recording artist's equivalent of camera consciousness." To NME critic Bob Woffinden, the attempt at an album-wide concept was "a pretty half-baked one" and Hipgnosis' cover photo was "easily the album's strongest point". While identifying the songs as "particularly weak lyrically", Woffinden concluded: "It was the familiar McCartney problem. He had every essential creative requirement, except the discipline required to knead the parts into a perfect whole." AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine views Back to the Egg as "a set of [McCartney's] most undistinguished songs" that "have no spark whatsoever", and bemoans "the weak sound of the record and Wings' faceless performances". Among McCartney biographers, Vincent Benitez writes that the songs are "uneven in quality", and Howard Sounes describes the album as "a curate's egg, good in parts, with token attempts at sounding contemporary". Tom Doyle views "the new wave-ish rockers" like "Spin It On" as "too smoothed out to be truly edgy" and the two spoken-word tracks as "weird – and not in a good way". Doyle considers that while Back to the Egg has its "moments of inspiration", "There was too much material [recorded during the sessions], and yet not enough of it to gel into a cohesive album." Aftermath and reissues With the album falling well short of Columbia's and McCartney's expectations commercially, McCartney spent the remainder of summer 1979 recording in Peasmarsh and Campbeltown, without Wings, creating his solo album McCartney II (1980). During November and December 1979, US TV stations aired the 31-minute Back to the Egg special, as Wings undertook a nineteen-show UK tour, the first leg of the proposed world tour. Among the songs in the setlist, they performed several tracks from Back to the Egg: "Getting Closer", "Again and Again and Again", "Old Siam, Sir", "Spin It On" and "Arrow Through Me". The band were scheduled to tour Japan during January and February 1980, but the concerts, together with their tour dates elsewhere in the world, were cancelled after McCartney was arrested for possession of drugs when entering the country. Around this time, "Rockestra Theme" won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Wings regrouped in October 1980 to finish off songs for the planned Cold Cuts album, a compilation that McCartney had suggested when CBS sought to recover part of its financial losses from Back to the Egg. The reunion with Wings was short-lived and the band discontinued upon Laine's departure