Hold Me Tight

The only Paul McCartney composition to share a title with a Beatles song, ‘Hold Me Tight’ was part of the medley that closes Wings’ second album Red Rose Speedway.

Well, I kinda like the idea of medleys, as it’s structured. It’s sort of operatic, you know. And it’s good fun putting things like this together, finding little links and ways to go from this to that. We had done it on the Abbey Road album, at the end. And what we’d done there was John and I both had bits of songs that we hadn’t finished. So we put them into a medley and it worked. So this was me doing it again.

As with Abbey Road, the songs in the 11-minute Red Rose Speedway medley were recorded separately. ‘Hold Me Tight’ was recorded at Abbey Road on 15 September 1972 in seven takes, two of which were false starts. Take seven became the master version, onto which Denny Laine and Henry McCullough overdubbed a dual guitar solo. Wings then added harmony vocals.

I remember doing all the vocals. Around one microphone you’d have Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine singing. And there’s something about singing around one microphone, rather than singing around three. You do them around one microphone, and then they have to balance themselves. Whereas, if you’ve got three microphones, you’re asking for trouble. Usually if someone’s not loud enough, it’s because they’re not singing loud enough.

The best thing about Linda was the texture of her voice. When you hear her voice in the backing vocals of the group, it’s really distinctive. You know that it’s Wings.

I remember it being really torture for the band doing ‘Hold Me Tight’ and ‘Lazy Dynamite’, because it’s very empty. There’s lots of space with just the voice on both ‘Hold Me Tight’ and ‘Lazy Dynamite’. It’s all vocal, almost a capella.

On 7 October McCartney added an organ part, and McCullough overdubbed more electric guitar.

The songs in the medley were never performed live by Paul McCartney or Wings.