On April 10, 1970, an announcement shook the world and became one of the most seismic pop culture moments of the 20th century: Paul McCartney said he would no longer be working with the Beatles. With that, the most famous band of all time was no more.
The truth, however, was less sudden. John Lennon had left the Beatles months earlier, but his departure had been kept quiet. What’s interesting about McCartney’s announcement is that it wasn’t a carefully crafted statement, but rather a written Q&A handed out to the press. Asked about his future plans, he replied: “My only plan is to grow up.”
Now, Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) is looking at McCartney’s post-Beatles life and career in a new documentary called Man on the Run. It follows the musician throughout the 1970s, tracing the personal and creative journey that led him to form the band Wings.
“How do you answer all these big life questions when you’ve been in a space of suspended animation — I mean, being a rock star is probably a certain amount of arrested development,” Neville says in an interview with Q guest host Garvia Bailey. “Suddenly, in 1969, Paul records Let It Be with the Beatles, he marries Linda, he records Abbey Road, he has a baby, Mary, John says he wants to break up the band, and then he moves to Scotland. This is all in one year.”
Once the Beatles broke up, McCartney moved to a farm in rural Scotland, which he bought in 1966. It was his wife Linda’s idea to build a home there with their growing family.
“In the wake of the madness of the Beatles and the Beatles’ breakup and everything else happening, what she creates is a home, but also a place where you can tune out the rest of the world,” Neville explains. “It is so remote that the rest of the world really does drop away…. It’s quite literally being grounded. I mean, working the land, fixing fences, shearing sheep, and having kids there — kids keep you grounded. In a way, it was kind of the least rock star thing to do, but it was also, in retrospect, maybe the sanest thing he could have done.”
It wasn’t long before McCartney decided to return to music, recording two solo albums, 1970’s McCartney and 1971’s Ram, which was credited to both him and his wife. Neville says McCartney made his self-titled solo debut without any expectation that people would hear it. The second album, Ram, saw him writing about his new life on the farm with his family.
“It was so pastoral and folksy, and it was hated by critics because it was out of sync with the time,” Neville says. “Of course, Ram has been reevaluated as one of the great albums, but people at the time were just thinking, ‘What are you doing, Paul?’ … It wasn’t the Beatles, which, I think, was the overarching hostility he got from everybody.”
Trying to escape the long shadow of the Beatles, McCartney started a new band, Wings, with his wife in 1971. Neville says McCartney found it lonely being a solo act.
“One hundred per cent, he loved the idea of a band,” Neville says. “It’s the idea of let me go back to how I started the Beatles, which is a group of people in a van playing gigs. I’ll just be the bass player and we’ll start at the very bottom and we will work our way up. And this was exciting to him, comfortable to him. It was also a bit of an impossibility because Paul was never just going to be the bass player…. Him coming to terms with that is one of the stories of this film. Understanding that there is no going back to just being a nobody bass player in a little band trying to make it.”
Listen to the full interview with Neville to hear him talk more about this pivotal chapter in McCartney’s life, including his time in Wings and his complicated relationship with Lennon. Neville also discusses Lorne — his upcoming documentary about Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. Man on the Run is out now on Prime Video.