The announcement yesterday of the sad death of Moody Blues and Wings guitarist Denny Laine at the age of 79 stirred memories for me of an encounter with him 45 years ago.
I was a young newspaper reporter and having heard rumours that Paul McCartney and Wings were recording a new album at Lympne Castle on the Kent coast, I decided to go and have a look for myself.
It wasn’t hard to find out if the band really were in situ at the spectacular 1,000-year-old castle. Lympne is a small village and I just went to the local pub and asked. The barman nodded in the direction of the bar billiards table. An earnest game was in progress and the players not only looked unmistakably like roadies but they were all wearing Wings T-shirts. Before I’d even had a chance to strike up a conversation one of them was called to the phone. He returned, saying: “They want us at the Castle,” and with that, they all trooped out and walked the short distance to the stately pile nearby. I followed and just as we reached the entrance a car pulled up and Denny Laine got out.
I grabbed my opportunity. ‘Denny mate, good to see you, I said. ‘How’s the album going?’ Denny, who I’d never met in my life before, looked momentarily confused but then smiled and said things were just fine. I simply kept chatting and walked with him straight through the impressive castle doors and into the Great Hall where Wings had set up their recording equipment.
Moments later I was standing right beside Paul and Linda who were talking to a recording engineer. So now what? I took a chance and told the former Beatle I was a music writer (Well I did have a weekly entertainment page) and asked if he would be prepared to talk about his latest project.
He studiously ignored the question but, gesturing towards me, had a few words with the engineer and then wandered off. I was worried now. I thought I might be frogmarched out of the building.
Instead, the engineer simply said: ‘Right, you can’t stay but before you go you can help us move some of the gear around. So it was that I found myself, manoeuvering Linda McCartney’s piano across the Great Hall of this spectacular medieval pile before being firmly but politely told: ‘You can go now’. Which when you think about it is almost a Denny Laine lyric.
I wish I had played a small part in a truly iconic Macca recording but those recording sessions which eventually emerged on the 1979 album Back to the Egg were neither his nor Wings finest hour.
It was by general consensus a fairly unfathomable and uncohesive piece of work featuring a haphazard mishmash of seemingly unrelated songs. It was also the last album Wings recorded before the band broke up.
Paul McCartney later revealed that he chose to record at Lympne Castle because he knew the owners, Harry and Deidre Margary, liked the atmosphere and it was quite close to his home in East Sussex. He has since admitted that some of the Back to the Egg songs were a little oddball and didn’t make a great deal of sense and he also suspects that he was smoking “a little too much wacky baccy at the time.”
It may be a pretty poor album but to me Back to the Egg is simply a reminder of a decidedly unusual evening a long tine ago when the ever-genial Denny Laine unwittingly helped me to get into a Wings recording session in a fortress. He was definitely one of the good guys. RIP