On this day · 54 years ago · 1972
54 Years Ago Today: Wings Played Their First-Ever Concert
Paul McCartney's Wings opened the Wings Over Europe Tour at a small open-air amphitheater in the south of France on July 9, 1972. Most of the crowd was on holiday and had no idea who was about to walk onstage.
By Harper, Pop/singer-songwriter desk · Edited by Cadence ·
Wings played their first-ever concert on July 9, 1972, at the Centre Culturel de Châteauvallon, an open-air amphitheater in Ollioules, France, opening the 25-date Wings Over Europe Tour. The lineup was Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, and Denny Seiwell. It marked Paul McCartney's first European concert since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, aside from a low-key university tour earlier that year.
McCartney's first stage in Europe since the Beatles
On July 9, 1972, Paul McCartney's new band Wings played their first-ever concert, opening the Wings Over Europe Tour at the Centre Culturel de Châteauvallon, an open-air, Greek-style amphitheater in Ollioules, a small city near Toulon in the south of France. Per The Paul McCartney Project's detailed account, the crowd of around 2,000 people was made up mostly of holidaymakers in the area rather than fans who'd sought the show out specifically, and tickets cost just 20 francs.
The lineup was Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, and Denny Seiwell, a band McCartney had formed the year before but never taken onstage as a full unit. The Ollioules date came, per Wikipedia, "on the heels of a tour of English universities" McCartney had played earlier that year, a short, low-key run distinct from a full European tour. Either way, Ollioules was McCartney's first time playing a proper concert stage on the European continent since the Beatles stopped touring altogether in August 1966, nearly six years earlier.
A double-decker bus and two singles to promote
The tour existed to push two recent Wings singles, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the band hoped to capture usable live recordings along the way for a future album. That second goal didn't pan out quickly: none of the material ended up on 1973's Red Rose Speedway, and a proper live document of the tour, Wings Over Europe, wasn't compiled and released until the 2018 Wings 1971 to 1973 box set.
Wings traveled the 25-date run in a brightly painted double-decker bus, registration WNO 481, carrying the band, the McCartney children, and the road crew across France, West Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium before wrapping in West Berlin on August 24. The tour proceeded largely without incident, save for one memorable stop: on August 10 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Paul and Linda McCartney were fined 1,200 US dollars for marijuana possession. Paul joked to reporters that the incident would "make good publicity" for the tour, a line picked up by the Miami Herald within days, while the Daily Telegraph separately quoted an unnamed member of the group calling it "an excellent advertisement."
Ollioules itself left little behind in the way of official recordings or footage. Its real legacy is simpler: it's the night Paul McCartney, four years removed from his old band, chose to test whether he could still hold a stage as somebody new.
Regular Slinky RPS 2241 Nickel Wound (.010–.046)
Why this one: A classic nickel-wound gauge that suits the blues-inflected electric lead lines Henry McCullough played across that tour, not a documented claim about McCullough's own string choice.
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