Backwards Traveller | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Backwards Traveller’ is the fourth song on Wings’s penultimate album London Town.

At just 1:07, it is the shortest song on the album. ‘Backwards Traveller’ is sometimes presented as a medley with the following track, ‘Cuff Link’. That, however, was not Paul McCartney’s first intention. See more…

I had the tune ‘Backwards Traveller’, and originally I was trying to use that going into the song ‘Name And Address’. And ‘Name And Address’ is like an old-fashioned rocker, sort of ‘after Elvis’, you know, it’s like people paint pictures after so-and-so. Well that’s kind of doing a thing based on the Elvis buzz, for me. And I was trying to get this song ‘Backwards Traveller’ to explain, on the album, why the album suddenly went to a kind of Fifties-type sound. I was hoping to do ‘Backwards Traveller’ and ‘Backwards Traveller’, set it up, and then go backwards into time with some of these… a couple of tracks that sound like the Fifties or Sixties, you know. ‘I’ve Had Enough’ sounds a bit sort of Sixties to me.

And I was hoping to do that, but in the end we couldn’t do it like that. So it ended up with the thing on its own. And I had to drum on that one. I drum on that track, which I like doing. Joe had left; he’d gone back to America to see his family, and we were stuck without a drummer, which is one of our recurring problems. [laughs] So anyway I always use that as an excuse, you know. The same thing happened on Band On The Run, I drummed on that in the end. So that ended up, we went into ‘Cuff Link’ which was a jam.