When Paul McCartney first visited Adelaide in June 1964, 350,000 screaming fans lined the streets from the airport to the town hall, in a last-minute addition to the Beatles’ first Australian tour.
A smaller, quieter but no less dedicated crowd was waiting at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on Tuesday afternoon, before McCartney kicked off his Got Back tour with an intimate – what passes for intimate when you’re an ex-Beatle – show at the 11,000 capacity arena.
At least a few of the fans here were alive back in 1964. “I remember being at school in 1964,” says David Gould, now 74. “All of a sudden there were no girls in class – they all skipped to go see the Beatles.”
Chrissie Weidenhofer, 73, wasn’t one of them: “I went to a girls school and they padlocked the gates. My parents walked down to Anzac Highway to see them drive past. My mother said their hair was so shiny and clean – I never forgave them.”
Chrissie’s here with her granddaughter Madison, both sporting matching tattoos of McCartney’s signature Hofner violin bass.
Eighty-one-year-old Sir Paul casually strolled onstage in a hoodie and jeans. David’s daughter Rachel asked the question that won them a spot in Tuesday’s fan event: how did he feel standing on the Adelaide Town Hall balcony all those years ago?
“I mean it was overwhelming,” he said. “That many people, it was insane. We were just standing there.”
The questions roam from his influences, food preferences, to the friends he’s left behind.
“He was a genius,” he says poignantly of John Lennon, before adding with wry self-deprecation. “I helped.”
Asked what he’d save in a house fire, McCartney pulls out the kind of dopey punchline he or his mop-topped bandmates might have delivered in the press conferences of that 1964 tour.
“I’d probably grab my guitar,” he says. “A piano would be too heavy.”
It’s when asked about songwriting that he gives a simple but revealing answer, that offers some explanation why he’s still at it, on stage and in the studio.
“It’s my hobby,” he says. “If I’ve got a day off I might write a song. Because I love it, that’s all there is to it.
“If I finished playing professionally tomorrow, I’d still do it – it beats working.”
Then, someone hands him that Hofner bass, and he and his band launch into Can’t Buy Me Love.
In the front row, Chrissie leaps to her feet to take it all in – there are no padlocks or parents to stop her this time.
