Recording "One Hand Clapping" / "The Backyard" - Day 5

Over five consecutive days in late August 1974, Wings was filmed at Abbey Road Studios for a documentary. “One Hand Clapping,” directed by David Litchfield, showcased the band working together and Paul’s musical talent. It featured performances of several tracks from “Band on the Run,” along with other familiar and unreleased songs, including some Beatles tracks.

On the fifth day of the “One Hand Clapping” sessions, David Litchfield, the director of the documentary, filmed a segment in which Paul sat on a chair in the backyard of EMI studios and played an acoustic guitar. Although more songs were recorded, only five made it to the final 9-minute edit. Interestingly, this segment was not included in the final version of the “One Hand Clapping” documentary.

The version of “Country Dreamer” recorded during that session was released on the “Band On The Run – Archive Collection” in 2010. In 2020, the instrumental strumming version of “Great Day” was released on Flaming Pie – Archive Collection as a hidden track.

In 1986, a portion of the “Peggy Sue” video was included in “The Paul McCartney Special” (originally a 1986 BBC documentary titled “McCartney“).

In 1995, an excerpt of the cover version of Elvis Presley’s “We’re Gonna Move” was broadcast in the Oobu Joobu radio series in both Part 4 and Part 16.

In 2022, the album “One Hand Clapping” was released in a special edition with an additional 7″ containing six tracks from “The Backyard” session. Those were “Blackpool“, “Blackbird“, “Country Dreamer“, “Twenty Flight Rock“, “Peggy Sue” and “I’m Gonna Love You Too.”

A raw tape of 26 minutes is available on the bootleg “Backyard+” from the Yellow Cat label, released in 1994.

Additionally, on this day, Paul McCartney and Wings were also filmed during the recording of a version of “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five,” which was included in “One Hand Clapping“.

Speaking of covers, part of the One Hand Clapping release includes The Backyard, which was recorded outside at Abbey Road and features you on an acoustic guitar playing some rock’n’roll classics. Was it your suggestion to record this?

Cool little session, isn’t it? I can’t remember how it came about, but I thought it’d be a good idea. I’ve done a few open air recordings from time to time. I remember doing it with The Black Dyke Mills Band when we recorded stuff with them. I like the idea of being outside, it’s just so different! I got in the backyard there and I suppose sitting down with guitar is what I do. And those rock’n’roll songs are the sort of songs that I would do anyway, sitting around on my own. They’re some of the first ones I ever learnt to play, such as ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran.

Paul McCartney – From Paul McCartney | News | You Gave Me The Answer – ‘One Hand Clapping’ Special!, June 19, 2024

From Club Sandwich N°61, Spring 1992:

Anyone who makes a lot of films is bound to have the occasional unreleased project, just like prolific writers have unpublished articles, prolific recording artists unissued music and prolific artists unseen canvases. It’s only natural and is most usually by design or the result of a change of mind rather than a reflection on the quality /unsuitability of the material.

Paul has a few unissued film and video projects. Not many, but a few, and one is called The Backyard. Made in 1974, the public knew nothing of this until an excerpt went out on primetime BBC television in 1986 in a McCartney retrospective to promote Press To Play, later released on video. Since when, The Backyard has assumed a level of intrigue to match a Len Deighton novel.

But what is The Backyard? In short (and that’s very much what it is), The Backyard is a modest film of Paul sitting on a chair in a garden, singing five songs to his own upside-down acoustic guitar accompaniment. It starts fairly abruptly (an animated roller-blind squeaks upwards, revealing a window), he performs, it ends fairly abruptly nine minutes later and the budget must have run easily into doubles figures. But it’s good.

The Backyard was originally a self-contained section within another production which sits unseen in the MPL vault, called One Hand Clapping. This featured Wings as it then was (late-summer 1974), with new drummer Geoff Britton and new guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, inside the hallowed number two studio at EMI Abbey Road, running through a ream of songs old and new before cameras directed by David Litchfield, with trusted friend and engineer Geoff Emerick manning the control room.

One fine day Paul suggested that it would be fun to work outside and scouted around for a local location. The area he chose was the grubby yard behind the echo chamber at the studios, clogged with rusting bits and pieces save for a tiny patch of unfettered grass. This was it -Paul grabbed a chair from the studio, slung his jacket across the back and plonked himself down. There was no room for anyone else so it became a solo spot. Litchfield – he later launched the hip newspaper Ritz and designed two special editions of Club Sandwich – set up his U-Matic video camera and two mikes and yelled “action”.

To the occasional ovcrdubbed accompaniment of a milk-float delivering pintas to the local residents, The Backyard features Paul performing five songs, one from his own fertile mind and four covers of classic rock and roll numbers. The McCartney number opens the film and straightaway it’s something unusual: a madrigal of the unreleased variety called ‘Blackpool’, celebrating saucy postcard images of curvaceous seaside women in that and also another fine upstanding northern resort, Southport. Thinking back to it now, two decades on, Paul remarks, “When Linda and I first got together we used to groove around a lot and I had a number of songs which I would just sing but not really record. They were mess-around songs, and this was one of them.” 

Four fine, niftily-busked rock standards follow. In the never less than invigorating ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ Paul drops into a scat imitation of the lead guitar solo, joyously chips in a “Take it, Eddie!” call to the late Mr Cochran and then, underlining the impromptu nature of the filming, makes light of a loud and clear emergency-vehicle siren that sounds a few yards away in Abbey Road. (Issuing from an ambulance probably, rushing to administer help to a bare-tooted Beatles tan in distress on the zebra crossing…)

After ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ come two great numbers from, as the singer proudly announces, “The late, great Buddy Holly, ladies and gentlemen, no-one like him” -‘Peggy Sue’ and a briefish ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’ – in which, for once, Mr McCartney manages to mess-up the words. Nicely so, though, with fluffs happily preserved.

After one more, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ – its rare to hear Paul doing this immortal Chuck Berry number – The Backyard comes to a sudden conclusion when the animated roller-blind comes down, bringing the viewer back inside from the garden, closing the window (shades of Andy Pandy here) and the film. Cue minimalist credits and fade to black.

Speculation about why The Backyard was hived off from One Hand Clapping only to itself remain unissued is a fairly pointless exercise. As Paul elucidates, “It’s a fun film but you don’t necessarily do everything for release. Some things you do, some things you don’t. We’ve got a few little items like this and the nice thing is that they start to look even better with time. We still haven’t thought of doing anything particular with it – yet.”

And so, for the moment, where The Backyard is concerned, that’s all folks. Back onto the shelf she goes.

Mark Lewisohn

From Club Sandwich N°78, Summer 1996:

Unless you count B-sides it wasn’t even issued as a single, and it has never been performed on stage by Paul. All the same, there is a video for the song ‘Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five’ (henceforth, for reasons of sanity as well as abbreviation, to be called ‘1985’ here).

It may even be that this ‘1985’ promo has never been publicly seen, which makes for a certain symmetry, really, because it was filmed when Paul and Wings were shooting a TV project that, also, has failed to see the light of day (this was called One Hand Clapping) and when Paul shot a charming vignette of a movie titled The Backyard which is also still under wraps (although it was the focus of this column in Spring 1992). The weirdest thing is, all these unreleased films are good – any notion that they’ve been kept in the dark these past twenty-odd years because they fail to measure up is nonsense. Rather, as Paul says, “Not everything you do is meant for release.” And, as he also points out, like fine wines, such films have a tendency to mature with age.

The ‘1985’ promotional video -or, more accurately, 16mm film – was shot sometime in the last few days of August 1974, in what looks for all the -world like a “wrap” from Wings’ One Hand Clapping duties, almost as if Paul persuaded a cameraman, lighting person and sound recordist to stay on after hours, found a grand piano situated in a far from glamorous quarter of Studio Two at Abbey Road, sat down and played. There’s nobody else on camera, although later on, when the action switches to a different part of the studio and Paul spends much of the time grinning up at the high Studio Two control room window, one gets the impression that Linda, if not the other Wings too, were looking down, watching the action.

But this is to jump ahead. The promo begins with Paul sat at the piano, belting out a great live vocal with the same blend of rawness and verve that marked out the song as very special on the album Band On The Run, issued at the back end of 1973. The piano track was also a real live performance, and quite a virtuoso one at that, the words “whirling” and “dervish” springing to mind when searching for a description of the speed with which Paul’s hands were running over the keyboard, fully meriting the camera close-ups that were spliced into the more panoramic footage. Being that he was really playing and really singing, there are no other instruments audible, at least not until the song’s middle-eight section when the original record’s harmonies were dropped into the soundtrack.

From the middle-eight onwards, through to the end of the number, the setting changed. Paul moved towards the rear of Studio Two, just in front of the huge wall clock, and stood up, singing the song in the style of a solo vocalist, with a microphone and yards of lead in his right hand and, get this, a cigarette in his left. The man was smoking a cigarette while shooting a video – how casual can you be!

Still performing live – although the orchestra, synth, drums, guitars and other instruments were dubbed in from the BOTR version – it looks as if Paul was thoroughly enjoying himself, singing and yelping into the camera, smiling broadly, glistening with perspiration, and puffing away on that nicotine. Incidentally, said smoking caused the creation of two different edits of the ‘1985’ promotional film: a “smoking” version and a “no smoking” version. Actually, if one looks closely enough, Paul has the cigarette in both but, in the specified “smoking” version, he is clearly seen dragging on the weed and exhaling the smoke.

The video ended with Paul, frozen in action, looking up at the control room window, the audio suddenly cutting off before the album version went into the reprise of the ‘Band On The Run’ title cut. And that was it.

Asked around this time by Paul Gambaccini for Rolling Stone if the title ‘1985’ was inspired by George Orwell’s brilliant novel 1984 Paul replied no, that the title was suggested, rather, by the first line of the song, which was the first bit he wrote. “With this it was ‘No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty-five’,” he said, adding, ‘”No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty-six’ wouldn’t have worked!”

Now there speaks a true wordsmith!

* Footnote. One is tempted to speculate that this ‘1985’ video has never been screened on TV. Indeed, this is exactly what we have done at the start of this article. Perhaps, however, a spot of caution should be exercised, if a letter from CS reader Robert Wright is anything to go by. He was interested to read in the Autumn 1994 issue about a video for another Band On The Run album track, ‘Mamunia’, which we said was never shown but he clearly remembers seeing on an ITV Wales pop series called (confusingly) The Dave Cash Radio Show, circa 1975. Somehow, somewhere, in the oddest of places, these things can reach the screen. Thanks for letting us know, Robert.

Mark Lewisohn

Session activities

1. Blackbird

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Recording • Take 1

   AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

2. Blackbird

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Recording • Take 2

   AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

3. Blackbird

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Recording • Take 3

   AlbumOfficially released on One Hand Clapping (2 LP and 7”)

4. Blackbird

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Recording • Take 4

   AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

5. Country Dreamer

   Written by Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney

   Recording

   AlbumOfficially released on Band On The Run - Archive Collection

6. Twenty Flight Rock

   Written by Eddie Cochran, Ned Fairchild

   Recording

   AlbumOfficially released on One Hand Clapping (2 LP and 7”)

7. Peggy Sue

   Written by Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison, Norman Petty

   Recording

   AlbumOfficially released on One Hand Clapping (2 LP and 7”)

8. I'm Gonna Love You Too

   Written by Norman Petty, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan

   Recording

   AlbumOfficially released on One Hand Clapping (2 LP and 7”)

9. Great Day

   Written by Paul McCartney

   Recording

   AlbumOfficially released on Flaming Pie - Archive Collection

10. Sweet Little Sixteen

    Written by Chuck Berry

    Recording

    AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

11. Loving You

    Written by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller

    Recording

    AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

12. We're Gonna Move

    Written by Elvis Presley, Vera Matson

    Recording

    AlbumReleased on bootleg Backyard +

13. Blackpool

    Written by Paul McCartney

    Recording

    AlbumOfficially released on One Hand Clapping (2 LP and 7”)

14. Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five

    Written by Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney

    Recording

    AlbumOfficially released on Band On The Run - Archive Collection

15. Freight Train

    Written by Elizabeth Cotten

    Recording

    Unreleased track

16. Cumberland Gap

    Written by Traditional

    Recording

    Unreleased track

17. Rock Island Line

    Written by Traditional

    Recording

    Unreleased track

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