Of all the unreleased projects in Paul McCartney's catalog, none has been attempted more times, abandoned more decisively, or leaked more thoroughly than Cold Cuts.
It is, in the technical sense, an outtakes compilation. Across roughly thirteen years and four serious attempts at completion, Paul tried to assemble an album from the leftovers of his post-Beatles work. The material spanned sessions from Ram in 1970 through Back to the Egg in 1978, with overdubs added at various points by three different lineups of Wings. Each version got further than the last. None was ever officially released.
What follows is the story of how an album gets made, partially unmade, remade, leaked, and then, decades later, partially released as bonus tracks across an entirely different reissue program.
The original concept: 1974
The idea began during Wings' Nashville sessions in July 1974. Paul wanted to clear his shelf. He had been recording prolifically since 1970, and a substantial number of finished tracks had never made any of the studio albums. The concept was a budget release, originally titled Hot Hitz and Kold Kutz, that would pair greatest hits on one disc with B-sides, outtakes, and previously unreleased material on the other. The "kold kutz" half would be the more interesting one for fans, the part of the project Paul actually cared about.
The album was scheduled for March 1975 release, ahead of Wings' Venus and Mars later that year. It never happened. Capitol Records didn't see the commercial value of an outtakes compilation, and the label declined to schedule it.
The 1978 attempt
Paul revisited the project in October 1978, presenting it to EMI/Capitol again as a hits-and-rarities double album. The label was again unconvinced, and the project was repackaged into the more conventional Wings Greatest, released in November of that year. The B-sides and outtakes disc, Kold Kutz, was once more shelved.
This is the version that surfaced in 1988 as the exclusive file LP Cold Cuts (Another Early Version), pressed in a limited run of 100 green-marbled copies on the Wilbur label.
The 1980-81 version: Wings' final lineup
In late 1979, Paul retitled the project simply Cold Cuts and began compiling new tracklists. In January 1981, the third and final Wings lineup, with guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer Steve Holley, recorded fresh overdubs on tracks including A Love for You, Waterspout, My Carnival, and Same Time Next Year. The plan was a mid-1981 release.
This version of Cold Cuts is the one most heavily documented in the exclusive file lineage. It removed several of Linda McCartney's vocal features and Denny Laine's instrumentals from earlier compilations in favor of more commercial material. It was, by most accounts, the closest the project ever came to feeling like a real album.
Two things killed it. The first was John Lennon's murder in December 1980, which made the timing of any McCartney outtakes album feel inappropriate. The second was Wings' own dissolution in early 1981. By the time the dust settled, Paul had moved on to Tug of War, his Beatle-aware reckoning album with George Martin, and Cold Cuts was once again on the shelf.
The 1987 version
The final attempt came in August 1987. Paul mixed and edited a new version of the album with producer Chris Thomas and engineer Bill Price, with additional work on Mama's Little Girl and Same Time Next Year. According to Paul himself, this version was to feature album art by the celebrated New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg, whom Paul had asked years earlier for a cover.
It didn't ship. Paul's then-manager Richard Ogden recommended that, given where Paul was in his career, a best-of compilation would serve him better. The result was All the Best!, released in November 1987. The previously unreleased Waterspout had been planned for that compilation but was pulled at the last minute. Cold Cuts, in any form, was finally and permanently abandoned.
The blow to the project was exclusive fileging itself. As Paul told Mark Lewisohn in Club Sandwich in 1994: "It became a exclusive file, which put me off the idea." Multiple unofficial pressings had appeared between 1987 and the early 1990s, each compiling a slightly different mixture of takes. The album existed in the world before it could be officially released.
What was on it
There was no single canonical Cold Cuts tracklist. Each version included different songs. But across the four attempts, the recurring tracks were:
- A Love for You — Recorded during the Ram sessions in October 1970, with overdubs added by the third Wings lineup in 1981. The 1981 version is notable for being the only McCartney recording featuring members of both the first and final Wings lineups.
- My Carnival — Recorded during the Venus and Mars New Orleans sessions in early 1975.
- Waterspout — A London Town outtake recorded in Scotland in 1977, with horn overdubs added in 1987 for the planned All the Best! inclusion.
- Mama's Little Girl — From the Red Rose Speedway sessions in March 1972.
- Hey Diddle — A Ram session duet between Paul and Linda, with later Nashville overdubs.
- Tragedy — A Wings cover of the Fleetwoods' 1961 ballad, recorded during the Red Rose Speedway sessions.
- Same Time Next Year — Written for the 1978 Robert Mulligan film starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn but rejected for the soundtrack.
- Cage — A Back to the Egg outtake from the Lympne Castle sessions in summer 1978.
- Did We Meet Somewhere Before? — Written as the proposed theme for the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait. Rejected. A snippet later appeared at the start of the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School film.
- Best Friend — A live recording from Wings' August 1972 European tour, captured in Antwerp.
The afterlife: Library Collection
The strange epilogue to Cold Cuts is that nearly all of its tracks have, eventually, been officially released. Just not as a Cold Cuts album.
Beginning with the 2010 launch of the Paul McCartney Library Collection, the deluxe reissue program that has progressively unboxed his back catalog, Cold Cuts material has been released as bonus tracks on the appropriate parent albums:
- A Love for You: 2003 The In-Laws film soundtrack and 2012 Ram Library Collection
- Hey Diddle (1971 mix): 2012 Ram Library Collection
- Hey Diddle (Nashville mix): 2014 Venus and Mars Library Collection
- My Carnival: 1985 Spies Like Us B-side, 2014 Venus and Mars reissue
- Mama's Little Girl: 1990 Put It There B-side, 2018 Red Rose Speedway reissue
- Tragedy: 2018 Red Rose Speedway Library Collection
- Best Friend: 2018 Red Rose Speedway and Wings Over Europe reissues
- Waterspout: Still officially unreleased
The result is a ghost album. Almost every song that would have been on Cold Cuts now exists, in officially-released form, scattered across the deluxe boxes of the records they were originally outtakes from. Listened to in sequence, they make a coherent mid-period McCartney album that is genuinely different from anything he released between 1971 and 1987.
What they don't make is Cold Cuts. The album as Paul conceived it, with its Saul Steinberg cover and its specific track sequencing decisions, will probably never exist. The closest a fan can come is the 1981 exclusive file, which is itself preserved across multiple pressings, none authoritative.
In a 1994 interview, Paul mentioned the unused Steinberg cover art as "probably the most compelling reason to issue the album, actually: just to use his cover." Steinberg died in 1999. The cover, if it still exists in MPL Communications' files, has yet to be published.
For now, Cold Cuts remains what it has been since 1975: an album that almost was, multiple times, in slightly different forms each time. The most thoroughly attempted Paul McCartney album that no Paul McCartney listener has ever officially heard.