Laurence Juber

The veteran session guitarist talks playing for Wings, Harry Styles and more

- JOE BOSSO

DURING THE LAST week of November 1963, the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was released in the United Kingdom. That same week, a young Brit named Laurence Juber started playing guitar. It wouldn't be a vast reach to read a little divine providence into the latter occurrence, given that Juber would eventually go on to join Paul McCartney in the last iteration of his post-Beatles band, Wings. But as he points out, he had been bugging his parents for a guitar for some time.

"My dad wanted me to play saxophone because he was a big-band fan," Juber says. "I signed up for clarinet in school, but I put my name at the bottom of the list to make sure they ran out of instruments before they got to me. I'd been following the Beatles since the summer, when 'She Loves You' came out. Then when they did the Royal Command performance [November 4, 1963], that seemed to give the guitar a certain gravitas. It was no longer a hooligan instrument. So I got a guitar as a birthday present, and I never put it down."

By the mid-Seventies, Juber was living a charmed life as one of London's top session guitarists, a career he would've happily continued had fate not intervened in 1978 in the form of an offer to join Paul McCartney and Wings. "Even though I'd spent the last decade working my way up in the studio circles, this was Paul McCartney. I couldn't turn it down. Why would I?

Along with another new member, drummer Steve Holley, Juber joined guitarist Denny Laine and the McCartneys (Paul and Linda) to record Back to the Egg, and he took part in what would be the band's final tour, a 19-date trek through the U.K., in late 1979. (Famously, the group's January 1980 tour of Japan was over before it started when McCartney was arrested for marijuana possession upon his arrival at Tokyo's Narita International Airport.)