“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