a crucial part of the set?

Paul: I just like the song. I like the riff. It’s a funky little riff! And obviously on this latest tour we had the horn section, the Hot City Horns. Or the ‘Horny Boys’, as we also call them! They start the song from somewhere in the crowd, and we have to do another number to allow them time to get back to the stage!

PM.com: The brass sections on Venus and Mars are great. Is there something special about how that sounds, and did you enjoy bringing horn and brass sections into the album?

Paul: Well, it’s very R&B, it’s very blues, it’s very rock ‘n’ roll. A lot of people had horn sections, particularly American R&B people like Little Richard and it was always a glamorous thing to me. In the early days of The Beatles, we never did any of that. It was just the four of us: that was it! And then we opened up a little bit when Billy Preston came in and we did session things like ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’. We played around with that, but we never had them in our stage act. 

At the time I recorded Venus and Mars with Wings, I got in touch with Tony Dorsey who was a trombone player from Georgia. He was a lot of fun and a great arranger, so we felt like we were in safe hands. He’d ask, ‘What do you need, a sax? A trumpet? A trombone?’ And he became the director of that section. We took to having that in our live act as well, and it just broadened the appeal of the group. 

A few years ago, I was getting ready for a new tour and thought, ‘What are we going to do to be a little bit different? It’d be great to bring back the horns!’ So, I rang [keyboard player] Wix – because he’s kind of like our musical director in the band – and asked him if he knew anyone who would be suitable. Funnily enough, he’d just done a charity gig with this great little horn section called the Hot City Horns. And coincidentally, two of them went to my old school, LIPA!

The Liverpool Institute was the grammar school that George Harrison and I had been to, and when it closed down we saved it and made it into a performing arts school. Two of the Hot City Horns guys, Mike and Paul, had gone through LIPA. So, it felt like a full circle moment inviting them to join the tour. And they’re great! One of the things we always wanted to teach the students was to have a great attitude: you know, just simple little things like showing up on time, not getting drunk before performing, and generally having a good work ethic. These guys are like that. They’re really nice people. 

PM.com: Wings had a lineup change during the recording sessions for Venus and Mars, with Geoff Britton leaving and Joe English joining. Do you remember how you found Joe?

Paul: Tony Dorsey had mentioned this guy, Joe English, who was also from Georgia and was apparently a great little drummer. We played with him and liked him a lot. We already had Denny, Linda, me, and Jimmy McCulloch at that point.

Everyone brought a lot to the band. Linda, who’d started off not being a band-type person as she was a professional photographer, was getting really good. She was rocking it! She was a great crowd-pleaser, getting the audience to clap and sing along. It was fabulous because she was one of the first girls in an otherwise male rock group. A few people around that time said she inspired them to get a girl in their group! 

So, with Wings we suddenly we had this really nice group. We had songs, we had hits. And now – with the addition of the horn section – we had something that could fill arenas and do well.

Going further

• https://www.paulmccartney.com/news/you-gave-me-the-answer-rock-show-special
• https://www.paulmccartney.com/news/you-gave-me-the-answer-venus-and-mars-special