"Band On The Run" sessions in Lagos

About

We were there for three weeks and we recorded seven tracks. We didn’t use anyone. We ended up working with just the three of us. We did the whole thing with just the three of us.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

I thought it’d be good to get out of the country to record, so I asked EMI where they had studios round the world. There were some amazing countries where they had studios and I thought ‘Lagos… Africa… rhythms… yeah’, cause I’ve always liked African music

Paul McCartney, from Club Sandwich N°47/48, Spring 1988

The idea to go to Lagos was originally just to have some fun because I didn’t fancy recording in London. I fancied getting out and EMI have got studios all over the world, including one in communist China, but because that was so far away, we decided to go to Lagos, because it would be sunny and warm. Then when we got there, we thought, ‘What are we going to do?’ So I played drums, Linda played piano and mellotron, Denny Laine added some extra guitar parts and between us we managed to make the sound a bit fuller. They were even building the studio when we got there.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

We thought that it would be warm and sunny out in Africa. We thought it would be like a fab holiday place but it’s not the kind of place you’d go for a holiday. It’s warm and tropical but it’s the kind of place you’d have monsoons. We caught the end of the rainy season and there were tropical storms all the time. There were power cuts, too and loads of insects. It does bother some people but we’re not creepy-crawly freaks. Linda doesn’t mind lizards. But someone else, for instance the engineer we took out, who did Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, he couldn’t stand them. So a couple of the lads put a spider in his bed. It was all a bit like scout camp. The worst a lizard can do is bite you. So we’re not freaked out by that, not like Ringo’s wife, Maureen, who can’t even stand a fly in her room. If one comes near her, she freaks out.

Over there, they don’t have many swimming pools and stuff, just a couple of big ones because they’re frightened of malaria. What’s more, we went there intending to use some of the local musicians. We thought we might have some African brass and drums and things. We started off thinking of doing a track with an African feel, or maybe a few tracks, or maybe even the whole album, using the local conga players and African fellows. But when we got there, and we were looking round and watching the local bands, one of the fellows, Fela Ransome Kuti, came up to us after a day or two, and said, ‘You’re trying to steal the black musicians’ music.’ We said, ‘No we’re not! Do us a favour, Fela. We do all right as it is, actually. We sell a record here and there. We just want to use some of your guys.’ But he got heavy about it, until in the end we thought, ‘Blow you then, we’ll do it all ourselves.’ So we did and the only guy from Africa we used, Remi Kebaka, was someone we met in London, then we discovered that he came from Lagos. But that was purely coincidental.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

It was a lot of misunderstanding. We met Fela through Ginger Baker, who has a studio over there, and one night we went down to The Shrine, a club that Fela has. Anyway, he used to come by the studios and it was all very friendly and then one day, he came by with a lot of heavies and sort of sat Paul down and said, ‘You’re stealing our music.’ And Paul said, ‘I’m not. Come and listen to the tracks. I haven’t used any of your musicians.’ The trouble was, Hugh Masekela went there and used an African band and they did the same thing to them, you know, ‘You’re going to take our music and exploit it.’ Hugh said no and he did.

Linda McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

Then, after we had been in Lagos a couple of weeks, we were held up and robbed at knife point. Linda and I had set off like a couple of tourists, loaded with tapes and cameras, to walk to Denny’s house, which was about twenty minutes down the road. A car pulls up beside us and goes a little bit ahead. Then a guy gets out and I thought that he wanted to give us a lift. So I said, ‘Listen, mate, it’s very nice of you, thanks very much, but we are going for a walk.’ I patted him on the back and he got back in the car, which went a little way up the road. It stopped again and Linda was getting a bit worried. Then one of them, there were about five or six black guys, rolled down the window and asked, ‘Are you a traveller?’ I still think that if I had thought really quickly and said, ‘Yes, God’s traveller,’ or something like that to freak them out a bit, maybe they would have left us alone. But I said, ‘No, we are just out for a little walk. It’s a holiday and we are tourists,’ giving the whole game away. So, with that, all the doors of the car flew open and they all came out and one of them had a knife. Their eyes were wild and Linda was screaming, ‘He’s a musician, don’t kill him,’ you know, all the unreasonable stuff you shout in situations like that. So I’m saying, ‘What do you want? Money?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, money,’ and I handed some over. Shaking, we walked on home and we were just sitting down having a cup of coffee to try and recover our nerves and there was a power cut. We thought they had come back and cut the power cables. We had a lot of trouble sleeping that night and got back to the studio the next day to be told, ‘You’re lucky to be alive. If you had been black, they’d have killed you. But, as you’re white, they know you won’t recognise them.’ I wanted to call the police, but everyone said it would do no good there at all. With that we had to carry on and make the record, adding to the pressure, which we had already got. It seemed stuffy in the studio, so I went outside for a breath of fresh air. If anything, the air was more foul outside than in. It was then that I began to feel really terrible and had a pain across the right side of my chest and I collapsed. I could not breathe and so I collapsed and fainted. Linda thought I had died.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

I laid him on the ground and his eyes were closed and I thought he was dead!

Linda McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

The doctor seemed to treat it pretty lightly and said it could be bronchial because I had been smoking too much. But this was me in hell. I stayed in bed for a few days, thinking I was nearly dying. It was one of the most frightening periods in my life. The climate, the tensions of making a record, which had just got to succeed, and being in this totally uncivilised part of the world finally got to me…

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” from Keith Badman

I thought Lagos was going to be gorgeous but I’d overlooked the realities of going to somewhere like that — the studio wasn’t built properly and it was like monsoon season. Again, though, out of adversity came something good.

Paul McCartney – From “Wingspan: Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run“, 2002

One night me and Linda got mugged. We’d been told not to walk around, but in those days we were slighly hippie – ‘Hey, don’t worry’. About five fellers jumped out of a car and one of them had a knife, so all my tapes went. These were all the songs I’d written, so I had to try and remember them all. The joke is, I’m sure the fellers who took them wouldn’t know what they were. They probably chucked them away, so lying in some Nigerian jungle there’s little cassettes of Band On The Run.

Paul McCartney, from Club Sandwich N°47/48, Spring 1988

Last updated on August 19, 2022

Songs recorded

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