Reception

Song facts

“Reception” is the opening song of “Back To The Egg“, the latest album by Wings released in 1979.

From Wikipedia:

[…] The album’s opening song is “Reception“, an instrumental, in which McCartney attempted to capture the effect of turning a radio dial and finding “about four stations at once“. The track features a guitar-controlled synthesizer (played by Juber) over a funk-inspired bassline, and spoken voices, including a reading of part of “The Poodle and the Pug“, from Vivian Ellis’s opera Big Ben (1946). The next three songs – “Getting Closer“, “We’re Open Tonight” and “Spin It On” – adhere to the proposed album-wide concept. Writing in Melody Maker in June 1979, Mark Williams interpreted “Reception” as representing a radio being tuned in a car, whereby “the occupant is on his way to a gig, hence ‘Getting Closer’ [to the venue] and, upon arrival, ‘We’re Open Tonight’“. The notional live performance is then reflected in the sequencing of what Madinger and Easter term “heavier rock tracks such as ‘Spin It On’“. […]

While the commercial version on Back To The Egg lasts 1:08, a rough mix lasting 2:34 has surfaced and is “radically different due to the content, level and placement of the imposing broadcasts” (from Eight Arms To Hold You, by Madinger & Easter).

Samples of “Reception” have been used on Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, the first album by the Fireman released in 1993.

Fragments of random spoken and musical broadcasts begin what would become the opening track on the album. To start, we laid down a track with a Meters-like groove, Denny and I playing interlocking funky guitar parts. Then I overdubbed a lead guitar melody using an ARP Avatar guitar synthesizer, to which was added a sonic collage of real and created radio fragments to give the impression of a radio receiver being tuned.

Laurence Juber, in Guitar With Wings, 2014

They were pretty much random recordings, fitting in with the concept of reproducing the miscellaneous sounds ones hears when tuning a radio across the frequencies in England, picking up a mish-mash of British and European stations and extraneous bleeps and buzzes along the way. Back To The Egg was jointly produced by Paul and Chris Thomas, and engineered by Phil McDonald and Mark Vigars, and this was the team that assembled the sounds in the studio.

From Club Sandwich N°79, Autumn 1996

Last updated on August 10, 2021

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