LEARNING TO FLY (again!) WINGS first gigs | Albums That Should Exist

Paul McCartney - Portland Building Ballroom, Nottingham University, Nottingham, Britain, 2-9-1972

Paul says? (no not THAT Paul!): Here's a timely post, if you're into bootleg collecting, like I am. Just a few days ago (as I write this on the last day of July 2025), a bootleg emerged on the Internet for the first time. Actually, this recording of this concert had been well known by Paul McCartney fans for a long time, because this was McCartney's very first concert with his new band Wings, since he'd been a member of the Beatles in the 1960s. But the audience recording had poor quality. The news is that a much, much better version has emerged, and that's the version I'm posting here.

Unfortunately, some people privately hoard interesting music recordings for whatever reason. (If you're one of those people, please share, before most of the interested people pass on!) In this case, somebody had a reel-to-reel recording of this concert, and didn't share it for decades. A reel-to-reel recording is still an audience recording, of lesser sound quality than most soundboard or FM radio bootlegs. But it also indicates a recording device of significantly better recording ability than the typical tape recorders people were sneaking into concerts at the time.

Earlier in July 2025, Beatles fans AdamBound and Juan Cena noticed this reel-to-reel recording was on sale. They bought it, then they improved it. For instance, they corrected the speed, as it ran a bit slow. Then they posted it at the Beatlegs forum, which is where I got it. In addition to sounding better than all previously known versions, it was seven minutes longer, including a second version of the song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish."

I made some additional changes to further improve the sound. One problem was that two songs were cut off right at the beginning, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Bip Bop." Only a few seconds were lost in each case, as the recording person was a few seconds slow hitting the "record" button. I found another bootleg from just two days later, in Hull, Britain, and used that to patch in the missing seconds for each song. That's why those two have "[Edit]" in their titles. "Lucille" and "Long Tall Sally" each had drop outs that lasted a couple of seconds in the middle of the songs. I patched those up using music from elsewhere in the song. That's why those two are edited too.

Furthermore, I made three big changes to all the songs. One was that the voices on stage were quite low during all the banter between songs. I boosted those considerably, so now it's easy to hear what McCartney and his band mates had to say. Secondly, I used MVSEP to remove all the crowd noise during the songs while keeping them at the ends of songs. Third, I boosted the lead vocals relative to the instrumental parts when I thought that helped, which was for most songs. Thus, this album should sound even better. Still not a soundboard, but getting there.

The band performed two short sets. Clearly, the first part of the first set wasn't included in this recording. We know other songs were played, since McCartney made reference to playing "Lucille" for the second time, when there's only one version here. (There are two versions of "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" though. Since the band had just formed, they didn't know that many songs yet.) Aside from the first "Lucille," we don't know how many other songs were missed. But judging by other set lists from the days just after this concert, probably only a couple others, maybe a little more.

McCartney wanted his new band to get better performing some concerts before they dig really big concerts and faced the scrutiny of the press. So they came up with the idea of just spontaneously showing up at universities and giving concerts before any media hoopla could catch up with them. They chose universities because there was guaranteed to be an audience of interested young people gathered together there. This concert was performed during lunch time to a packed room of only about 700 to 800 people. That was a far cry from the huge stadiums McCartney performed when the Beatles went on tour!

There are a lot of very interesting stories connected to this concert. But I don't have to write about them here, because there's a lovely webpage all about this concert, which you can find here:

Wings concert at Nottingham University in Nottingham on Feb 9, 1972 (Lunchtime) 

It has lots of quotes from band members and audience members, photos, and much more. I strongly recommend checking it out. That same website has another interesting page about the events that led up to the concert:

Wings departs for their University Tour • The Paul McCartney Project 

This album is 54 minutes long. 

01 Blue Moon of Kentucky [Edit]
02 talk
03 Give Ireland Back to the Irish
04 talk 
05 Help Me 
06 talk
07 Thank You Darling 
08 talk
09 Wild Life 
10 talk 
11 Bip Bop [Edit] 
12 talk 
13 Shuffle Blues 
14 talk 
15 The Mess 
16 talk
17 My Love
18 talk 
19 Give Ireland Back to the Irish [Second Version] 
20 talk 
21 Lucille [Edit] 
22 talk 
23 Long Tall Sally [Edit] 

Dual sources offered Pixeldrain or Bestfile

Paul & Mary (by Linda)

Linda & Mary (by Paul)