Paul McCartney – Coming Up

The Version of “Coming Up” That Hit No. 1 in America Wasn’t the One on the Album — It Was a Live B-side Paul McCartney Didn’t Even Know His Label Was Pushing

Paul McCartney scored a No. 1 hit in America with “Coming Up” — but not the “Coming Up” he thought he was releasing. The version that topped the Billboard Hot 100 on June 28, 1980, and held there for three weeks wasn’t the strange, synthetic, sped-up solo recording that opens his album McCartney II. It was a completely different take: a live performance by his band Wings, recorded in Glasgow months earlier, tucked away on the B-side of the single. American radio programmers flipped the record over, started playing the live version instead, and Columbia Records pushed it hard — all without McCartney’s knowledge. “Americans like the sound of Paul McCartney’s real voice,” a Columbia executive reportedly explained. McCartney only found out his B-side had become the hit after the fact.

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The song the world first heard was the weird one, and that was the whole point. In the summer of 1979, McCartney holed up at his farm in Scotland with a rack of synthesizers and no plan, recording entirely alone. “I went into the studio each day and just started with a drum track,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I built it up bit by bit without any idea of how the song was going to turn out.” For the vocal, he ran his voice through a vari-speed tape machine, pitching it up into a nasal, off-planet warble — “the nutty professor,” as he put it, “getting into my own world like a laboratory.” The result was startlingly modern: a jittery, drum-machine-driven new-wave track that had more in common with Talking Heads, Blondie, and Devo than with anything McCartney’s rock-and-roll generation was making. It became the lead single and opening track of McCartney II, his first fully solo, one-man-band album since 1970.

But there was a second “Coming Up” already in the wild. When Wings toured the UK at the end of 1979, McCartney slipped the unreleased song into the setlist to give audiences something new. The live recording came from the band’s December 17, 1979 show at the Glasgow Apollo — the second-to-last concert Wings would ever play. That fuller, warmer, horn-driven band version went onto the B-side of the single, credited to Paul McCartney and Wings. In the UK, the synthetic A-side did the job, reaching No. 2. In America, radio simply preferred the live one, and Columbia ran with it. The Wings recording shot to No. 1, becoming, remarkably, only the third live recording ever to top the Hot 100 — and the sixth and final chart-topper of Wings’ career.

The Song That Got John Lennon Off the Couch

“Coming Up” had one more consequence that no chart could measure. John Lennon, McCartney’s old partner, had spent the back half of the 1970s in self-imposed retirement from music, raising his son and staying out of the studio. Then he heard “Coming Up.” “I thought that was a good piece of work,” Lennon said — and according to McCartney, it lit a competitive fire. “Apparently ‘Coming Up’ was the one song that got John recording again,” McCartney recalled. “I think John just thought, ‘Uh oh, I had better get working, too.'” Within months, Lennon was back in the studio recording Double Fantasy. Lennon even had a favorite version, and it wasn’t the hit: “I like the freak version that he made in his barn better than that live Glasgow one,” he said. “If I’d have been with him I would’ve said ‘that’s the one’ too.” It was one of the last warm public exchanges between them; Lennon was murdered that December.

One Man, Ten Roles

The video sealed the song’s identity. Directed by Keith McMillan, it shows McCartney playing every single member of a fictional band dubbed “the Plastic Macs” — ten roles in all, from two guitarists and a bassist to a drummer and four saxophonists — with his wife Linda playing the two backing vocalists. It was an elaborate visual joke about the album’s whole premise: McCartney really had played everything himself. He layered in affectionate impersonations of other musicians, including the Shadows’ Hank Marvin, Sparks’ Ron Mael, and a Beatlemania-era version of his own younger self, complete with the Höfner violin bass. Compositing all those McCartneys into one frame was a genuine technical feat in 1980, taking two days to shoot and many more to edit. Premiered on Saturday Night Live in the US, the clip became an early landmark of the music-video age. For a song that reached the top in a form its creator never intended, “Coming Up” did exactly what its title promised — it announced that McCartney, a decade after the Beatles and on the verge of dissolving Wings, was still capable of surprising everyone, including himself.