NMB wrote:Moleskin wrote:There's only one really front-to-back great Wings album, but plenty of good songs dotted across the others. His strike rate since hasn't been that much better.
Two and the other one is London Town. IMHO obviously but I'm right.
London Town was one of the first albums I ever bought and, in a spirit of nostalgia, I had a listen to it today for probably the first time since the late 70s. It's atrocious! Even worse than I thought it would be! I guess the title track is pleasant enough although it's pretty insipid. With A Little Luck might have been alright in a "Getting Better" kind of way if the arrangement wasn't so anaemic. The rest is appalling! There are so many low moments in Macca's post Beatles career - the frog chorus, the christmas song, the Michael Jackson duos - but I'm not sure any of them plumb the depths of Famous Groupies. It's amazing to think that a mere decade after co-writing Day In The Life he was coming up with stuff like Girlfriend or Morse Moose or really anything on this album.
In retrospect Wings was a pretty odd phenomenon, it was absolutely massive at the time and yet it really left no mark on the culture. There aren't successive generations rediscovering Wings in the same way as there are with say Pink Floyd. Just about everything in 70s pop culture has been reassessed or recycled or has influenced something at some point in the retro culture in which we currently live. But not Wings.