Denny Seiwell on “Live and Let Die”
Denny Seiwell will be joining me this Saturday as my interview guest. He’s the founding drummer of Wings and a first-call session player across six decades, and he’s just released his memoir, The Best and Worst of Times.
The book is packed with stories from a career that spans more than 60 years. In our conversation, we talk about the book, Denny’s wider career, working with Paul McCartney and much more.
If you visited the blog yesterday, you saw my movie review of Live and Let Die. I started writing about the song, which is one of my favorites, and which Denny played on and discusses both in his book and our interview. But I was writing too much about the movie, so I split this post off. So you got a funny (at least it was meant to be funny) movie review yesterday, but Denny’s stories about the song are far more interesting.
How the song came to life
Denny told me Paul McCartney rang the band up to his place outside London after reading Ian Fleming’s novel the night before. Paul walked to the piano and, almost offhand, sketched the chase motif, a tender love bit, and a reggae-flavored passage for the Jamaica setting; “before… in 10–15 minutes, he wrote the song.”
They fell straight into rehearsal; within an hour everyone had parts. McCartney ran a rough tape to producer George Martin, who scored it for about a 40-piece orchestra, and a week later they cut it live at AIR London—band and orchestra together—with the whole track, vocals included, done in about three hours. Timpani master Ray Cooper was on the session; George was in the booth.
“Is this the demo?”
When the team sent the finished cut over, the producers treated it like a demo. As Denny put it, “they send it over to Cubby Broccoli. He said, well, was this the demo? And Paul said, no, this is it. Do you want it or not?”
I mentioned in the interview that I’d seen a documentary saying Broccoli had to be persuaded to let McCartney sing. Apparently, according to the internet, this oft-repeated story might not be entirely accurate, but the way I heard it was that Broccoli wanted a female singer to perform the song, and that his compromise was to include a scene within the movie where exactly that happens. And, without a doubt, there are two versions of the song in the movie– the Wings version in the credits, and a version performed by B. J. Arnau that is worked into the movie itself. In any case, its a great and enduring song, and while Arnau has a terrific voice, its the Wings version that has a life of its own more than half a century after the movie’s release. In fact, McCartney still performs it live (which I hope to see in November, but I’ll save that story for a future post).
At release, “Live and Let Die” became the most successful Bond theme to that point and for years after (No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100; first canonical Bond theme ever nominated for an Original Song Oscar)*, and it’s remained a concert centerpiece for McCartney ever since.
The premiere, the pandemonium, and a long afterlife
Denny remembered arriving at the London premiere packed into Paul’s 1920s Hispano-Suiza with the band and being mobbed afterward—Gregory Peck in a charcoal velvet tux among the boldface names inside (although Denny didn’t mention it, I located a picture of David Bowie posing with McCartney at the premiere, just days after he killed off Ziggy Stardust).
And the song’s lived on. Just days before our chat, Denny had accidentally “butt-dialed” McCartney; they ended up catching up, and a few days earlier Denny had watched rehearsals where “Live and Let Die” detonated—literally—even inside a cavernous building.
He explained that the pyrotechnics dated back to the 1973 “James Paul McCartney” TV special, where a staged blast made the piano collapse in on itself—big enough to knock Henry McCullough off his feet while the string players behind the band jumped out of their chairs.
There’s a touching anecdote in the book, which Denny also discusses in the interview, in which McCartney asked him to give it a go recently, while Denny was present at a rehearsal, and the two performed the song together for the first time since Denny left Wings.
Saturday we’ll get into all of this—the book, the sessions Paul McCartney and more.
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Note: One thing that didn’t come up in our interview is David Bowie. Yes, yes, my guests usually have something to do with Bowie, but Denny is such an accomplished musician with such great stories that i thought it would be a waste of time to try to force the connection.
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* Sigh– I feel compelled to disclose that “The Look of Love” was nominated in 1968. You probably know the song but probably didn’t know that it was from the terrible 1967 Bond spoof, Casino Royale. The movie, released during the height of Bond-mania, featured an ensemble cast including everyone from Woody Allen to Peter Sellers and is actually based on the Fleming book, the same as the excellent 2006 version starring Daniel Craig. But the whole thing is a mess. “The Look of Love” itself has proven to have far more staying power than the movie. As a nod to the movie, though, a newer version of the song appears on the soundtrack of a far superior Bond parody– Austin Powers (1997).