“When we were kids, you couldn’t really say to each other that you loved each other,” Paul McCartney reflects midway through the first show of his Australian tour. “You tried to be hard, young guys. We never got around to it really.”
For a musician whose back catalogue is, famously, not short of love songs, it’s a poignant reflection: while the Beatles were conquering the world with pop ditties like Love Me Do and Can’t Buy Me Love – both of which we’ll hear tonight – in their prime they never quite articulated the deep, life-changing bond between them. And what else could you call it but love?
Half a century later, in his first set in Adelaide in 30 years, he’s making up for lost time. On his seven-date Got Back tour McCartney is due to play some of Australia’s biggest arenas, but has opted to start it off with a relatively small and very sold-out 8,000-capacity show: the first Australian city he ever played is a gentle setting for his first live appearance since Glastonbury over a year ago.
Eighty-one years old, spry and light on his feet, McCartney and his longtime band get some Wings stuff out of the way early, McCartney holding it down on bass while his comrades shred on guitar and horns. There’s a twinkle in his eye, an old hand still hooked on the formula of a few mates, some guitars, some drums and a stage.
It’s during Let ’Em In from 1976’s Wings at the Speed of Sound, that something happens that feels so surreal it provokes an almost physical response: McCartney throws his head back and wails, “Yeah, yeah, yeah”. You know what I mean. It’s a sound ingrained in pop culture, tested out in Liverpool living rooms, shaped in noisy Hamburg nightclubs and belted over the screams of girls and maybe a few boys in stadiums whose public announcement systems were no match for the sheer volume of Beatlemania.
A few other moments approach it: McCartney’s fingers nimbly picking out a rubbery bassline on that well-loved old Höfner. Those same fingers plucking out the melodic runs of Blackbird that every aspiring high school guitarist tries to nail and, according to McCartney, fails. (“How many people here tried to learn Blackbird?” he says. “And you got it wrong.”)
It isn’t all about the past, of course. McCartney intersperses songs such as Let Me Roll It, Got to Get You Into My Life and Maybe I’m Amazed with newer tracks and deep cuts. He and his band know which option crowds prefer: “When we play an old Beatles song the place lights up with all your phones, it’s like a galaxy of stars. When we play a new song … it’s like a black hole. But we play ’em anyway!”
As he revealed in a fan event the day before, this “hobby” of songwriting – a bottomless lucky dip pitting “skill” against “magic” – will never get old to him.
Some of the newer songs are, at least, not bad. Come On to Me from 2018’s Egypt Station packs an appropriate amount of horniness for an octogenarian, served with a wink and some nice organ on the chorus.
He has another laugh while trying to read signs held up in the crowd: “Sign my butt? No no no!” Then, “Oh come on, let’s have a look at it.”
Midway through, a screen cuts the stage in half as McCartney and the band play a few stripped-back numbers before an image of a boarded-up old house. “Let’s hear it for a long time ago,” he says, before launching into an old skiffle track, the first thing the proto-Beatles recorded.
It’s at this point that he reflects about his love for his old friend, performing Here Today from 1982’s Tug of War. “I wrote this song after John died – let’s hear it for John,” he says, before singing: “I am holding back the tears no more, I love you.”
Later, a weathered ukulele signals another tribute. “This one was given to me by George,” he says, launching into a jaunty music hall take on Something. It’s lovely.
A thick succession of rolled-gold classics rounds out the first three hours. Live and Let Die features flames and pyrotechnics you might expect from an AC/DC concert, while a medley of medleys (You Never Give Me Your Money turns into Band On the Run) is an unexpected delight – he’s never played the former in Australia before.
In the encore, McCartney reprises the Peter Jackson-assisted redux of I’ve Got a Feeling that he showed off at Glastonbury, with McCartney duetting with footage of Lennon filmed on the Abbey Road rooftop before it all fell apart. I expected to cringe at this digital resurrection, enabled by AI tech that seems poised to undermine the creative spark, the very human spark, upon which all this is built. But it’s quite moving. “So amazing to be singing along with John again,” Paul says. “Sweet memories.”
They then finish the rest of the Abbey Road medley, Golden Slumbers right through to The End. As McCartney sings about carrying that weight, it hits differently than it did in those sessions, the band barely keeping it together for one last ride. His voice is a little shaggier, his mop a little greyer, but it seems the past is a weight McCartney carries lightly – with love, remembrance and, occasionally, an ear-splitting “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!”
• Paul McCartney’s Got Back tour continues around Australia until 4 November
