Back to the Egg (1979) 


 


  1. Reception
  2. Getting Closer
  3. We're Open Tonight
  4. Spin It On
  5. Again and Again and Again
  6. Old Siam, Sir
  7. Arrow Through Me
  8. Rockestra Theme
  9. To You
  10.After the Ball/Million Miles
  11.Winter Rose/Love Awake
  12.The Broadcast
  13.So Glad to See You Here
  14.Baby's Request
  15.Daytime Nighttime Suffering *
  16.Wonderful Christmastime *
  17.Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reggae *
  
  * CD Bonus Track

 

It’s tempting to view Back to the Egg as the moment when the air finally left the balloon. Released in 1979 to an indifferent public and a chorus of critical shrugs, the album marked the beginning of what many regard as McCartney’s “wilderness years”—a curious decade of misfires, stylistic U-turns, and the gradual dissolution of Wings. And nowhere is that downward drift more evident than here, in what may be the most scattershot album McCartney has ever released.

Nominally a return to the band format—complete with a revamped Wings lineup—Back to the Egg is anything but cohesive. McCartney, ever the musical magpie, flits from genre to genre with no discernible thread tying it all together. That wouldn’t be an issue if the material were stronger; McCartney’s career is built on eclecticism. But here, eclecticism gives way to chaos. The result is an album that sounds more like a patchwork of unfinished ideas than a fully realised record.

And yet, nestled within the clutter are flashes of brilliance. A mid-album trio—Again and Again and Again, Old Siam, Sir, and especially the sleek, soulful Arrow Through Me—remind us that McCartney could still deliver the goods when the mood struck. No two of these tracks sound remotely alike, which is oddly part of their charm. It’s the surrounding detritus that dulls the impact.

Worst misfires: Reception and The Broadcast are less “songs” than sonic experiments—snippets of spoken word and static that suggest some sort of conceptual ambition, but ultimately add little beyond confusion. Perhaps McCartney was aiming for a kind of radio-suite framework, but whatever the intention, the execution falls flat.

Worse still is the familiar frustration of McCartney-era b-sides being inexplicably better than the album they orbit. Daytime Nighttime Suffering, criminally omitted from the original release, outshines nearly everything here. Its later inclusion as a bonus track on the CD reissue serves as both a consolation and a reminder of what could have been. That same reissue also tacks on Wonderful Christmastime—a tune that somehow manages to be both insanely catchy and maddeningly inescapable. You already know how you feel about it. As for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reggae, it’s the sort of joke track that’s only funny once. If that.

Back to the Egg would prove to be Wings’ swan song, though by this stage, the band’s disintegration barely registered. It’s an album essentially lost—adrift in its own ambition, unfocused, and emblematic of a period where McCartney seemed less interested in coherence than in throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick.

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