What’s The Movie? One Hand Clapping
What’s It All About, JG? It’s an in-the-studio recording of one of (many) Wings line-ups, this week time including Geoff Britton on drums and Jimmy McCulloch on guitar, alongside regulars Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, and Linda McCartney. We get to see them messing about in the studio, running through a few tracks, faffing about in the control room and so on. There’s also “The Backyard” tacked on the end, which is literally McCartney sitting in Abbey Road’s backyard with an acoustic guitar, running through a small handful of classic rock and roll numbers. The whole thing is topped and tailed by 2024-vintage McCartney doing a specially-recorded introduction.
Why Did You Give It A Go? – Well, for a long time, One Hand Clapping was a bit of a legend, recorded back in the 70s but never seeing official release. A few tracks have dribbled out here and there, and there’s been plenty of bootlegs, but never anything formal. That changed in 2010, when the film was packaged on DVD as part of the punishingly-expensive Band on the Run Archive Collection. That rather limited its accessibility. Now, however, fifty years after its recording, it’s been cleaned up, restored and had a limited release in cinemas. And, as it happens, my local picture house (the quite excellent Glasgow Grosvenor Picture Theatre) had a screening, so it was a perfect chance to check out this curio from long, long ago.
Is It Any Good? It’s certainly interesting, though mostly to people who are already invested in the history of Wings. The Britton/McCullouch line-up lasted for a very short period of time – Britton quit and was replaced by Joe English not long after this – so it’s a curious moment in the band’s history. Band on the Run was a huge success, of course, and though not quite in the same league, Venus and Mars is hovering in the future. One Hand Clapping is the mid-point between the two.
And the band sound great here. There’s a robustness to these performances that really makes it sound like everything has clicked for Wings. McCartney is in fine voice, Laine is ever-dependable, Britton proves himself to be a great drummer, McCulloch is a fabulous guitarist, and Linda McCartney contributes enough to easily justify her place in the band despite how sneeringly she was regarded at the time. This is, simply, a great-sounding band.
And the actual sound quality here is fantastic. The whole project – allegedly groundwork for a potential live album but nevertheless reeking of self-indulgence – was recorded at Abbey Road, so you’d expect everything to sound great. And it does! The quality here deserves real praise – while this may well be self-indulgent, it isn’t just a bunch of musicians dicking about for the sake of it and when they play they really play. The opener, “Jet” sounds huge and muscular and the band absolutely roar through it but it isn’t all about Big Rock. There’s a few tender moments too, like a surprisingly great take on “Maybe I’m Amazed” with huge echo on McCartney’s impassioned lead vocal. Everything sounds great and the band are in fine form. It helps, of course, hearing it on a huge cinema sound system but even so there’s simply no faulting the technical quality of the sound here.
The whole thing sags a bit in the middle though. We leave the band – nominally what we’re actually here to see – and join McCartney at the piano while he runs through a few corny, Sinatraesque numbers while vaguely ruminating on the fact that, to have a career in music, he always assumed he’d end up doing cabaret-type numbers because singers like Sinatra were the only template that existed for a long-term career as a musician or songwriter. None of this is partciuarly engaging, it’s nothing you haven’t heard McCartney say a hundred times before (even back in the smoke-filled fug of 1974) and there’s nothing remarkable about the performance – it’s just some bloke sitting at a piano knocking out a few numbers but it so happens the bloke in question is Paul McCartney. Anyone’s concentration would wander.
When we do cut back to the band in the studio, we get a searing rendition of “Live and Let Die”, complete with orchestra, and it reminds you of what you’re supposed to be watching in the first place. It’s a great take on a classic Wings number. The director – David Litchfield – then makes the beyond-baffling decision to have the raucous, full-tilt delivery matched by visuals of musicians munching on an apple or absent-mindedly flicking through the day’s newspaper while looking very bored and entirely unengaged. It’s an incredibly strange choice that illustrates and illuminates absolutely nothing at all.
And then there’s the backyard, a chance for McCartney to shine as a solo performer. It’s… alright. I don’t know how many times anyone can listen to McCartney competently knocking out “Twenty Flight Rock” but the number has gone up anyway and, you know, it’s a good performance and all. The whole backyard section is a fairly charming, unpretentious little extra though, completely inessential but easy enough to enjoy if you’re happy to listen to McCartney knocking out “Peggy Sue” yet again.
The whole thing wraps with McCartney giving a knowingly-cheesy rendition of “Baby Face” and hamming it up for the cameras. It ends up being a fair encapsulation of the whole movie side of the project – fun enough, but just enough. The songs are still great, however, and that’s what counts, in the end.
How Many Of These Have You Seen? Well, I’m obviously a Beatles fan and have sat through all of Get Back on more than one occasion. And I’ve always pretty much liked Wings – there’s a sort of ragged persistence to them that I’ve always found enjoyable. Their strike rate is pretty hit and miss but there’s loads of great music to explore before McCartney goes full-on 80’s in the next decade. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries about him – they’re rarely very revealing – and a couple of live shows, including his Glastonbury set. So… some?
Would You Recommend It? To anyone interested in the history or development of Wings, yes. It’s an interesting document of a band who are sounding great and have finally managed to prove themselves after the success of Band on the Run (even though McCulloch and Britton aren’t on that album) and can finally reap the rewards of that. And the music here really is great.
The picture quality is dreadful though. If this is the “cleaned up” version, I shudder to think how bad the original must have looked. Everything is muddy, images occasionally shudder or bend, and the whole thing has a Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who look to it, so much that you wouldn’t be surprised if the camera panned round to a Sea Devil on tambourine. The footage was shot on videotape and boy does it show. Saying that, weirdly, in the backyard session, there’s an overhead shot that’s used a couple of times and looks much cleaner – it would be interesting to know if this was shot on cine or some other kind of film because it certainly looks better than the rest of the footage.
Still, nobody’s really coming to this for the picture quality, are they? And if the emphasis sits on the music then that’s the thing that shines through. Yes, things go a bit dull in the middle but whenever Wings themselves are centre stage, the whole thing comes alive. This was a great incarnation of the band and it’s a shame it didn’t last a little bit longer because they really do sound fantastic.
It’s certainly true that One Hand Clapping is no Get Back but then again, it’s not meant to be either. What it is, though, is a somewhat self-indulgent documentary capturing a band that are great and know it, with some excellent tunes and a little glimpse into the process of the band working (not always harmoniously). There’s also little interview clips over some of the footage which are generally interesting too – it’s not often you get to hear Geoff Britton or long-deceased Jimmy McCulloch speaking so it’s nice they get a moment or two in the spotlight (Britton – the so-called Kung Fu Drummer – gets to bust a few moves too, which probably shouldn’t be as hilarious as they are but oh well). So while the film is interesting enough, “enlightening” would be something of a stretch.
Basically, this is worth watching once, as a curio, then sticking with the album version which contains more songs than the film does and also sounds great. This was an entertaining little diversion, I’m glad I’ve seen it after all the years of hearing about it, but it’s pretty far from essential even while it remains a fun, diverting enough watch.
Scores On The Doors? 7/10, mostly for the music
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