The garish velvet Pepper bands roaming the site all day might be here to celebrate the retro-pop cheesiness of Glastonbury’s oldest headliner but, getting real, let’s not spare the superlatives here. Glasto 2022 has got break-out bedroom pop superstars. Critically worshipped rappers. Pop legends, rave icons and Mel C DJ sets aplenty. But it has only one name that will be etched into history books centuries from now, as one half of the greatest songwriting partnership of the rock’n’roll era. It’s not just a tell-your-grandkids honour to watch Paul McCartney make his second Worthy Farm headline appearance, where pretty much every act bar Kendrick Lamar is indebted to him for their existence. It’s a historic privilege just to be alive at the same time as him.
McCartney’s available canon is the greatest in music by such a vast degree that any couple of hours plucked from it at random would be the best gig of any particular year, as he proved on Friday night at a warm-up gig speckled with relatively obscure Beatles and Wings tunes, in nearby Frome. Tonight, after an anticipation-building megamix of Macca classics that threatens to be longer than Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, he indulges in roughly the same set, plus surprises. An enlivening opener of “Can’t Buy Me Love” gives way to the bluesier end of Wings (“Junior’s Farm”, “Letting Go”), then Revolver’s magnificent Motown homage “Got to Get You Into My Life”. A McCartney lucky dip keeps turning up winners: “Let Me Roll It”, extended in tribute to Hendrix; “Getting Better”; a charming “I’ve Just Seen a Face”. Even 2018’s soulful glam “Come on to Me” holds its own, despite being, like “Fuh You” later, far raunchier than is fitting for any knight of the realm, let alone pop’s kindly grampa.
