Wings Over Europe Tour

First date:: Jul 09, 1972

Last date:: Aug 24, 1972

Number of concerts:: 26

Number of countries:: 9

Band members

Line-up Discover Wings 1972-1973

Wings University Tour

Wings 1973 UK Tour

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About

From Wikipedia:

In the summer of 1972, Paul McCartney’s newly formed band, Wings, set out on a concert tour of Europe.

Promotion

Coming on the heels of a tour of English universities, the Wings Over Europe Tour was intended to promote recent singles “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb“, as well as provide live recordings to be included on a future album. The second objective never came to fruition, however, and Red Rose Speedway was released in Spring of the next year without any of the concert material. Only the 21 August performance of “The Mess” at The Hague was officially released, as a b-side to Number One single “My Love“.

Touring

The band, with the McCartney children and their road crew, loaded up in a brightly coloured double decker bus for the tour of the continent. The tour proceeded largely without incident, but on 10 August in Gothenburg, Sweden, Paul and Linda McCartney were fined US$1,200 for possession of marijuana. Paul joked that the incident would “make good publicity” for the tour.

Wings’ lineup for the tour was Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, and Denny Seiwell.

Paul McCartney in "Wingspan: Paul McCartney's Band on the Run":

We knew we were going to tour in Europe, and that the weather would be nice, and the idea of being stuck in a bus all the time, going from city to city, hotel to hotel, wasn’t too appealing. Not much quality of life there. So we decided to travel around in an open-top bus. We put mattresses on the top deck and got some sunshine as we traveled from one place to another. And we painted the outside psychedelic, like a magic bus.

If you look at it very straight, very conventionally, it was a quite mad thing to do, to put a playpen on the top deck of the bus and put all the children in there while driving around Europe. It was not what you’d expect from a normal band. But we weren’t a normal band.