Paul McCartney & Wings - C Moon (1973)

As I mentioned in the 'Red Rose Speedway' post, once we'd worked which songs were going to be included on that proposed double album, we could then take all the other out-takes, non-albums singles and b-sides, and compile them into a couple of nice little collections. 'Hi Hi Hi' / 'C Moon' was released as a 7" single in 1972, but radio stations became a bit uneasy about playing a song with 'high' in the lyrics, so they flipped it over and started playing the b-side, resulting in 'C Moon' becoming a surprise number 2 hit single for the band. 'Walking In The Park With Eloise' / 'Bridge Over The River Suite' was released as a 7" single in 1974 by The Country Hams, who were in fact Wings, plus a couple of guest musicians on the b-side. Both tracks were instrumentals, and not really in the normal style of Wings' other material, so McCartney issued them under a pseudonym, just as he did with the 'Percy 'Thrills' Thrillington' album some  years later. 'Live And Let Die' is a classic Bond theme, and one of the best ever attached to the films, but the version I've used for this album is by just the band, with no orchestral overdubs, and I think it fits in so perfectly with the rest of the album that you hardly notice the lack of strings. 
'Jazz Street' and '1882' were originally intended for 'Red Rose Speedway', but there were just too many songs under consideration for the final track listing, and so these two had to be left off the proposed double album version of that release. '1882' was going to be a live version of a song that had been hanging around since 1970 but never properly recorded, but as I can hear no audience noise on this version it sounds to me like it might be the rumoured studio recording from January 1972. 'The Great Cock And Seagull Race' was another old song, recorded during the 'Ram' sessions, and was originally planned to be the b-side of the 'Hi Hi Hi' single, but it was replaced at the last minute by 'C Moon', and 'Little Woman Love' was another song recorded during the 'Ram' sessions, and released two years later as the b-side to 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'. 'Give Ireland Back To The Irish' was the band's debut single in 1972, and you might be hearing it for the first time here, as although it breached the top 20 in the UK, US audiences felt alienated by the overtly political stance, and airplay was so marginal that it was in effect banned from US radio. 'Helen Wheels', named after Paul and Linda's Land Rover, was much more successful, hitting number 12 in the UK, and although it was included on the US edition of their 1973 album 'Band On The Run', in the UK it remained a stand-alone single.

Track listing

01 C Moon (single 1972)
02 Jazz Street (previously unreleased 1972)
03 1882 (previously unreleased 1972)
04 Walking In The Park With Eloise (single 1974)
05 Hi Hi Hi (single 1972)
06 Bridge On The River Suite (b-side of 'Walking In The Park With Eloise')
07 Helen Wheels (single 1973)
08 Mary Had A Little Lamb (single 1972)
09 Live And Let Die (single 1973)
10 Little Woman Love (b-side of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb')
11 The Great Cock And Seagull Race (previously unreleased 1970)
12 Give Ireland Back To The Irish (single 1972)