“I can’t tell you how I feel, my heart is like a wheel”
 
Going to see Paul McCartney in concert is like experiencing the musical history of the twentieth century all at once. It’s a level no other artist reaches. The Stones do get close. They bang out the hits, have a looseness I adore and Jagger works harder than anyone. But he wants to go big, which means his band are always going to be long-distance dots in Hyde Park or a football stadium, which is nobody’s ideal way of connecting with music. Only Springsteen can make Wembley seem like your front room.
 
Dylan could reach that level, but chooses not to. He’ll ramble through seventeen songs and maybe three of them will be well-known. You’d be lucky to recognise any, even during the choruses. And he’s not going to thank you for coming with thumbs aloft either. (No shade, I just saw him twice and it was beautiful, but he is who he is; he doesn’t come to you, you go to him.) And sure, the heritage artists (a Who, a Stevie Nicks) have decent hits catalogues but they’ve only got maybe ten classic tracks at best, which they dot around the lesser songs that make exits for pints easy. Bowie was different. I wanted to hear his new stuff as much as I did Ashes to Ashes or what an arena audience would consider a rarity, but I don’t deny that when he played an older song that had become part of my brain pathways decades before, it did deliver a particular buzz.
 
But McCartney stands alone… He’ll choose around thirty-five perfectly crafted pieces of songwriting, with no limit to what he might drop in or leave out, from hundreds of options. His highly experienced band, all of whom are now in their fifties and sixties, are a huge part of why the show holds together, too – Rusty Anderson, Brian Ray and the great Abe Laboriel Jr. have been with him on the road for more than twenty years, with musical director Wix Wickens there since 1989. A great horn section gives the sound some heft as well. McCartney remains a superb bassist, and he’s not a bad guitarist either.
 
There is no trepidation, no fear of disappointment, before a McCartney gig because the night is about you as much as him. (This show was my fourth; I’d seen him on consecutive nights at Earl’s Court in 2003 and another time in Hammersmith, 2010.) Leah had never seen him live; before the show we were buzzing with excitement. We grew up with Beatles songs, hearing them in the mid-1980s… only about fifteen years since the band split, which is a little mind-blowing. Our parents were the luckiest people in the world to be there first time around. Her dad played these songs on the guitar, especially the early stuff. Always the dramatist, my mum played She’s Leaving Home, loudly and while weeping, in the record room as I walked down our avenue and off to university (I think she was pleased when I gave up after a year and came back).
 
Being in the same room as a Beatle is a joyful, surreal and moving experience. Two are gone, and neither of them particularly enjoyed playing live and didn’t do it that much. One is here but I’m not racing to hear Photograph any day soon, no offence, Richie (more of you later). You know what you’re going to get with McCartney, though he does throw in a few deeper cuts for his own amusement and avoidance of boredom. I do consider those tracks to be filler in the setlist, however. Though they are still songs other people couldn’t dream of writing, they are, for him, fairly second rate. I’m talking about stuff that is, you know, fine, like Junior’s Farm, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five, Here Today, Letting Go, Dance Tonight, Now and Then (terrible video too; Real Love is much better). And My Valentine, written for his wife, Nancy, is the picture of mediocrity. (She’s the second New York Jewish girl he’s married, incidentally, and he doesn’t mind a visit to shul for Yom Kippur either, so I do forgive him.) And you have to give it to the guy on stamina: each show day he does a dozen-song setlist at 5.30pm for a ‘VIP soundcheck’ crowd, that’s some warm-up before the main gig.  
 
After a beer or two, we took our seats – you could feel the emotion and anticipation pulsing through the venue already. The crowd had an age range of eight to eighty, which was gorgeous to see (it reminded me that my mum saw the Stones when she was thirteen in 1964, then took me to see them when I was thirteen in 1990). The pre-show mixtape was his own stuff, clearly set up to include songs he wasn’t going to play, like Flaming Pie and the terrific Coming Up, though they were ropey remixes. He certainly doesn’t mind reminding you how many songs he has to choose from. It’d be easy to create a setlist or two out of the crackers he didn’t play: Fool on the Hill, Can’t Buy Me Love (sometimes the show opener), Yesterday (!), The Long and Winding Road, We Can Work It Out, Silly Love Songs, No More Lonely Nights, I Saw Her Standing There, All My Loving, Eight Days a Week, Eleanor Rigby, Hello, Goodbye, Two of Us, Back in the USSR, My Love, Here, There and Everywhere, She Loves You, Michelle, Magical Mystery Tour, Paperback Writer and plenty more, including We All Stand Together, aka the Frog Chorus, and Penny Lane.
 
Let’s be real about it: in The Beatles, that great little guitar group, McCartney was the songwriting goldmine. And while the quality from George and John in the 70s was as high as his, the consistency was not. Seeing him live is your only chance to pay tribute to the whole lot of it, who they are and were, what it all meant and still means. So when you’re in that state of anticipation already, and the lights go down and the band thrum the endless, deathless opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night to start the gig, you are ready. And when you get that hit, your entire body experiences a WHOOSH that’s akin to, I don’t know, Neo learning kung fu in a split second, or Spock pressing his fingertips to your face and mind-melding the entirety of life in a breathless minute, or feeling the opiate ecstasy of falling through the floor in Trainspotting. And this feeling doesn’t happen just the once, no. It’s done to you over and over again for nearly three hours. It’s like going through the stargate at the end of 2001. At the end of it all stands a father of five and grandfather of eight, a quite smug, millennia-straddling musical genius delivering sounds you’ll be hearing in your head on your deathbed.  
 
But the other thing about Macca, which I remembered almost as soon as the gig started, is that he’s not very… cool? As a bloke, he’s naff in lots of ways, which somehow makes him more endearing because he’s trying so hard to please you from the cheesy, decades-old speeches between songs to the cheap-looking visuals on the screens around him (great use is made of Get Back, though). He is very pleased with himself. A combination of a musical genius, a vaudevillian at heart and a career politician, he’s exactly aware of his effect on people. A man who knows how to put everyone at ease by being the person they want to meet. Bowie had some of the same persona, at least from the 80s onwards, though he was always more outré so it’s no surprise they weren’t each other’s cup of tea.
 
What McCartney is also understandably keen to reiterate at his shows is what you might call, “You know, I did do other songs after 1970!?” which puts fourteen non-Beatles songs in a setlist of thirty-six, though the Fab Four content does dominate as the gig gets into its latter third. Only one of the last ten songs – the eyebrow-singeing, pyrotechnic spectacular of Live and Let Die, always a highlight – is not a Beatles record.
 
The layers of emotion just kept piling up throughout the night; I hardly know how to talk about the encore without welling up. But first, there is the very fact of his age, which means his voice is understandably diminished, which in turn somehow makes the whole enterprise more poignant. When we’re old, I said to Leah, and we can’t hardly get out of our chairs in our seventies, we’re going to look back at this night where eighty-two-year-old Paul McCartney has just danced off the stage to greet his family after playing for nearly three hours and go: what the fuck? How did he do it? One day in 1957 he’s just a fifteen-year-old motherless boy from Walton singing Twenty Flight Rock to a cooler kid, trying to get into his band… and the next day it’s 2024, he’s craggy and grey, but trim and spry, on an arena stage making grown adults cry.
 
Having written songs across multiple genres, you’re getting everything from exquisite love songs (the hot, beardy Paul of Maybe I’m Amazed; while I’m here, it wasn’t just Yoko who was targeted for the crime of being a Beatle’s wife: I haven’t forgotten how abominably Linda was treated by the media and fans during her lifetime even though she put only positivity out into the world) to droplets of psychedelia (Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!), flawless Wings hits (Band on the Run, Let Me Roll It, that Bond theme), plus tributes (a very moving I’ve Got a Feeling where he ‘sings’ with John on the Apple rooftop; a gorgeous Something for George; god knows both would have hated such mawkishness), an overload of naff that nevertheless made me smile (Wonderful Christmastime with choir and falling ‘snow’; the music-hall-Paul of the unexpectedly beloved Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da) and proper tearjerkers (Let It Be and Blackbird obviously, but Love Me Do’s innocence and simplicity got me). This would all have been fine, enough, more than enough. Even when the old crow Ronnie Wood came on to add some sharp playing to Get Back (he’s keen to go back on tour, clearly, Mick, get on the phone would you?), that would have been enough, too. It was already a special night.
 
But then, in the encore… he introduced Ringo. What?! I’m still punch-drunk thinking about it. This was a whoosh across the universe.


 
Ringo Starr is 84, the oldest Beatle. On he ambled, a slight figure, and then a kit was slid on to the space behind him. The noise in that room… “Get behind your kit, la,” said Paul. They did the delightful reprise of Sgt. Pepper then Helter Skelter, a loud, powerful, heavy blast. And then he was off, peace signs flashing as ever, so we just looked at each other, dumbfounded, because there was nothing left to say. Then, with barely a second to breathe and take any of this in, McCartney delivered perhaps his finest moment, the triple punch of Abbey Road’s glorious finale – Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End – which finished off the night. I’m out of words. Love you, Paul. See you next time.
 
Setlist
A Hard Day's Night
Junior's Farm
Letting Go
Drive My Car
Got to Get You Into My Life
Come On to Me
Let Me Roll It
Getting Better
Let 'Em In
My Valentine
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Maybe I'm Amazed
I've Just Seen a Face
In Spite of All the Danger
Love Me Do
Dance Tonight
Blackbird
Here Today
Now and Then
Lady Madonna
Jet
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
Something
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Band on the Run
Wonderful Christmastime
Get Back
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Hey Jude
 
Encore:
I've Got a Feeling
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
Helter Skelter
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight
The End

Tags: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, The Beatles

My feelings towards Paul McCartney are subject to change. He gets on my nerves sometimes; the nice-guy act, the fake humility, calling for the 100 Club to be saved… YOU save it; you’ve got half a billion quid in the bank. In the ‘80s and ‘90s he seemed to be in a perpetually defensive place; having a fight with a ghost, about who wrote better songs, was a battle that took him years to realise he couldn’t win. Then he caught a bad break with Heather Mills, a preying mantis, and I felt for him. But still, there it is, nagging away, the feeling that so much of what he does is rehearsed, contrived and insincere.

In some ways, he’s the very opposite of John, who put everything out there: good, bad and ugly. He was a work in progress and didn’t shy away from everyone knowing it; being incomplete, being painfully flawed, always searching for something, not even knowing what to look for half the time, was part of who he was and when he tried to be a better person, finding success or failure, he would never hide the journey. A confessional genre was born out of him, but Paul has never been like that. There are songs about heartfelt love, yes, but few (aside from Flaming Pie, when he didn’t know what else to do) about human flaws and personal frailty, which I always took as rather unappealing. Not that all singer songwriters must be confessional but, for me, if you’re not connecting with your audience on a personal level, there’s something missing. While songwriters with nothing to say can’t write words worth thinking about and self-absorbed lyricists mask deficiencies in song-craft, the perfect balance is one who can communicate on both musical and lyrical levels and I felt McCartney was sometimes lacking in the latter.

George would always talk about the Beatles as ‘them’, knowing the construct of pop culture iconography was something that shouldn’t be believed, something that shouldn’t stop you from looking for more. Paul, only half joking, once said that sometimes he would walk past the mirror and think, ‘you’re him!’ He and Ringo (who should be grateful, frankly) are satisfied with the tangible, whereas John and George always yearned for more. As such, with all the misgivings I have about his personality, I felt like a blank canvas as I trudged through the snow to Hammersmith to see him live, excited but wary.

After all that, you can guess what happened. He’s Paul fucking McCartney and he will work his arse off to make you forget every doubt you have about him, even if just for those two and a half hours on stage.

Some days I love the Stones more. Some days I love Led Zeppelin more. But they cannot make me feel what I felt last night. The Beatles are woven into the fabric of this country in a way that no other band is. These songs are your life; they’re in your DNA. I saw teenagers, hipsters, mid-30s couples, I’m-still-cool 40-year-old dads with their youngsters, record-fair guys like my dad pushing their late 50s and a collection of sweet old couples in their 60s who might even have seen him play this venue before, long before. And to a man, woman and child, every one of them laughed and cried and sang their hearts out, a deafening roar greeting every song. Strangers looked each other in the eyes with recognition of the moment. Those songs… there are so many - with that back catalogue, how can you go wrong?

The stars even aligned to the point where I ended up closer to the stage than my ticket allowed. I had a balcony ticket, but I was lucky enough to get to use what I call the ‘Arcade Fire trick’, only because I first did it for them at Brixton Academy a few years ago. You need two friends with standing tickets. They go in together. One comes back out with both tickets. You walk in with the spare. Simple. And thus, I ended up 10 rows back from the stage. Good work. Everyone was ready and wide-eyed, thrilled to be in such a small venue, thawing out from the snow, ready to feel or stay young, how they felt when they first heard, or their parents first played them, a Beatles song.

And not just Beatles songs either, there’s a lot of love for the 70s solo/Wings stuff – Band On The Run, Let Me Roll It, Jet and Maybe I’m Amazed were warmly greeted before massive explosions and fireworks, which I thought might set the roof alight, blasted out alongside Live And Let Die.

You simply lose yourself. There is no resistance; you can’t help it. These songs are part of who we are and, as you stand with a crowd of people who have come from all over the world, there’s an inevitable, inescapable, joyous, Englishness about every single person there. The Beatles make you feel, or rediscover, what it is to be English. Fifty years worth of people have grown up with this music in their head and, even in another fifty years, it’ll still mean as much. Undoubtedly, we’re in a lucky position now, to be able to hear these songs performed live. I saw him at Earls Court in 2003, a small figure in the distance, and it was a great show. Then I saw the next night and he came out with the same schtick, verbatim, between songs. I know your game, I thought. Everyone likes to think the gig they’re at, no matter who is on stage, is like a snowflake. Just for you, with your own touches and unique events on the night you went. And sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s not. And yet, with McCartney, despite yourself, it's just one of those things that you let simply float away with the opening bars of Magical Mystery Tour.

We got ‘em all – the innocence of youth (I Saw Her Standing There); Hard Day’s Night Beatlemania (Drive My Car/All My Loving); a Dylan-influenced lyrical move forward (Eleanor Rigby); solo in everything but name late-period rockers (Get Back/Back in the USSR), a little bit of quirky rubbish with good humour (Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da), weepy tributes (Here Today/Something); and so on and on and on. Songs you’d forgotten about completely, songs that remind you of being a kid, hearing them at home. Songs that you want to be the last songs you ever hear on this earth. And just think of some of the songs he can afford to leave out: Penny Lane, Can’t Buy Me Love, We Can Work It Out, Things We Said Today, Fixing A Hole, Fool On The Hill, Hello Goodbye, I’ll Follow The Sun, Here, There and Everywhere, Day Tripper, Lady Madonna…

He has everything to offer and, even if he knows it, it is irresistible. One need not be filled with humility when you can say you wrote Hey Jude and Yesterday. Hey Jude in particular is a tune we’ve all heard and over-heard. It goes on forever but, having lived through nine fake endings of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, I could take it. So I sang and waved my arms and knew it might be the last time I’d get a chance to do it. Arenas and stadia are not for me, this was my night to have, to remember, to thank him for what he’s done. I sang Yesterday, and wept. And just when you think neither you nor he has any more to give, he plays Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, followed by The End and, with everyone joined as one, the meaning strikes home: and in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.

Magical Mystery Tour
Jet
Got To Get You Into My life
All My Loving
One After 909
Drive My Car
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady (snippet)
The Long and Winding Road
1985
Maybe I'm Amazed
Blackbird
Here Today
I'm Looking Through You
And I Love Her
Dance Tonight
Eleanor Rigby
Hitch Hike
Sing The Changes
Something
Band on the Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back In The USSR
A Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance
Let It Be
Live And Let Die
Hey Jude

Encore 1
Wonderful Christmas Time
I Saw Her Standing There
Get Back

Encore 2
Yesterday
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
The End
...

Tags: Paul McCartney