Denny Laine, co-founder of Wings with Paul McCartney, dies at 79

2023-12-05 21:35:51

The British musician Denny Laine, co-founder of Wings with Paul McCartney and an essential guitarist in 70s rock, died this Tuesday at the age of 79.

Laine had been suffering for a few months from a lung disease that prevented her from breathing normally and due to which she did not get enough oxygen into her blood. His wife, Elizabeth Hines, was in charge of confirming the sad news through the musician’s official profiles on social networks.

“I was next to him in bed in his last moments and I played his favorite Christmas song for him.”wrote the guitarist’s wife in her farewell message.

Fate has wanted Denny Laine to say goodbye on the same day that ‘Band on the Run’, which is probably the most important album of Wings’ career, turns 50 years since its launch in the United States; an anniversary that Paul McCartney himself had been celebrating for several days on his channels, the same ones in which he has so often shared memories with his trusted guitarist in the band he opted for, also with his wife at the time, Linda. , to continue his career after the Beatles.

The 60s in the shadows, the 70s in the glory

Laine, a native of Birmingham, had founded the Moody Blues in 1964 – in the midst of the British Invasion – where he also achieved his first successes as a composer. It was at that time that he met McCartney, touring with the Fab4 when British pop dominated the world.

Already in the 70s, after that sonorous ‘Paul leaves the Beatles’ that shook the world in the first April of the new decade – despite the fact that Lennon had left the legendary band around seven months earlier – McCartney remembered him and knocked on his door to join forces as if it were the old duo. .

Both, Laine and Macca, reached a great level of complicity and, although the vast majority of the authorship of the Wings songs corresponded to the Beatle, together they gave birth to a good handful of songs, such as the unforgettable ‘No Words’ that contributed to the perfection made album that was the one that, precisely on the day of the guitarist’s departure, turns half a century; or the success, a few years later, of the song ‘Mull of Kintyre’.

Denny not only strummed the six strings, he also sang. And he did it, furthermore, in a “brilliant” way, as Paul himself has been responsible for emphasizing in his heartfelt farewell message on social media.

“He had great talent, a keen sense of humor and was always willing to help people,” the Beatle has written, remembering who was another of his great right hands.

Ten years of band, configured as a trio with Linda in its most important stage, which ended with McCartney’s definitive solo leap, leaving Laine at the top with enough prestige to continue wasting talent around the world with his own albums, twelve in his entire career; in addition to continuing to collaborate with the beatle on subsequent works.

Among his solo projects, ‘Japanese Tears’ (1980) stands out, whose inspiration was born in the cancellation of a Wings tour in Japan and well received by critics, or ‘Wings at the Sound of Denny Laine’which revisited some of the band’s hits with an included nod to the 1976 LP ‘Wings at the Speed ​​of Sound’.

In his last years he did not abandon music or his relationship with the bass genius – despite rumors of taunts hidden in songs and gossip born of the media’s desire for another shady breakup.

Macca found in Laine the perfect squire among mortals after falling from Olympus. Wings were Paul, but they wouldn’t have been without Denny.