Paul and Linda McCartney's Mugging in Lagos and the Recording of 'Band On The Run'
Updated: Oct 6
Quick answers
Why did Paul McCartney choose to record in Lagos?
He asked EMI for a list of its international studios and picked Lagos, Nigeria, wanting an exotic location and a taste of African musical culture, without realising how underequipped the actual studio was.
What happened when Paul and Linda McCartney were mugged?
Walking home from a friend's house in Lagos in September 1973, they were stopped by a car of five or six men, one holding a knife. They handed over their bags, cash and camera equipment and weren't hurt.
Did losing the demo tapes actually shape the album?
Yes. The stolen cassettes held the only recordings of the songs Paul had written for the album, forcing him to reconstruct all of it from memory using only what had stuck.
Did Paul McCartney and Fela Kuti really become friends?
Eventually, yes, though it started badly. Fela accused McCartney of coming to Nigeria to steal African music, and it took a studio visit and a personal explanation before the tension eased.
Wings arrived in Lagos in August 1973 already down to half a band. By the time they left two months later, they'd been robbed at knifepoint, accused of cultural theft by one of Africa's biggest music stars, and Paul had collapsed in the street convinced his heart had stopped. Out of all of it came Band on the Run, the album that turned McCartney's shaky post-Beatles career around.
A three-piece band before they'd even landed
Wings was supposed to travel to Nigeria as a five-piece. Days before departure, guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell both quit after a row during rehearsals at McCartney's Scottish farm, with no time left to find replacements. That left just Paul, Linda and Denny Laine to make the entire album, with McCartney picking up drums, lead guitar and bass on top of his usual parts. Engineer Geoff Emerick came along to help run the sessions.
Why Lagos, of all places
McCartney had asked EMI to send him a list of every studio the label operated internationally, wanting to record somewhere other than London for a change. Lagos won him over on the promise of an exotic setting and a shot of African musical energy. What he found on arrival was a cramped, underequipped studio on Wharf Road with a faulty desk and a single working tape machine, in the middle of Nigeria's rainy season.
The Lagos they'd flown into was a city riding an enormous, badly distributed oil boom. Nigeria had come out of a brutal civil war only three years earlier, and by 1973 the country's oil revenue was climbing into the billions of dollars a year, enough for General Yakubu Gowon's government to declare that money was no longer the country's problem. Very little of that money reached most of the people living there. Lagos itself was a city of stark contrasts, all-night parties and new wealth sitting a few streets away from shortages of basics like milk and petrol, the kind of unevenly distributed boom that tends to breed exactly the sort of desperate, opportunistic crime Paul and Linda would run into a few weeks later.
Fela Kuti accuses McCartney of stealing African music
Wings had actually planned to bring in local musicians for the record, but that idea collapsed fast. Fela Kuti, a fixture of the Lagos music scene and a fierce critic of Western influence in Africa, heard through the grapevine that a former Beatle was in town planning to use African sounds on his next record, and decided to see for himself. He turned up at EMI's studio with an entourage of around forty people, enough to bring the session to a dead stop. Denny Laine, alarmed at the scale of it, ran to the control room and rang Ginger Baker, the one person in Lagos likely to know how to defuse the situation, since he and Fela were already old friends from Cream's touring days.
Fela came into the control room alone while the rest of his group waited in the studio, and accused McCartney outright of coming to steal African rhythms for a foreign audience. "I was accused of stealing the Black man's music," McCartney later recalled. Rather than fight the accusation, he called Fela and invited him back to hear what Wings had actually been recording, playing him an early version of Mamunia to prove it had nothing to do with Nigerian music. Fela was satisfied, but the confrontation put McCartney off using local musicians altogether. "We'll do it all ourselves," he decided, which is largely why an album made in Lagos ended up with almost no African instrumentation on it at all.
A night at the Shrine
The two men became genuine friends afterwards, and Fela invited McCartney and his group to the Afrika Shrine, the club Fela had opened in 1970 outside Lagos. Ginger Baker, the former Cream drummer who'd relocated to Lagos and ran his own ARC Studios there, came along too. He and Fela already knew each other well. McCartney, high on locally offered cannabis far stronger than he'd expected, ended up in tears during a performance by Fela's band, Africa '70. "We were the only white people there, and it was very intense," he said of the night.
Mugged at knifepoint
The most dangerous night of the trip had nothing to do with the studio. Around two weeks into the visit, Paul and Linda had spent the evening with some of their crew at a friend's house nearby, and decided to walk the twenty minutes home rather than accept a lift, enjoying the warm night air. A car pulled alongside them on the empty road and slowed to a stop. A man got out, and McCartney, assuming he was offering a ride, thanked him, said they were happy walking, and patted him on the back as he sent him on his way. The car pulled off, but only a short distance up the road, where it stopped again.
This time someone rolled down a window and asked if they were travellers. McCartney, by his own later admission, gave a straight answer instead of trying to bluff his way out of it, saying they were just tourists out for a walk. With that, every door on the car flew open. Five or six men climbed out, one of them holding a knife. Linda started screaming that her husband was a musician, please don't hurt him, the kind of thing people shout in situations like that without expecting it to help. McCartney asked what they wanted, was told money, and handed it over along with the bags, cameras and cassette tapes they were carrying. "He's got a knife," was as far as McCartney's own account of the moment usually gets. Nobody laid a hand on either of them.
The car sped off, then took a wrong turn and doubled back past them again. "They're going to finish us off," was the thought that went through both their heads at that point. It didn't happen. The car disappeared for good this time, and the two of them walked the rest of the way home shaking, sat down with a cup of coffee to try to steady their nerves, and were promptly convinced a power cut a few minutes later meant the same men had come back to cut the lines. Neither of them slept much that night. When they got back to the studio the next day, someone on the local crew told them flatly that being white had probably saved their lives, since it meant the men had nothing to fear from being identified later. McCartney wanted to call the police. He was told plainly that it wouldn't do any good, and that was the end of it.
Among the stolen bag's contents were the only cassette recordings of the songs McCartney had written for the album, along with the notebooks holding the lyrics. "I had to remember the songs," he said afterwards. He reconstructed all of it from memory over the following days, working through each song with Linda and Denny Laine to pin down which lines and melodies had actually stuck, and quietly dropping anything that hadn't. He and John Lennon had always worked to a rule that if a song couldn't be remembered without a recording to lean on, it probably wasn't good enough to keep. Losing the tapes forced that test on an entire album at once, whether McCartney had wanted it or not.
The collapse that followed
The stress caught up with McCartney the next day. Standing outside the studio for some air between takes, still rattled from the night before and smoking heavily to cope with it, he felt a sharp pain spread across his chest, staggered and collapsed. Linda, convinced he was having a heart attack in front of her, was screaming for help before he'd even fully hit the ground. It wasn't a heart attack. The diagnosis that followed was a bronchial spasm, brought on by the shock of the mugging combined with the smoking and the Lagos heat, and after a day of rest he was back at work, though the rest of the sessions carried on with a wariness that hadn't been there before the robbery.
Finishing an album that technically didn't exist anymore
Ginger Baker, ever since Denny Laine's panicked phone call had put the two men back in touch, had been keen to get the whole album recorded at his own ARC Studios rather than EMI's. McCartney wasn't willing to hand over the whole project, but he did agree to one session there, for "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)", with Baker himself sitting in on shaker. Everything else stayed at EMI's Lagos studio, where sessions ran from 1 to 23 September 1973, the band working around power cuts, a single functioning tape machine and the lingering unease left over from the mugging. The trio finished the record back in Britain that autumn, with overdubs at AIR Studios in London in October and final mixing at Kingsway Recorders in early November, before its release at the end of that year.
The album that saved Wings
Band on the Run went on to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, won a Grammy, and is now generally regarded as the high point of McCartney's post-Beatles career, a reputation built directly on top of everything that went wrong to make it. The title track and "Jet" became era-defining singles, and the whole record carries a theme of escape and survival that's hard not to read as a direct response to the two months that produced it. McCartney has actually told two different stories over the years about where the name "Jet" came from. In 1973 he traced it to a black Labrador puppy the family owned, describing her in one interview as "a runt, the runt of a litter" they'd bought from a roadside pet shop. By 2021 he was telling a different story altogether, saying Jet was actually a pony belonging to his daughter Mary.
Even the cover nearly went wrong
The album's cover shoot, on 28 October 1973 back in London, was its own small disaster. Photographer Clive Arrowsmith staged a prison-break scene against a wall at Osterley Park, with Wings joined by an unlikely cast of celebrity extras dressed as escaped convicts, including chat show host Michael Parkinson, singer Kenny Lynch, actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, boxer John Conteh and broadcaster-turned-politician Clement Freud.
The McCartneys had thrown a party for everyone beforehand, and Arrowsmith, sober while nearly everyone else wasn't, later admitted "I was too scared to join in the fun" on what was still one of the biggest jobs of his career. Loading the wrong film for the lighting he'd rigged gave the finished cover its distinctive yellow tint entirely by accident.
The trip left its mark elsewhere too. Ginger Baker, whose own life was never short on chaos, stayed close to the Lagos music scene for years afterward. It wasn't the last time McCartney's own recklessness abroad got him into serious trouble either, something that would happen again, far more seriously, on a Tokyo tarmac six years later. And the tension with Fela over ownership of Black music echoes a question McCartney had already wrestled with on record once before, on Blackbird. More than fifty years on, the whole story got its own definitive retelling in Man on the Run, Morgan Neville's 2026 documentary on McCartney's post-Beatles decade, which premiered on Prime Video that February.
Frequently asked questions
Did Paul McCartney ever use African musicians on the album?
Only one, percussionist Remi Kebaka, and even that was a coincidence. McCartney had met him in London and only later found out he was originally from Lagos.
How long did Wings spend in Lagos?
Roughly six weeks in total, arriving in August 1973 and recording through most of September, before finishing the album back in London that autumn.
Was anyone physically hurt in the mugging?
No. Paul and Linda handed over their belongings without resisting and weren't injured, though the demo tapes taken that night had a lasting effect on how the album was finished.
What happened to Wings' original lineup before the Lagos trip?
Guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell both quit days before departure after an argument during rehearsals, leaving McCartney to play most of the instruments himself alongside Linda and Denny Laine.
Who's on the Band on the Run album cover?
Wings posed as escaped convicts alongside six real celebrities dressed the same way: Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Christopher Lee, John Conteh and Clement Freud. The cover's yellow tint was an unplanned result of the photographer loading the wrong film.
Sources
● Beatles Bible: Lagos, Nigeria (Band on the Run recording sessions)
● Beatles Bible: Fela Kuti Confronts Paul McCartney in Lagos
● John Blaney: Paul McCartney vs Fela Kuti
● Far Out Magazine: The Mystery of Paul McCartney's Stolen Nigeria Demos
● Kiji (via The Sun): Paul McCartney Feared He'd Be 'Finished Off' During Lagos Robbery
● Marco Werman: The Band Really Was on the Run: McCartney in Lagos
● The Paul McCartney Project: Band on the Run (session details)
● American Songwriter: Paul McCartney Gears Up for Band on the Run Reissue
● Beatles Bible: Cover Photoshoot: Band on the Run by Wings
● American Songwriter: The Dog and Pony Story Behind 'Jet' by Paul McCartney & Wings
● The Hollywood Reporter: Paul McCartney Doc 'Man on the Run' Picked Up by Amazon MGM
