Paul McCartney’s band Wings is celebrating the 50th anniversary of their fourth studio album, Venus and Mars, with a new reissue, and now McCartney is reminiscing about the record.
In a Q&A posted to his website, McCartney shares that they initially titled the album after a song on the record, but it soon took on a different meaning.
“We only meant the planets, but then we had a great party on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and somebody said, ‘Oh, hi Venus! Hi Mars!’ to Linda and me,” he says, referring to his late wife, Linda McCartney. “So, it was a great observation from them: Venus is the female; Mars is the male. It made a lot of sense, really.”
“But to us it was just the planets, and the song is just about a kind of space cadet,” he continues. “There were loads of people at the time who were very ‘spacey’.”
The album was recorded in New Orleans, and McCartney says he chose to make it somewhere other than London because it was around that time it became “a little bit of a fashion” for artists to record outside of their home city.
“I was choosing somewhere where I liked the local music,” he says. “It’s a very musical city, so we were really trying to soak up an atmosphere. … We were just enjoying the buzz of being in a great place.”
The new half-speed master reissue of Venus and Mars will be released March 21. The album will also get its first-ever Dolby Atmos release, with Giles Martin and Steve Orchard behind the new mix.
Venus and Mars (50th Anniversary) is available for preorder now.
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