Denny Laine Quotes

Nobody has won thirty games in a season since Denny McLain did it in 1968. No other pitcher has drunk as many Pepsi-Colas, broken as many team rules, or played the organ as famously as McLain did. And there has never been another World Series game in which both starting pitchers had won the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards that year.

Wanting to use someone he had not worked with before, and who could give him an up-to-date sound, he settled on Tony Visconti, a New Yorker whose work with David Bowie and Marc Bolan’s T. Rex made him one of the hotter producers on the London scene. Laine had worked with Visconti before he joined Wings; Visconti wrote the arrangements for Denny’s classical-rock hybrid, the Electric String Band. And Paul knew him slightly—he had married Mary Hopkin in 1971.

And Denny Laine, just weeks after the LP was released, had developed a sour view of the project, and Wings generally. “I look on Band on the Run as definitely their [Paul and Linda’s] album,” he complained to Disc’s Caroline Boucher, while promoting Ahh . . . Laine!, finally released on December 7. “We’re not a group anymore. I’m one of the three, or I’m an individual. If it was Wings I’d feel more a part of it. But it’s not my songs and I’d like to feel more involved and contribute as much as they do.

Five years after Affectionate Fink the musical landscape was vastly altered, and McNair could make an album like The Fence, featuring free pianist Keith Tippett, Tony Carr, Traffic’s Steve Winwood and Ric Grech, and Pentangle’s Terry Cox and Danny Thompson. The same year (1970) he also turned out the Ellingtonian cocktail jazz of Flute and Nut with John Cameron, and appeared in Ginger Baker’s hard-driving Air Force supergroup, featuring the same Traffic members plus Denny Laine of Wings and Graham Bond. On his final cue on Kes, a thirty-eight-second, rain-sodden lament as the bird is buried, he blows a murmuring, unresolved line loaded with trepidation. The cancer that had been killing him since the late 1960s finally finished its work on 7 March 1971.

That night, a guy I knew called Denny Laine sang a beautiful song called “Go Now” I was feeling really chilled until his girlfriend grabbed me and gave me a tongue sandwich. I was so shocked, but she was drunk, as we all were, and later became one of the Marquess of Bath’s wifelets, so I’m sure she didn’t fancy me. “A fantastic night to remember,” I wrote in my diary—and it wasn’t that kiss that had made it special.

Paul was committed to Denny having a showcase on the album, though, so he found a way around Denny’s vocal shortcomings: sharing a mic with Laine, Paul joined him in the chorus, taking the spotlight as Denny dropped back. With ‘Spirits of Ancient Egypt’ now complete, Paul and O’Duffy set

Linda is a nice chick and I really like her,” Joe English said in a dyspeptic moment, “but let’s face it, she can’t play, and she can’t sing. And Denny Laine can sing, but he tends to sing off-key.”17