First the TV Film, Then the Album, Now It's `Wingspan' the Book: New McCartney Biography to Reveal Linda's Never-Seen Rock Shots.

Entertainment Editors

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--May 23, 2001

Wingspan Remains in the Top Ten On the Billboard Album Chart

PAUL McCARTNEY will follow the recent release of his `Wingspan' TV film and album with a `Wingspan' book that will publish for the first time the never-seen backstage rock photography of his late wife Linda. WINGSPAN, the 40 song double CD from Paul McCartney and Wings, entered the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart at #2, making it the highest debut album that week and fastest selling post-Beatles album of McCartney's career. The album remains in the Billboard Album Chart Top 10 in its second week.

Just as the Beatles carved up their `Anthology' project into a TV documentary, albums and hefty autobiography, Paul is to follow suit with his acclaimed Wings retrospective. The `Wingspan' biography will be centered around Linda McCartney's pictures from her "lost decade," the Seventies years during which Linda stopped her career as a photographer in order to play keyboards in her husband's band, Wings.

Prior to Wings, Linda McCartney established herself as rock and roll's foremost female photographer. In the Sixties, as Linda Eastman, she photographed all the legends of rock - including The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and The Beatles.

A collection of her pictures from the time - `Sixties; Portrait Of An Era' - was published in 1992 and became an international best-seller, with more than 200,000 copies sold.

Before her death in 1998, Linda McCartney said: "Playing in a band totally stopped me from being a working photographer, my career just stopped. Before that I was taking pictures for all sorts of magazines and was working on photographs for a book about rock and roll. But it stopped because I joined a band and all the time that I was in that band was time that I would have been taking photographs."

"Photography was more important to me than music - but my husband and my family were more important to me than photography, and I was prepared to give up photography for them."

But now it will be revealed that Linda didn't stop taking her rock-pop pictures. Although playing in Wings stopped her working as a photographer, in private throughout the Seventies she continued to record the rock and roll way of life.

Now these never-seen pictures will be published later this year in a `Wingspan' biography - along with text by Paul McCartney that will be more detailed and revealing than his interview for the `Wingspan' TV documentary.

Said Paul McCartney: "Because of her perception, Linda could see the way you are inside, beyond the act or the image, and it was that honest reality that she photographed. Linda had an eye for honesty, she saw the truth and that shines through all of the images that she produced. Her pictures are all very natural, nothing was posed".