Paul McCartney in the 70s & the end of The Beatles with Tom Doyle

Paul McCartney in the 70s & the end of The Beatles with Tom Doyle

Author: Rock n Roll Book Club April 26, 2026 Duration: 50:06

Take a deep dive with us into the end of the Beatles, Paul McCartney in the 70s, Wings Over America, Mary Had a Little Lamb, feuding with John Lennon & more with writer Tom Doyle whose McCartney biography Man On The Run is out now. 


The Beatles come to an end & Paul takes refuge at High Park Farm in Scotland, taking a little time to consider his next move. 


Amid the Paul Is Dead rumours, Paul releases his debut lo-fi solo album McCartney followed not long after by Ram - credited to he & Linda. 


It is Linda who plays a key role in getting him back into music & she ends top in his next band, Wings. 


There are some nasty public exchanges with John Lennon culminating in the acerbic How Do You Sleep on Lennon’s Imagine album. 


Wings first tour is a series of unannounced gigs at universities around the UK & Wildlife becomes their debut album. 


Red Rose Speedway follows not long after but its James Bond theme Live & Let Die which becomes their first huge success. 


Not long after Wings decamp to Lagos, Nigeria to record what becomes Band On The Run, but not before losing 2 members, completing the album as a three piece (Paul, Linda & Denny Laine). 


Paul begins to reconnect with John Lennon & the other Beatles by the middle of the decade & also begins to play Beatles songs for the first time on the hugely successful Wings Over America tour - feeling he has enough new hits to blend in with the older material. 


Following a drugs bust in Japan, Wings Peters out without a formal announcement, leaving a charity gig at Hammersmith Odeon in late 1979 as their last gig. 


John & Paul are on better terms by the end of the decade with their final conversation coming in October 1980 on the occasion of John’s 40th birthday. Would the Beatles have re-formed had John lived into the 1980s? 



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Hosted, Produced & Edited by Simon Cardwell

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The Music Maps Podcast from the Rock n Roll Book Club isn't your typical music show. It's an audio expedition where geography is the guide. Every episode starts with a specific location-a city, a venue, a forgotten roadside attraction-and uses that place as a launchpad to explore the sounds, stories, and scenes connected to it. You might find yourself deep in the blues clubs of Chicago one week and tracing the underground punk threads of a small European town the next. The conversations are wide-ranging, connecting the dots between iconic artists and obscure movements, all anchored to a point on the map. Listening to this podcast feels like adding a new, richly detailed pin to a global atlas of musical influence. It’s about the context behind the chords and the cultural soil from which genres grow. The result is a continuously evolving, deeply human portrait of how music and place are inextricably linked, one fascinating destination at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Music Maps Podcast
Podcast Episodes
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