Wings Over Europe Tour

Tour Information

In the summer of 1972, Paul McCartney and his newly-formed band, Wings, set out on their first concert tour of Europe. Following a tour of English universities, the Wings over Europe Tour was initially undertaken with the idea of recording live takes for use on a future album, but this idea was never brought to fruition (although the August 21^st performance of ‘The Mess’ was officially released as the B-side to the Number 1 single, ‘My Love’). The tour was undertaken in a brightly-coloured double-decker bus, which included the McCartney children and the full road crew. “We knew we were going to tour in Europe, and that the weather would be nice, and the idea of being stuck in a bus all the time, going from city to city, hotel to hotel, wasn’t too appealing,” Paul recounts. “So we decided to travel around in an open-top bus and got some sunshine as we travelled from one place to another. And we painted the outside psychedelic, like a magic bus. If you look at it very straight, very conventionally, it was quite a mad thing to do, to put a playpen on the top deck of the bus and put all the children in there while driving around Europe. It was not what you’d expect from a normal band. But we weren’t a normal band.”