Paul McCartney has a lot of time for Bob Dylan, but even the ex-Beatle admits that seeing him live can sometimes be hard work.
Speaking to The Rest Is Entertainment, McCartney reflected on Dylan’s habit of either ‘reinterpreting’ his older material or ignoring it completely, and gently suggested that he might like to consider giving a little more thought to his audience.
“I've been to see a couple of shows of Bob's and I couldn't tell what the song was that he was doing,” says Sir Paul. “Now, that's a bit much because, I mean, I know his stuff and, you know, I get it if he doesn't want to do Mr Tambourine Man, you know, maybe he's fed up with that, but I would like to hear it. And I've paid.”
McCartney has previously admitted that he sometimes wishes he could be a bit more like Dylan – “He’s legendary… and doesn’t give a shit!” he told Uncut in 2020 – but in reality, he says that he remains happy to perform in the service of the people who pay the money and come to his shows.
“What is it you're trying to achieve?” he ponders. “If you're going out to do a show, I know who's in my audience most of the time. And it's kind of families. So it can be granddads [who are] sort of my age or it can be their kids. And then it could be their kids. So, it's quite a spread. I think, ‘well, we could do songs they don't know – I’ve a lot of black holes – but they've paid a lot of money.’”
McCartney returns to this theme of providing value to his fans later in the interview: “They've all paid to come in and they're not necessarily all rich,” he says. “So, I think, why wouldn't I give them what they want?”
Despite his reputation as a crowdpleaser, though, McCartney adds that he does still like to play both his new material – his latest album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, will be released on 29 May – but accepts that this is as much for him and his band as it is the paying public.
“We put in a few songs that they don't particularly like, but we enjoy playing those,” he explains. “The band are just looking at each other going, ‘Yeah, this one. Yeah, we love this one.’”
Inevitably, though, it’s still those Beatles classics that get bums off seats, hands in the air and vocal cords throbbing, and in today’s world, McCartney thinks that’s more important than ever.
“You do something like Hey Jude and you see this whole audience singing together, and in Trump's America, the Republicans and Democrats all at each other's throats, when we do that song they're not. They're all loving it and it's like, wow, this is pretty amazing that suddenly this room has forgotten all of that and it's not, you know, we’re not all going to argue with each other – we're all just going to sing together.”
