Why Paul McCartney rejected a legendary drummer for Wings

faroutmagazine.co.uk

The drummer Paul McCartney said was too good for Wings: “I didn’t really want heavyweights”

Reuben Cross

FAR OUT MAGAZINE

Mon 5 January 2026

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

When The Beatles disbanded, it was evident that all of the individual members would see an increased demand to work as solo artists and continue to please fans by pursuing their own individual careers.

It was John Lennon and George Harrison who excelled especially in their own right from the getgo, with Ringo Starr struggling to keep up with his bandmates due to his limited scope as a songwriter, but that only accounts for the actions taken by three of the Fab Four.

Paul McCartney, on the other hand, had different plans to the rest of his former associates, and while he did choose to release McCartney, his debut solo album, in the immediate aftermath of the band’s dissolution, he wanted to take a slightly different approach to the rest of them, essentially choosing the hard path of starting again from square one.

With his previous project having been a success due to how collaborative it was, he wanted to start something else from scratch rather than relying solely on the weight attached to his name. Rather than continue in the same vein as the others, he sought to do something unprecedented, and something that would arguably give him the upper hand over his fellow ex-Beatles.

After his first self-titled album, he went to America to record Ram alongside his wife, Linda, and saw about putting together a cast of session musicians to back him up, and held auditions for the other roles. While the album is credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, it would be this album that triggered the formation of Wings, the name under which some of this group of people would continue to perform thereafter.

One of the members he brought in for the recording, who would eventually take on the role of the original drummer in Wings, was Denny Seiwell, a relative unknown to the rest of the world. However, during auditions, McCartney realised that he wasn’t after a big name.

While he could have attracted the attention of some of the elites of the music world had he wished to, according to a 2001 interview with Billboard, he thought twice about bringing the superstars into his inner circle, and the audition process really highlighted just how reluctant he was to work alongside established legends just because he could.

“I just put the word out through my office that I was in town and wanted to look at drummers,” he explained. “People like Bernard Purdie came along, but I was looking for a new band rather than the Blind Faith thing, so I didn’t really want heavyweights.”

While Purdie’s resumé would have been impressive, having worked alongside the likes of James Brown and Aretha Franklin prior to his audition, not selecting the iconic ‘Purdie Shuffle’ mastermind ultimately worked out for McCartney in a big way. While there were a number of lineup changes throughout the existence of Wings, there were never too many big names other than McCartney, and it was always an organically handpicked selection of the musicians who he knew would work best in the studio with him.