You Gave Me the Answer: 'Venus and Mars' special!

Venus and Mars are alright tonight, because they’re getting a special 50th anniversary edition release! 

The first album since their debut Wild Life to be attributed to ‘Wings’ (rather than ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’), and featuring timeless hits such as ‘Letting Go’ and the chart-topping ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, Venus and Mars followed the huge success of Band on the Run and gave Wings another Number 1 album in both the UK and US. It’s a record that has been referenced and loved by fans ever since its release in 1975 - in fact, it’s the album that gave us the title of this website Q&A series, thanks to track four!

To mark this exciting milestone, we spoke to Paul about his memories from the original recording and release of the record. Listen to what the man said here…

PaulMcCartney.com: Do you remember why the album was titled Venus and Mars?

Paul: Well, I wrote a song called ‘Venus and Mars’, and thought it was a good title. We only meant the planets, but then we had a great party on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and somebody said, ‘Oh, hi Venus! Hi Mars!’ to Linda and me. So, it was a great observation from them: Venus is the female; Mars is the male. It made a lot of sense, really.

So, I suppose people might have thought of that idea. But to us it was just the planets, and the song is just about a kind of space cadet. There were loads of people at the time who were very ‘spacey’.

PM.com: Was anyone in the band at that time ‘spacey’?

Paul: Not so much. It was more the people we'd meet who were sort of hippie-ish people. And Neil Young had done a song about spaceships and ‘Mother Nature’s silver seed’ [‘After the Gold Rush’], so this was my way of including us in that world. It’s very, ‘Venus, Mars, alright man? Hey, dude!’. If we’d had the word ‘dude’ then, it would have applied at the end of all the sentences!

PM.com: Do you remember why you chose to record much of the record in New Orleans? And do you think the city inspired the sound of the album?

Paul: Up until a certain point, everyone had just recorded in their home country. Basically, if you're American, you record in America. If you're British, you record in the UK and so on. So, with The Beatles and early days of Wings that meant London. But then there started to be a little bit of a fashion where people were recording elsewhere. I think The Rolling Stones went to the South of France, and we saw it as exotic and thought it was a good idea. 

We knew there was a studio in New Orleans that Allen Toussaint had with his friend Marshall Sehorn, called Sea-Saint. It was a great little studio! I was choosing somewhere where I liked the local music: there was African music in Nigeria, for example, and although it didn't really find its way onto Band on the Run, it was in the air while we were recording. 

When we got down to New Orleans it was around carnival time, so we could get dressed up. We had the kids with us too, so that was nice for them! It’s a very musical city, so we were really trying to soak up an atmosphere. We did do one piece, ‘My Carnival’, because of the Creole feel in the city, but generally speaking we did songs I'd written anyway that could have been recorded anywhere. We were just enjoying the buzz of being in a great place. You would run into local people like The Meters, and Professor Longhair, and it was inspiring to go and see them play. 

PM.com: One of the things we love about the 50th anniversary edition of Venus and Mars is that you've included all these wonderful extra elements that were in the original release, like the two stickers, two posters, the bookmark. Do you remember why you wanted the packaging to be quite extravagant? 

Paul: The theory behind that comes from being a kid in Liverpool. If I bought a record back then it was really substantial buy. You'd spend a lot of pocket money on it and would have saved for it. In those days I would I'd take the bus into the city centre, and normally there were a couple of record shops and a big department store called Lewis's, and an electrical store called Curry's. These were the places you could buy records. So, you would get the record that you were after, and then you'd go home on the bus and you would just study it. Every little detail would be a great joy. It was a very interesting thing because this was an artist you liked and now you were seeing photos of them or reading something new about them. And you could see who else was on the record. It made the journey very interesting and built the anticipation of listening to it when you got home. I always remember that. 

When we came to the point of putting out records ourselves as The Beatles - particularly once we had a bit more say in the matter - we wanted to put stuff in that people could pull out. We started with Sgt Pepper, putting little cut-outs and things in there. And the lyrics! Nobody put the words on albums up until then. So, the back cover of Sgt Pepper was a photo of us all and the lyrics. 

It was about including interesting and fascinating things for the record-buyer. If you unwrapped it on the bus, then you would have found the little things: ‘Oh, there’s a poster! I’ll have a look at that later. There's the little bookmark thing, little stickers…’ And we’d just ask the record company if we'd be able to do all of this, if it would still be affordable. Luckily for us they said yes, because record sales were very high in those days as well. It meant that we could give our audience more, and I always loved that. 

We’d been record-buyers ourselves and I had bought a couple of records that were rip-offs. There was a Little Richard album I bought once because I loved him so much - it was Little Richard and Buck Ram with an orchestra. I thought, ‘Yeah, great. That should be good!’ I got it home and Little Richard was on one track... The rest was Buck Ram and his bloody orchestra! I thought, ‘That is such a rip-off!’ In The Beatles we were all very much anti that kind of marketing. Early on we’d hung out with Phil Spector, whose work we loved, but he was a little bit that way. He asked, ‘Why do you have two different songs on a single?’ We said, ‘Well, because it's great if you’ve got the B-side as well as the A-side. We love turning it over and getting a new song, two for the price of one!’ And he said, ‘Oh no, no. All we do is just take the vocal off and leave the backing track on, and we call it “Sing along with…”’. That is such a rip-off, man! That is terrible!

George Martin always used to say: VFM – Value For Money. So, you could say Venus and Mars is VFM. V&M gives you VFM!

There’s the marketing tagline – thanks Paul! You can get your copy (complete with stickers and bookmark, of course) of the 50th anniversary edition on 21st March 2025. Pre-order here!

Venus and Mars will also be mixed in Dolby Atmos for the first time, available on supporting platforms also from 21st March. Plus, keep an eye out for more exciting Venus and Mars content coming soon.