In 2003, I proof read and did some additional fact checking for a a fascinating book. Entitled Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! - Beatles erövrar Sverige ("Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! - The Beatles Conquer Sweden"), the book is a detailed account of The Beatles' visits to Sweden in 1963 and 1964 and all their other Swedish connections throughout the 1960s. Click on the link to the right and read more about this book.

Reading the manuscript made me think of some of the individual members post-Beatles visits to Sweden and prompted me to finally publish this page of my recollections about seeing Wings in concert in August 1972.

I was seven years old at the time, but had been a Beatles fan since the age of three - seriously! I remember sitting outside in the sun, probably in July, when my mother showed me a newspaper item announcing the news that Wings would be coming to Stockholm and the Gröna Lund amusement park.*

I thought, "Wow, I want to see them". I don't think it even occurred to me that this could be a logistical problem. Looking back, my dad wasn't really into rock and pop (he was and is a jazz fan), so it certainly wasn't self-evident that he would want to go to a Wings concert with a lot of 15-to-25-year-olds. To his eternal credit, he decided to take me there anyway.

My dad is a photographer and I believe he used his press card to get us in for free at Gröna Lund. Since I was so small, and Gröna Lund is an outdoors venue where everybody is standing, I sat on my dad's shoulders throughout the entire show. Some of the audience were astonished that I was there at all - they couldn't understand how I could be a Beatles fan when I was only seven years old. "But ... he wasn't even born then!" they said to my dad. He assured them that I was a bit unusual in that respect. Let's put it this way: I was always more interested in playing my records than playing with cars and such.

From the concert I don't remember too much. It was magical seeing Paul on stage, of course, but I hardly recognised any of the tunes. That wasn't so surprising: I didn't own any of the Wings records released up to that point - indeed, some of the songs they played during that tour hadn't even been released (My Love, etc.) - nor was I familiar with covers such as Blue Moon Of Kentucky.

I did remember for several years afterwards that there was one song I thought was really great. Paul and co. must have liked it as well, since they played it twice, if I recall correctly. I could only remember the general feel of the song, but I was certain that it had never been released; I knew that I would have recognised such a cool song. 15 years later, when the BBC documentary The Paul McCartney Special was released on home video, there was a clip from the 1972 tour and I finally realised which song I had heard. It was Hi, Hi, Hi, which had an altogether different, boogie type feel when it was released as a single in late 1972. On the tour, the arrangement had been more "squarish", for want of a better word. Mystery solved!

At some point during the show, my dad instructed me to take a picture of the concert. I don't think anyone was allowed to take pictures, but apparently he decided we didn't care. Unfortunately, I must have fiddled with the lens or something, because the result was the blurry mess you see at the top of this page. Oh, well...

All I can remember after that is falling asleep in the car home, exhausted but very happy.

I plan to extend this section of my site with a more comprehensive story of Wings 1972 concerts in Sweden. For now, all I have to offer is a few scanned newspaper images, plus a larger version of my own blurry picture. Click on the Images link to the right.

And keep watching this space...

*An unfortunate error regarding the venue on Wings' 1972 Stockholm visit has crept into several authoritative and otherwise impeccably researched sources. Wings did not play Kungliga Tennishallen or "Kungliga Hallen", as these sources state (The Beatles played this venue in 1963, but Wings most certainly didn't). Nor is it really necessary to qualify the name Gröna Lund with the addition "Tivoli Gardens", as some sources do. Now you know!