{"id":9024,"date":"2026-02-28T09:48:24","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T09:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/man-on-the-run-reviewed-inside-paul-mccartneys-post-fabs-creative-rebirth-153478\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T09:48:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T09:48:24","slug":"man-on-the-run-reviewed-inside-paul-mccartneys-post-fabs-creative-rebirth-153478","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/man-on-the-run-reviewed-inside-paul-mccartneys-post-fabs-creative-rebirth-153478\/","title":{"rendered":"Man On The Run reviewed: inside Paul McCartney\u2019s post-Fabs creative rebirth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

In a way,\u00a0Paul McCartney\u2019s 1970s \u2014 as detailed in Morgan Neville\u2019s rich, expansive documentary \u2014\u00a0plays as a love story. There are legal battles, lo-fi experiments, pot busts, exotic locations, near-drownings, pipe bands, punks and prison \u2014 and plenty of\u00a0extremely good\u00a0music. But at its core,\u00a0Man On The Run\u00a0is about Paul and his remarkable unions, creative and personal, with John Lennon and Linda Eastman\u00a0and his new band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
Click here and subscribe to Uncut<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\u201cHe wanted to be grounded in an ordinary life\u201d<\/h2>\n

In a way,\u00a0Paul McCartney\u2019s 1970s \u2014 as detailed in Morgan Neville\u2019s rich, expansive documentary \u2014\u00a0plays as a love story. There are legal battles, lo-fi experiments, pot busts, exotic locations, near-drownings, pipe bands, punks and prison \u2014 and plenty of\u00a0extremely good\u00a0music. But at its core,\u00a0Man On The Run\u00a0is about Paul and his remarkable unions, creative and personal, with John Lennon and Linda Eastman\u00a0and his new band.<\/p>\n

We open in 1969, with a shocked McCartney navigating both rumours of his own death and the fallout from Lennon\u2019s (then still private) decision to leave The Beatles. He retreats to his farm on the Mull of Kintyre \u2014 in Gaelic, literally the \u201cend of land\u201d \u2014 with his new family, fixing the roof and raising sheep. \u201cHe wanted to be grounded in an ordinary life,\u201d says Mick Jagger, one of the very few people who could understand McCartney\u2019s position. \u201cBecause being in The Beatles was free of any kind of grounding whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n

For McCartney, \u201can ordinary life\u201d meant several things. Both he and Linda had lost their mothers young \u2014 Paul at 14, Linda at 20 \u2014 and this shared understanding of loss bound them fiercely to their growing family. Later, they even raised their children on the tour bus. \u201cI don\u2019t remember nannies,\u201d says Denny Seiwell. \u201cThey would pull out a drawer, put a pillow in it, and that\u2019s where the baby slept.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonal peace\u201d<\/h2>\n

In an early archive interview, a journalist asks McCartney: \u201cWhat\u2019s the most important thing that you value?\u201d The camera cuts to Linda. \u201cJust personal peace,\u201d McCartney replies. \u201cCan you develop that a little more fully?\u201d asks the journalist. \u201cNot really.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Lennon is never far away \u2014 even in the abstract. Over footage of a chorus line hoofing through \u201cGotta Sing, Gotta Dance\u201d<\/em>, McCartney muses: \u201cThere\u2019s never anyone around saying, \u2018No, that\u2019s a stupid idea. You shouldn\u2019t do that.\u2019\u201d Much, you assume as Lennon might have done as the pair edited one another\u2019s works and visa versa.<\/p>\n

In more quantifiable terms, McCartney and Lennon\u2019s solo records get constantly compared by pesky journalists. A montage culled from TV interviews finds McCartney repeatedly asked the same question: will The Beatles ever play together again? Eventually, he fake-lunges at an off-camera reporter, to much laughter from his Wings bandmates. Little wonder McCartney refused to play Beatles songs live until the mid-Seventies.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople thought we were crazy\u201d<\/h2>\n

McCartney\u2019s determination not to repeat the past is brave \u2014 and rare \u2014 for an artist so deeply embedded in the public eye. \u201cPeople thought we were crazy, but that was our way,\u201d he admits. Not everything worked as intended. After the prominence of The Beatles, McCartney envisaged a more democratic environment for his new band. \u201cHe wants you all to be normal and equal,\u201d says former Wings drummer Geoff Britton. \u201cBut you ain\u2019t normal and equal, because he\u2019s a world superstar and you\u2019re a dog-faced nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d expect with a fully authorised work like this, Neville has full access to both the story\u2019s key players and a wealth of exceptional audio and visual material from McCartney\u2019s archives. It\u2019s very much an honest and open depiction of the period \u2013 as great as the many peaks are, Neville does not airbrush out the flops. Or as Nick Lowe puts it: \u201c\u2018Mary Had a Little fucking Lamb\u2019. Are you nuts?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAn impossible dream come true\u201d<\/h2>\n

The decade ends with Lennon\u2019s assassination and the break-up of Wings. But even after such heavy blows, McCartney\u2019s perseverance had paid off. He <i>had<i> done things differently \u2014 and, crucially, on his own terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI doubted whether it was possible to follow The Beatles,\u201d he says. \u201cBut looking back on it, we made what seemed like an impossible dream come true. That was the magic of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Man On The Run reviewed: inside Paul McCartney\u2019s post-Fabs creative rebirth<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a way,\u00a0Paul McCartney\u2019s 1970s \u2014 as detailed in Morgan Neville\u2019s rich, expansive documentary \u2014\u00a0plays as a love story. There are legal battles, lo-fi experiments, pot busts, exotic locations, near-drownings,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1107,383,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd-blu-ray-and-tv","category-paul-mccartney","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}