Saturday 14th December 2024

Co-Op Live, Manchester, England

What can be said, at this point, about Paul McCartney? It is a question I ponder for more than a week after seeing him live in Manchester, finally fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine – the culmination of a musical journey that began when I first heard ‘Twist and Shout’ as a seven-year-old in the mid-Nineties.

The concert reviews I’ve written over the last couple of years have mostly been for young up-and-comers in an exciting independent country and roots scene, where the reviews tread on new ground and the writing therefore comes fresh and easy. I can sometimes tell myself that documenting such nights of music from artists who deserve to be better known is a worthy pursuit; perhaps an advertisement for their music or, in some small way, an encouragement to the artists themselves as they seek validation of their art. Or perhaps those reviews will be redeemed by posterity; perhaps one day it will be something to brag about that I heard Sierra Ferrell’s voice fill a small hall shortly before she began filling arenas, or the Red Clay Strays just as they were becoming the next big thing in rock music. Perhaps it will be of use someday, when they are spoken of as legends, to have written of Tyler Childers and Billy Strings live. Perhaps it will have been of value to report on the purity of Kassi Valazza’s voice as she played in a church or a bakery, or the infectious dance-hall fun of Nick Shoulders in a pub in Bolton. But what could I hope to write that says something fresh and interesting about Sir Paul McCartney?

No one needs a critique of songs so universally admired, nor a blow-by-blow report of a night of music for which greatness can – correctly – be assumed. There’s no call for a live dissection of a Beatle, and it would be quixotic to even try to explain that magic. This is a man who not only wrote songs like ‘Yesterday’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but also wrote so many other gems that those three – and many other deserved numbers – don’t even make the almost three-hour setlist tonight, or even occur to us as omissions. This is an artist who can afford to leave out dozens of his No. 1 hit singles. He was one of The Beatles. The Beatles.

That may be one observation I could write about. I’m certainly not alone in the depth of my love for the Beatles’ music, or the mythology surrounding them – there are 22,000 other people here tonight in the new Co-Op Live arena in Manchester who could put forward a similar claim. But even so, it seems surreal that the voice I hear from the stage tonight is the same one I’ve heard in my ears pretty much every day since I was a young boy. The voice doesn’t have the astonishing versatility it once had – a fact that becomes apparent in a few of the songs tonight – but it remains admirably strong and distinctive, and continues to rest in these melodies as effortlessly as the melodies themselves seem to have been created. At the risk of sounding like a gushing fool, at more than one point tonight I find myself thinking: This is Paul McCartney stood in front of me. He was in The Beatles.

Certainly, no one ever carried the weight of history so lightly. Of the four – the Fab Four – Paul McCartney always seemed the one most at ease with Beatlemania, and with the legacy the band has left in the decades since. Where John snarked in the years after the breakup, Paul tended. Where George grumbled and sighed, Paul cheered. Where Ringo went along, Paul took a mind to lead. After John died, and became an untouchable icon rather than a man of flesh and blood, Paul shared the memory of his friend and was not made bitter by tragedy or burden.

Even tonight, as his band first takes the stage and there is an audible rush as tens of thousands stand from their seats, there’s no apparent ego on display as Paul takes in the applause. There’s no faux-humility later on when telling anecdotes in between songs; no need to clarify that it’s Harrison he’s referring to when he talks about “George”. Part of the secret sauce of Beatlemania was that the Four appealed as personalities as well as musicians, and Paul has maintained this effect. Even anonymous in a crowd of tens of thousands, you feel a personal connection.

It starts, funnily enough, with ‘The End’; the Beatles’ original harmonies announcing Paul and his band on stage as the arena’s vast screens project a fizzing video of that iconic Höfner bass. The same bass is slung around Paul’s neck as he approaches centre-stage. Far from shying away from that imposing word ‘Beatles’, Paul acknowledges the thundering elephant in the room and makes it dance to his own tune. George Harrison’s cover of ‘Got My Mind Set on You’ plays as I pass the ticket barrier to enter the venue. Instead of an opening act tonight, a DJ provides a long, slaloming remix of various Beatles snippets, including ‘Revolution’, ‘Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. A retrospective video followed, projected on the big screens, relating key Beatles moments and soundtracked by songs like ‘Twist and Shout’ – which reaches the seven-year-old boy still inside me – and 2013’s ‘Early Days’. Later, in between songs, Paul will casually hold up that iconic “Beatle bass” in the palm of his hand as he speaks to the audience – as though it were no big thing, and not a totem for millions. At one point, he’ll ask the audience to give him a good, old-fashioned Beatlemania scream – the audience obliges with a deafening shriek that would put Shea Stadium to shame.

But this is no lazy nostalgia act tonight. Although Paul gives the audience what they want – he opens with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, immediately granting the audience the license to revel unashamedly in our Beatles lust – he and his band deliver a well-balanced and well-performed setlist. Only four of the first ten numbers are Beatles songs, and the band delivers the four Wings songs of this opening salvo with gusto (‘Letting Go’ and ‘Let Me Roll It’ rock particularly hard, with the latter incorporating a coda inspired by Jimi Hendrix).

Having been together longer than the Beatles and Wings combined, Paul’s touring band are a well-oiled machine. Paul Wickens keeps it tidy behind his keys while still providing moments of dash. Brian Ray and Rusty Anderson are anything but rusty, providing harmonies and delectable guitar lines throughout. The big, bald Abe Laboriel Jr. is by no means the spitting image of Ringo Starr, but is more than able to fill those big shoes with his fills. Sometimes the band provide lively facsimiles of the original songs; sometimes they are able to spread their wings. They fulfil both parts with aplomb. When, later tonight, a dancing Abe drops his drumsticks during ‘Dance Tonight’, he recovers so smoothly you suspect it might even be a rehearsed piece of Chaplin-esque comedy.

Sometimes maligned or undervalued, or dismissed as uncool, the Wings songs are the dark horses at full gallop tonight. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’, from the Band on the Run album, follows the slow, jazzy ‘My Valentine’ and really gets the blood pumping again with its funky throughline and grand, rock-opera closing. The glam-rock ‘Jet’ is sung lustily twenty songs into the set, while ‘Band on the Run’ is as fresh as ever, particularly in that irresistible acoustic-guitar break in the middle. Wings were fun and endearingly over-the-top, and nowhere is that more in evidence than in ‘Live and Let Die’, played towards the end of the night, with fireworks exploding around the stage and blasts of heat spreading throughout the Co-Op arena. As the song ends with another cacophonous salvo of fireworks, Paul leans on his grand piano with his fingers in his ears, perhaps rueing the day he decided live and up-close explosives would be a good idea for a song he’d still be performing into his eighties.

Over the thirty-six songs Paul sings tonight, his age never becomes a hindrance. Even when dancing grandad-like from piano to centre-stage and back, the passage of the years seems unfathomable, such is the energy and enthusiasm he shows for the crowd and the enduring quality of the songs. Remarkably, Paul even seems to grow in strength throughout the night, with a heavy, intense ‘Helter Skelter’ being a highlight of his encore.

‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is perhaps the quintessential McCartney song – perfectly balanced and so seemingly effortless it looks easy, and yet something only this one man was able to do. It’s also one of Paul’s most vocally-challenging songs, which holds him back a bit tonight, more than fifty years after it was recorded. But Paul doesn’t shy away from this passage of years either. Throughout the song, a video plays of a young, bearded Paul with a baby snuggled in his sheepskin coat. After it ends, Paul says “that baby is here tonight – and now has four kids of her own”.

‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, if you chose to analyse it at length, epitomises all that is good about Paul McCartney both as a musician and as a person. Written as the Beatles were breaking up, despite his efforts to hold them together, Paul found comfort in love – of both a woman and his two daughters – and domesticity, and didn’t baulk at expressing that vulnerability in music. It led to one of his most quietly remarkable songs, which we have been privileged to hear tonight.

The night is also quintessentially McCartney in other ways. Long derided as the upbeat or ‘uncool’ Beatle (though I would personally argue that bearded, domestic look from ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is cooler than anything John Lennon put together), Paul has always seemed unfazed by such a characterisation, and willing to embrace it if it means everyone is having a good time. It’s an outlook that allows everyone to bop along happily to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ tonight. And it means that when Paul says he has “a surprise” for us, and ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ then begins to play, that much-derided earworm takes on the form of pure joy.

Paul unapologetically indulges the naff-ness of it all. His three horn players – who had been having the time of their lives with earlier songs like ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’ – reappear on stage dressed like Christmas elves, jingling bells. A choir of local schoolchildren appear to sing “ding dong, ding dong”. Fake snow is released from the top of the arena and cascades over the crowd. That the man who wrote some of the most important rock songs of all time is also responsible for this, and willingly embraces it, feels surprisingly wonderful.

One wonders what John Lennon would make of it all. Perhaps, as Paul sings tonight in his tender, acoustic tribute ‘Here Today’, he’d laugh and say that they were worlds apart. Perhaps, being unafraid of a bit of silliness himself, Beatle John would join in; after all, as Paul also sings, he was always glad he came along. That, by the way, is one of the most impactful lyrics Paul ever wrote, encompassing in a stark and understated way the simple friendship that underlay the most remarkable creative collaboration in popular music.

The spectre of John Lennon is always there. Where much of the weight Paul shoulders so well can be disassociated with an abstract “Beatles” label – able renditions of ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ (“the first song the Beatles ever recorded”) find their way onto the setlist tonight – some moments are clearly more personal to Paul, more closely linked to the friends of his storied past.

A nod to John with the John-penned Sgt. Pepper song ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ is followed by Paul plucking away on a ukulele that he says was given to him by George. He sings the first couple of verses of ‘Something’ (a “fantastic song”, Paul says) on the ukulele, and the whole crowd sings along too. The song builds and the band enters, turning it into the rock number it started out as on Abbey Road. Images of a grinning George Harrison are projected onto the screen as Paul pays homage to his friend, more than twenty years gone now himself, with one of his most admirable musical achievements.

The song is the only one on the setlist tonight that Paul doesn’t have a writing credit on (though he did contribute that remarkable bass line on the original). It is the presence of John Lennon – that co-writer, collaborator, singing partner and friend, taken before his time – which looms the larger. And Paul, with his intrinsic goodness, doesn’t confront this ghost: instead, he embraces it.

For the first song of the encore, the band pick out the opening riff of ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, from the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert. Paul says the performance of the song is “special to me – you’ll see why”. Soon enough, we do – and it’s a special moment in a night full of such moments. In the song’s final verse, John Lennon himself sings out of the speakers – “everybody had a hard year” – as the screens project him singing from the rooftop concert. Paul joins in and, just as they did on the freezing cold rooftop of Abbey Road Studios in 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sing the song to its conclusion – together. Not only do we in the audience get to experience something special – Lennon/McCartney united again – but Paul also gets to experience something denied him. Once more, with feeling, he is able to sing with his friend again.

Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time. So sang the Beatles, prophetically, in the medley on the Abbey Road album. And you can’t help but be amazed at how well Paul shoulders that burden, the pain and the expectations that have continued throughout the decades. We get a sense, sometimes, that it’s not effortless. Nowhere is that more apparent than on ‘Now and Then’.

A song John Lennon recorded on tape in the late Seventies, ‘Now and Then’ was worked on during the Anthology sessions in the Nineties (when George was present) but the audio was deemed too poor quality to be released. Using AI to reconstruct John’s voice, the recording was finally completed by Paul in the last few years. This, the Beatles’ last hurrah, reached No. 1 last year, and tonight is its first live performance in their home country. At its end, Paul McCartney leans forward on his piano with his hands clasped, and looks thoughtfully over the rapturous, applauding crowd. Tears are in his eyes. One can only imagine the gratification, the weight of burden released, he feels at that moment, more than forty years after John scratched “For Paul” onto a cassette tape – a tape which only found its way into his friend’s hands after his senseless murder. “And if I make it through, it’s all because of you.”

Elsewhere, we are provided with some obligatory Paul McCartney concert moments that, no matter how many times they must have been played over the years, still sound fresh. Those ubiquitous late-period Beatles songs ‘Get Back’ and ‘Let it Be’ are played in quick succession towards the end of the set, each bringing back that surreal feeling that this is Paul McCartney singing them in front of me. Paul McCartney. He was one of The Beatles.

There is, also, as the final song of the main set, that inevitable concert singalong, ‘Hey Jude’. Perhaps only the AI that reconstructed John Lennon’s voice could calculate how many billions of ‘na-na-na-na’s have been sung over the years, but everyone – Paul included – is happy to add many more tonight. It is a communal moment, bringing tens of thousands of people together, just as the music has long brought together millions across the generations and across the years, across cultural divides and language barriers. The Beatles did that, it was what they did above all else, and it was a remarkable thing.

And throughout it all, from a church fête in Liverpool in 1957 where he met John Lennon to the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester a couple of weeks before Christmas in 2024, Paul McCartney has been the one constant. The most famous man in the world, stood in front of us on a stage, full of energy and singing his cornucopia of melodies, having changed the world but refusing to rest on his laurels. A man as beloved, essential and ever-present an icon as the Queen he sang about at the end of Abbey Road (the medley of which, sans ‘Her Majesty’, caps off the music tonight). While everyone has a favourite Beatle, there can be no doubt as to who is the greatest Beatle.

“Now we’re gonna go back in time,” Paul had announced after performing ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ earlier tonight. “We’re going to a little place in the north of England – about half an hour down the East Lancs, I think. A little place called Liverpool…” And tonight in Manchester, about thirty minutes down the East Lancs Road from his hometown (traffic permitting), Paul McCartney has shown just how far he has come. It has been a life lived without peer.

What can be said then, after almost 3,000 words, about Paul McCartney? About the magical touring act, I can say: Satisfaction Guaranteed. Paul leaves the stage after nearly three hours on it, kissing the camera as he does. He throws on a jacket and high-fives an audience member. A rock-star entourage filters him out the door just like in the movies.

But about the achievement, the life, the music, I can say nothing new. I can only point out things said that are not true. During that opening retrospective video, projected onto the big screens three hours earlier, a news announcer from the Sixties was clipped as saying “Beatlemania is a temporary state of mind”. Sixty years later, as applause and energy still ripples around the arena, we can say that is untrue. Beatlemania is lasting. It might even represent something eternal.

Perhaps all there is to say after a night like this is to wish a Merry Christmas to Paul and his family. For your career and your melodies, for your matchless creativity, for your personal integrity and enduring goodwill: Merry Christmas, Paul McCartney.

Setlist:

(all songs written by Paul McCartney, unless noted)

  1. A Hard Day’s Night (John Lennon/Paul McCartney) (from A Hard Day’s Night)
  2. Junior’s Farm (single)
  3. Letting Go (from Venus and Mars)
  4. Drive My Car (Lennon/McCartney) (from Rubber Soul)
  5. Got to Get You Into My Life (Lennon/McCartney) (from Revolver)
  6. Come On to Me (from Egypt Station)
  7. Let Me Roll It (from Band on the Run)
  8. Getting Better (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
  9. Let ‘Em In (from Wings at the Speed of Sound)
  10. My Valentine (from Kisses on the Bottom)
  11. Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five (from Band on the Run)
  12. Maybe I’m Amazed (from McCartney)
  13. I’ve Just Seen a Face (Lennon/McCartney) (from Help!)
  14. In Spite of All the Danger (McCartney/George Harrison) (from Anthology 1)
  15. Love Me Do (Lennon/McCartney) (from Please Please Me)
  16. Dance Tonight (from Memory Almost Full)
  17. Blackbird (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
  18. Here Today (from Tug of War)
  19. Now and Then (Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Ringo Starr) (single)
  20. Lady Madonna (Lennon/McCartney) (single)
  21. Jet (from Band on the Run)
  22. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
  23. Something (Harrison) (from Abbey Road)
  24. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
  25. Band on the Run (from Band on the Run)
  26. Wonderful Christmastime (single)
  27. Get Back (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
  28. Let it Be (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
  29. Live and Let Die (single)
  30. Hey Jude (Lennon/McCartney) (single)
  31. Encore: I’ve Got a Feeling (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
  32. Encore: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
  33. Encore: Helter Skelter (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
  34. Encore: Golden Slumbers (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)
  35. Encore: Carry That Weight (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)
  36. Encore: The End (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)

My other concert reviews can be found here.