By the time Paul McCartney reached the end of 1970, he was heartbroken. Compared to the wild heights that he had reached when working with The Beatles, McCartney had slowly lost all his friends due to various business deals, being cast as the villain of the group as the rest of his band sided with manager Allen Klein. Although McCartney would try to press on as a solo artist for the next few years, he always knew he needed something more to get back into music.
After being convinced to work on new material by his wife Linda, McCartney’s first stabs at solo work on albums like McCartney and RAM offered various genre experiments for the ex-Beatle. Instead of the various perfectionist tendencies, the ramshackle feeling of both records incentivised McCartney to work on more music, eventually putting a band together under the name Wings after the birth of his next child.
Featuring Denny Laine of the Moody Blues on various instruments and Linda on backing vocals and keyboards, the group spent their first few years playing various jams around universities. Although the band’s debut Wild Life met a deaf ear with fans and critics, McCartney still honed his act apart from The Beatles.
While it was McCartney’s wish to make Wings a collaborative effort, the management knew that no new band would sell unless it had the bass player’s name at the front. Rechristened Paul McCartney and Wings, the band went into the studio to craft the follow-up Red Rose Speedway, which they had planned to turn into a double record.
Although they were convinced to cut the songs down to a single LP, a handful of less deserved cuts ended up getting prime time on the album, including the unfinished scraps like ‘Single Pigeon’. Regardless of how their initial vision was skewed, McCartney thought one of the songs from the record was one of the best singles they would ever record.
Featuring a bluesy shuffle rhythm, ‘Hi Hi Hi’ would become one of the catchiest songs the band would ever create, despite being hit with a ban from the BBC because of its suggestive lyrics. Even though the song remained on the charts for weeks, fans didn’t get to see its true potential until years later.
Across the album Wings Over America, the song got a shot of adrenaline, featuring the band increasing the tempo and turning the song into something that The Rolling Stones could reasonably pull off. Looking back on the Wings catalogue, McCartney would admit that the song is one of the greatest they ever made.
Discussing the appeal of the song, McCartney maintained that ‘Hi Hi Hi’ is one of the peaks of the group’s career, telling The Beatles: The Dream Is Over, “I was in a sensuous mood in Spain when I wrote it. To me, it was just a song to close our act, and since it went down well when we toured the continent, I thought it would be a good single. I think it’s the best single we’ve done as Wings”.
