A period often dismissed as McCartney's 'missing' years, in fact the band lasted for a decade: two years longer than the Beatles, and wielded such impact and influence that they at one point achieved the status as the biggest live band in the world. Band on the Run sold over 6 million copies worldwide and became EMI's biggest selling album of the 1970s in the UK.

Music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones has met McCartney many times and knew his late wife Linda. Here she shows how crucial Linda was to the evolution of Wings - at great cost to herself given the ridicule she was to encounter. But Linda saw that McCartney needed the band in the wake of the break up of the Beatles.

Drawing on extensive interviews and her trademark meticulous research, the author shows how this period in Paul McCartney's career was to become crucial not only to his development as an artist, but to his very survival.