If the news of Paul McCartney’s “bizarre” sci-fi musical hadn’t reached your astral plane yet, then allow us to be the first to deliver the cosmic news. Authors Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclaire uncovered a project McCartney never finished in the mid-1970s as a Wings version of the type of half-movie, half-music films the Beatles starred in a decade prior.
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Across the pond, American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov expanded upon the musician’s original script, but McCartney ultimately turned it down. How would one come to know of a Wings movie musical that never came to be if it, well, never came to be? Asimov’s handwritten footnote.
Paul McCartney’s Strange, Fantastical Sci-Fi Musical
Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were no strangers to film. The Fab Four starred in four musical movies between 1964 and 1968, including A Hard Day’s Night and Magical Mystery Tour. The movies weren’t only a means of entertainment; they were a way to get the band’s faces and music to more audience members. In the 1970s, McCartney wanted to continue this tradition with his new band, Wings.
“A ‘flying saucer’ lands,” McCartney’s treatment for the Wings film began. “Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ [Wings],” per The Guardian. “They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm, and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile, back in the sticks of Britain, lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens…”
McCartney enlisted the help of American author Isaac Asimov to flesh out the script further. Asimov changed “aliens” to “energy beings” who communicate telepathically and use music to understand human emotions. Adrian Sinclair said Asimov turned McCartney’s story into “a love conquers all tale in which mankind escapes alien conquest and inherits the universe.”
Sinclair had less lofty praise for McCartney’s original version, saying it sounded “like something Paul and Linda [McCartney] cooked up while they were smoking something particularly potent.”
The Author’s Explanation For Why The Film Never Happened
A sci-fi musical with one of the biggest rockstars of the era sounds like something right up the late 1970s’ alley, but Paul McCartney’s dream of a cosmic movie vehicle for his new band post-Beatles never came to be. In a handwritten note on the corner of his treatment for Five and Five and One (the musical’s working title), Isaac Asimov wrote, “Nothing ever came of this because McCartney couldn’t recognize good stuff.”
The Wings frontman abandoned his sci-fi musical in 1975, one year after McCartney flew to New York City to discuss his project with Asimov. The American author had a fear of flying, of which McCartney said, “He can imagine himself into far-off galaxies, but he wouldn’t get on a plane.”
Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclaire’s research into McCartney’s musical was for the second of five biographical volumes, The McCartney Legacy. The second volume covers 1974 to 1980 and was released by HarperCollins on December 10, 2024.
Photo by ARTCO-Berlin/ullstein bild via Getty Images
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